Afterlives of Abandoned Work: Creative Debris in the Archive 9781501339424, 9781501339455, 9781501339448

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: On the Shelf:An Introduction to Abandoned Work
Definitions
Abandonment in plain sight
A model of shelving probability
Waste matters
Chapter 2: The Writing and Rewriting of Place: The Story of Llano Del Rio
Introduction
Archives
Abandoned utopias
A brief history of Llano Del Rio
Harriman’s failure
Unrealized Llano
Archiving Llano
Ghosting the Huntington
Ozymandias
Invisible debris
Chapter 3: Town Fictions: Planning the Future in Post-War London
Real-Life Motopias
Underways: A subterranean plan for London
The City of Guided Order: Tracing the Underways in the archive
Catacombs of confusion: Reading the Underways
Monorails, alternative futures and the GLC
Monorails in London
Tomorrow’s London: ‘New ways of moving around may appear’
The city in a book: Hook, The Planning of a New Town
Textualizing town fictions
Chapter 4: A Shattering Achievement: Piecing Together Pinter’s Proust
Writer killers
Proust in pieces
The Proust project is abandoned
Pinter’s Proust in drafts and marginalia
Reading The Proust Screenplay
Unfinished afterlives: The Proust Screenplay’s letters in the Pinter Archive
Interminable texts
Intermission
The Proust Screenplay in the context of British Cinema in the 1970s
High street ruins
The rise and rise of Cine-Bingo
Unfinished afterlives II: Projecting projections in The Shepherds Bush Pavilion
Continuous performances in text and landscape
Chapter 5: The Frugal Charade: Ideas for Books in Literary Archives
The slush pile
Spark notes
Genetic defects: Between drafts and fragments
B. S. Johnson’s big ideas
Trawl tales
Rejectamenta
Chapter 6: Remains to Be Seen:Afterword
On unfinishing
Books, Journal Articles, Periodicals, Digital Resources & Films
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Afterlives of Abandoned Work

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Afterlives of Abandoned Work Creative Debris in the Archive Matthew Harle

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Matthew Harle, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Cover design: Jason Anscomb / rawshock design Cover images courtesy of the National archives (ref. MT106/427), the Cinema Theatre Association Archive, and the personal collection of Paul Greenstein and Dydia DeLyser. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3942-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3944-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-3943-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6

On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work The Writing and Rewriting of Place: The Story of Llano Del Rio Town Fictions: Planning the Future in Post-War London A Shattering Achievement: Piecing Together Pinter’s Proust The Frugal Charade: Ideas for Books in Literary Archives Remains to Be Seen: Afterword

Bibliography Index

vi x 3 23 69 109 159 203 217 241

List of Illustrations From the pamphlet On the Shelf: Survey of Research and Development Projects Abandoned for Non-technical Reasons, Centre for The Study of Industrial Innovation, (London: CSII, 1971)

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‘Model of Shelving Probability’, On the Shelf: Survey of Research and Development Projects Abandoned for Non-technical Reasons, Centre for e Study of Industrial Innovation, (London: CSII, 1971)

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Figure 2.1

Llano Hotel, Llano Del Rio, California. Author Photo

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Figure 2.2

Future Street, Los Angeles. Author Photo

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Figure 2.3

Job Harriman, Clarence Dallow and an unnamed family. Courtesy of the personal collections of Paul Greenstein and Dydia DeLyser

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From The Western Comrade, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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From The Western Comrade, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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Leonard Cooke’s Plan of the City of Llano, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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Alice Constance Austin’s Civic Centre plans for Llano Del Rio, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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Llano currency, The papers of Robert Hine, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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Newllano Map, The papers of Robert Hine, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 2.4 Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6 Figure 2.7 Figure 2.8 Figure 2.9

List of Illustrations

vii

Figure 2.10 The constitution of Llano Del Rio, The records of Llano Del Rio, 1911–1969 MS 1304, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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Figure 2.11 Ruins of Llano Del Rio, California, Author Photo

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Figure 2.12 Ruins of Llano Del Rio, California, Author Photo

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Figure 2.13 Ruins of Llano Del Rio, California, Author Photo

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Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2

Figure 3.3

Figure 3.4

Figure 3.5

Figure 3.6

Figure 3.7

Figure 3.8

A. E. Mathews’s Underways plan in scale model. Courtesy of The National Archives, ref. MT106/427. Scale model of ‘Underways’

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A. E. Mathews’s Underways plan in cross section. Courtesy of The National Archives, ref. MT106/427. Tunnel crosssection of ‘Underways’

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A. E. Mathews’s Underways plan map. Courtesy of The National Archives, ref. MT106/427. Cross-section of ‘Underways’

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A. E. Mathews’s Underways plan map. Courtesy of The National Archives, ref. MT106/427. Road network of ‘Underways’

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Perspective mock-ups of the GLC’s Fleet Street Monorail proposals in Monorails in London, Greater London Council, 1967

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Transport collage from Tomorrow’s London: A Background to the Greater London Development Plan (London: Greater London Council, 1969)

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Perspective drawing of Hook New Town from The Planning of a New Town: Data and Design Based on a Study for a New Town of 100,000 at Hook, Hampshire, Fifth Printing edition (Greater London Council, 1965)

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Perspective drawing of Hook New Town from The Planning of a New Town: Data and Design Based on a Study for a New Town of 100,000 at Hook, Hampshire, Fifth Printing edition (Greater London Council, 1965)

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viii List of Illustrations

A. E. Mathews’s Underways plan map. Courtesy of The National Archives, ref. MT106/427

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A bomb-damaged Shepherds Bush Pavilion c.1944–5. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Figure 4.2

Apartment Living, an advert placed in Variety over 1988–9

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Figure 4.3

Barry Joule presents Harold Pinter with Francis Bacon’s copy of The Proust Screenplay: photograph from The Strange World of Barry Joule (2002)

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The Shepherds Bush Pavilion and the smaller Odeon 2 (formerly Pyke’s Cinematograph Theatre) in the early 1980s. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Odeon overhead projector slide. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Odeon overhead projector slide. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Odeon overhead projector slide. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Figure 4.8a Odeon overhead projector slide. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Figure 4.8b Odeon overhead projector slide. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Figure 3.9 Figure 4.1

Figure 4.4

Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7

Figure 4.9

Odeon overhead projector slide. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Figure 4.10 Odeon overhead projector slide. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Figure 4.11 Inside the Shepherds Bush Pavilion. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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Figure 4.12 Odeon 2 in 1983, shortly before it closed. Courtesy of the Cinema Theatre Association Archive

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List of Illustrations

Figure 5.1

Figure 5.2 Figure 6.1

ix

Sketches from Notebook 8 of the Muriel Spark Collection, in ‘Fragments and Notes’ 1951–8. Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland and the Muriel Spark Estate

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The uncatalogued boxes of the Muriel Spark collection. Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland

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The final scene of The Last Tycoon (1976), Robert De Niro as Monroe Stahr

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Acknowledgements This project was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and Birkbeck, University of London. Early versions of the research in Chapters 3 and 4 appeared in City 19:4 and Literature & Film Quarterly 43:4. Many thanks to all the people who have helped this book come into being: Joseph Brooker, Adam Smyth, Ben Highmore, Joe Kerr, Davina Bentley, Barry Menikoff, Cindy Cheng, Gareth Evans, Daniel O’Donnell-Smith, Tom White and  Giles Herman. This project is indebted to archives and archivists, in particular: Clive Polden, Rachael Marks, Peter Blodgett, Chris Marshall, Sally Harrower, Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein. Thanks also to support from my family, along with friends and colleagues from the British Library, British Film Institute, Birkbeck and the Barbican Centre.



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Figure 1.1 

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On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work

Definitions There are many well-known abandoned projects. Examples include Tatlin’s Tower; Perec’s I Was Born; Dickens’s Edwin Drood; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; The MP Edward Watkin’s incomplete Eiffel Tower at Wembley – later renamed ‘Watkin’s Folly’; Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures The Family of Man; Raymond Williams’s historical epic People of the Black Mountains; the artist John Martin’s plans for London’s sewage system; St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (which he left unfinished in 1273 after a supernatural encounter); Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom; Bizet’s Roma Symphony; The M8 Bridge to Nowhere in Glasgow; the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid in Tokyo; the nearly 100 unfinished giant Ferris Wheels dotted around the world; Charlotte Bronte’s collection entitled Unfinished Novels; Tony Hancock’s unaired Australian Sitcom Hancock Down Under; Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 8; Alfred Hitchcock’s Number 13; Orson Welles’s Don Quixote and It’s All True; Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon; the hotly anticipated companion novel to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight vampire series, Midnight Sun; almost all of the novels of Franz Kafka; Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas’s proposed collaborative opera; Eisenstein’s screenplay of Marx’s Capital; Thomas More’s The Four Last Things; and so on There are entire catalogues of abandoned work. The best are probably Henri Lefebvre’s extensive prose poem/collection The Missing Pieces and Harry Waldman’s Scenes Unseen.1 But many other books, projects and pieces of journalism exist, often as whimsical lists on websites or as brief articles

(This is Henri Lefebvre the poet, not theorist) Henri Lefebvre, The Missing Pieces (New York: Semiotexte/Smart Art, 2014); Harry Waldman, Scenes Unseen: Unreleased and Uncompleted Films from the World’s Master Filmmakers, 1912–1990 (Jefferson: McFarland, 1991).

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pondering on ‘what might have been’.2 It is also a popular subject of modern and contemporary art.3 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, exemplary of the ‘super curator’ trend of the early 2000s, once declared, ‘I see unrealised projects as the most important unreported stories in the art world. … It seems urgent to remember certain roads not taken, and – in an active and dynamic, rather than nostalgic or melancholic way.’4 The interest of a figure like Obrist is indicative of something significant. His statement is partly an official endorsement to the art world – which in itself is a symptom of its ranging appeal across academic, arts and popular conversations – but also a simple indication of the ubiquity of the act of abandonment. Obrist continues: ‘There are many amazing unrealised projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, desk-drawer projects, realisable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealisable projects, partially realised projects, censored projects and so on.’ Unfinished projects are expansive texts; they present open-ended ideas without material restraint, which by their very nature spill across cultural categories and notions of genre, and this opportunity is regularly taken advantage of. There are many finished works created in the discussion of unfinished work. Francis Ponge’s processual poetics of detergent, Soap, asks sweeping questions about his own creative process, the author ‘profiting from this occasion to complete a work, begun many years ago, yet which I have never managed, despite numerous efforts to come to the end of ’.5 The writer Arthur Machen, in his uncanny memoirs The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering, spends most of his account returning to his jottings from years past, looking at inchoate sketches for novels and short stories – all sitting in a rough, unformed state:

Ruth Eaton, Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002); Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films, ed. by Dan North (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008); Roberta Smith, ‘The Fascination of the Unfinished’, The New York Times, 9 January 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/arts/design/the-fascination-of-the-unfinished.html [accessed 4 June 2014]; Stephen Coates and Alex Stetter, Impossible Worlds (Birkhäuser: Publishers for Architecture, 2000); Marguerite H. Rippy, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009); Unbuilt America: Forgotten Architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the Space Age, ed. by Alison Sky and Michelle Stone, New edition (New York: Abbeville Press Inc., U.S., 1983). 3 Sam Ely and Lynn Harris, Unrealised Projects: V. 1–6, First edition (London: AND Publishing, 2010); Dan Graham, Unrealised Projects for Children and Boutique Architecture, Hauser & Wirth Gallery London, http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1175/dan-graham-rock-n-roll-showunrealised-projects-for-children-and-boutique-architecture/installation-views/ [accessed 15 June 2015]; Gustav Metzger, Projects Unrealised 1, 1998 1971, Tate, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ metzger-projects-unrealised-1-t12338 [accessed 15 June 2015]. 4 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ‘Manifestos for the Future’, E-Flux, 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ manifestos-for-the-future/#_ftn13 [accessed 15 June 2015]. 5 Francis Ponge and Lane Dunlop, Soap (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 8. 2



On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work

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I have the itch too and vehemently desire to scratch myself, that is, to write, but I can’t do it – save at long intervals, and after taking the most horrible pains and racking my brains, and filling the fat notebook with hundreds of pages of plots and plans and elaborations and dark and craft schemes, I dig deep, I burrow, far under the ground, I hew out my laborious subterranean passages, I blast whole strata of unsuspected rocks which suddenly interpose themselves between me and my end.6

Throughout The London Adventure, the reader is privy to some very half-baked ‘weird fiction’ from Machen’s ‘fat notebook’. Some of Machen’s unfinished projects start with titles and no content, or vice versa. ‘Maze Story’ describes a maze on a bare hilltop made of limestone called ‘the way (or path) to the city’, with no other detail. His untitled stories, however, often include minor sordid details (‘An ordinary family living in the suburbs shut themselves up for certain days in the year to perform some horrible “Cave” rights’), but come with no accompanying plot or structure. Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage is a travelogue of his inability to finish a biography of D. H. Lawrence, who himself was unable to finish his own biography of Thomas Hardy.7 The pop music critic Paul Morley begins his account of his father’s suicide, Nothing, with a list of tens of books he would have liked to start writing and leave unfinished – when in actual fact, he hadn’t written anything at all.8 The chief location of Richard Brautigan’s novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971) is a cavernous suburban library that houses thousands of volumes of unread and unpublished works of the general public.9 Yet, for all of their musings, the incomplete or unfulfilled works laboured over by Brautigan, Ponge, Machen and the rest are little more than a literary device – they are not true Bartlebys. They are red herrings that discuss the idea of an unfinished work within the comfortably bound pages of a completed and published book.10 Arthur Machen, The London Adventure Or the Art of Wandering (London: Martin Secker, 1924), p. 93. 7 Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2012). 8 Paul Morley, Nothing (London: Faber, 2000). 9 Some of these great, unseen titles include ‘Growing Flowers By Candlelight in Hotel Rooms’ by Mrs Charles Fine Adams; ‘Your Clothes are Dead’ by Les Steinman; ‘Bacon Death’ by Marsha Paterson; ‘My Trike’ by Chuck, a freckled five-year-old boy; ‘The Culinary Dostoevsky’ by James Fallon; and ‘Leather Clothes and the History of Man’ by S. M. Justice. Richard Brautigan, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1973), pp. 21–6. 10 Actually, this is not strictly true. In 1989, Brautigan’s fictional library became a real library for unpublished work. The Brautigan Library was originally based in San Francisco under the protection of the San Francisco Public Library system before being closed down. After its closure, the collection was moved and permanently housed at the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver. 6

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Afterlives of Abandoned Work

Many ideas lie unfinished and abandoned, and the sheer breadth of the works listed above highlights a problem in the particular phrase we use to describe them, exemplified by the fact that the term ‘unfinished’ leaves us intrigued about what kind of work has been produced, or how much has gone unfinished. Much thought has gone into this in literary theory. As James Ramsey Wallen notes, Like ‘work’ itself, ‘unfinished work’ does not actually refer to a specific type of text, but is rather a label we apply to texts that influences the interpretive practices we bring to bear on them. Most frequently this label is applied to texts still being written at the time of their author’s death, but unfinished works can also be created through authorial abandonment, deliberate or accidental arson, or scholastic controversy regarding ‘who wrote what’. Beyond this, the unfinished label actually tells us very little since it specifies neither how the work in question came to be unfinished, nor just how unfinished it is.11

While I agree with Wallen on the unspecific nature of the phrase, I would say the term ‘unfinished work’ is still a useful phrase to depict unfulfilled effort, if it is accompanied with additional contextual detail to elucidate each instance of its use. As such, the phrases I repeatedly use throughout this piece of writing – abandoned unfinished, incomplete, unrealized – are used as illustrative or notional phrases for texts that exist in a half-formed or planned state. They refer to the condition of a piece of work, a project, or a set of documents in a rudimentary and embryonic form. In short, there must be a conjectural image to supplement the material evidence of the project in order to obtain a full representation of the work. This study, therefore, splits its attention between examining the qualities of these two states, the material and the conjectural – their relationship to one another – and how this dialectic has a role in propelling cultural history. This is an exploration of the remains of designs, plans, unfinished narratives, drafts and pilot tests that were never completed. On their shelves sit works that are oddly similar to their fictional counterparts in the novel. The texts vary from just two pages to two thousand; some are half finished, some are sketches of a book to be written, others are highly polished works of fine writing unseen by the literary world. The online catalogues boast titles like: ‘I’d Be Your Roadkill, Baby’ by Carla A. Schwarz and ‘Hormones; If I Don’t Have a Lover, I Make One Up’ (also by Carla A. Schwartz); not to mention the philosophical canon of Albert Helzner, a retired engineer whose sixteen book-length works include ‘Some Observations about the World We Live In and More Challenging Essays for You To Think About’. Digital submissions are currently being accepted, and the Library catalogue is available to browse online. In an interview about the Library with the Wall Street Journal in 1991, one contributor to the library, May Janko, whose children’s books were rejected by every single publishing house she had submitted to, said, ‘it has a home. In my mind, it’s someplace, and that’s a good feeling … it’s not in oblivion’. 11 James Ramsey Wallen, ‘What Is an Unfinished Work?’ New Literary History, 46 (2015), 125.



On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work

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It is this kind of text – the blueprint, half-completed, or proposed work – that I refer to when I use terms like ‘abandoned’, ‘unfinished’, ‘incomplete’ and ‘unrealized’ interchangeably during the project.12 Working through the difficulties of what constitutes an unfinished work and the constraints around the ways we have to describe it, is just the first stage to this project, however. Commonly, a piece of research on the subject must then decide upon a definitive direction to pursue. In former studies, Balachandra Rajan chose to look at the poetics of incompletion: Saverio Tomaiuolo, the literary form of unfinished Victorian literature; and Wallen, the notion of ‘unfinishability’ within the novel. Like these prior works, this project is firmly rooted in literary studies. The difference here is that I have chosen to take a material and cultural-historical mode of analysis as the primary route of investigation. It is through this method that the project hopes to account for the historical contexts, critical interpretations and contiguous narratives produced during the process of research. Put simply, it is an enquiry into the literary status of the unfinished cultural work within the archive; and, as is characteristic of literary studies, the various chapters in this project treat a range of archival material as ‘texts’, to be read and scrutinized as works of literature. In this spirit, the archival works here are considered literary texts that look outwards and point to broader sociohistorical cultural structures. This methodology approach is extended over a variety of disciplines, subjects and historical periods, hoping to broaden the focus of literature’s relationship with the archive, from studies of fiction and literary history to non-literary forms. One of the conditions that shaped this particular approach was the frequency with which one encounters the limitations of critical and creative responses to unfinished texts. Abandoned works are more often than not presented as defective objects of study. They are to be lamented over, treated with the utmost suspicion, or subjected to literary continuation or editorial publication in an unfinished state. This is where literary executors, academics and devotees, in

Personally, I do not differentiate between projects that were abandoned due to interruption and those that were left unfinished due to the (literal) death of the author, as it is my view that the remains of inchoate work operate in the same way. But, for clarity and to distinguish this project from strictly literary and author-led studies, the projects discussed in the thesis look at works that were abandoned due to interruptions as part of their process, not posthumous unfinished works. Posthumous works are mentioned in the Introduction, as these are one of the few forms of unfinished works that are widely debated, and for this purpose they can help orientate a broader discussion of unfinished remains.

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the face of a work that lacks what Frank Kermode called a ‘sense of an ending’,13 attempt to shape fragmented remains into something that could be evaluated alongside a satisfactorily final work, usually mimicking the form of a complete work in the process.14 The first iteration of the unfinished work’s inadequate reception is a relation to Obrist’s description of the ‘nostalgic and melancholic’ reflection upon the unrealized project, or, what Wallen calls the ‘tragic rhetoric of failure’.15 Classically, this is recurrent around the incomplete work of great writers: ‘In more than one way, the loss of Edwin Drood is one that will always be mourned.’16 But it persists beyond literature and into other fields. As Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde’s introduction to their engrossing London as It Might Have Been declares, ‘discarded designs and rejected plans lurk like unhappy ghosts behind every important building in London’.17 A subsequent constraint upon the unfinished or abandoned work’s discussion is the suspicion or wariness as to the work’s significance as an object of culture. As a commentator in the London Review of Books confesses in a review of David Foster-Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King, It’s impossible to know if I’m projecting this, but the work just seems so obviously unfinished: brilliant, certainly, but also dim and fudgy in places; ideas laboriously reworked and repeated … writing that hasn’t found its way yet; an author who hasn’t quite found the right angle to make the writing catch light.18

Would the same prose have seemed ‘dim and fudgy’ or ‘obviously unfinished’ if the book had declared itself ‘complete’? It is impossible to know – just as the reviewer doesn’t know if they are ‘projecting’ their doubt upon the text. This is, obviously, because an unfinished project is innately unknowable, absent and infinite in its prospects. It is a form that takes the interminable, ambivalent and unsettling qualities of literature into focus, unable to reconcile the distance between reader and text. Consequently, comparing the words on the page that Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 14 There are, obviously, redeemable publications of this kind. See Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980) (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2011); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 1999). 15 Wallen, ‘What Is an Unfinished Work?’, p. 128. 16 ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’, in A Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. by David Paroissien (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), pp. 444–51 (p. 450). 17 Felix Barker, London as It Might Have Been (London: Murray, 1982), p. 9. 18 Jenny Turner, ‘Illuminating, Horrible Etc’, London Review of Books, 14 April 2011, pp. 27–9. 13



On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work

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constitute The Pale King to the imagined finality of the reviewer can only slip into solipsism – of authorial intentionality and perfection. On this note, Ralph Ellison would not have approved of the previous commentator’s view on Wallace’s leftovers, explaining that ‘incompletion of form allows the reader to impose his own imagination upon the material with too little control from the author, thus I don’t like to show my work until it is near completion’.19 But then (and this moves us on to the third variety), the only reason we know Ellison thought this is because it was inserted there by the editor of his estate, as the final note of his posthumously published unfinished novel Juneteenth.20 This representation of unfinished work is repeated over and over. It confirms a latent assumption that a deficiency in content is somehow transferable to cultural value. Rarely is an unfinished work considered within its own formal terms. Instead, its cultural function is hamstrung, pointed towards the direction of finished work, either in its critical reception or publication. Despite these examples, critical reception is ordinarily limited to posthumous unfinished projects usually of canonical writers, major architects, or film directors. There is even less critical or public discussion of the ideas abandoned during one’s working process or everyday life – the unfinished drafts, plans and designs for projects that fall by the wayside. Must we account only for the things we finish? It seems perfectly logical that one would produce a creative surplus or simply fail to complete work, either to conclude one’s work elsewhere, or simply as an experiment: the creator unaware if they will ever complete what they have started. As such, there must be an adverse productivity in unmaking and unfinishing, which is something John Roberts notes in his philosophy of error: ‘The implications for a productive theory of error are both obvious and profound … what is discarded contributes through its inadequacies or contradictions to the historical labour of reason.’21 Roberts refers to Hegel’s belief that error offers a ‘dynamic element of truth’,22 which for this study attaches itself to Hegel’s conception that ‘negation is no longer an abstract nothing, but, as a determinate being and somewhat, is only

Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth, ed. by John F. Callahan, First edition (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1999), p. 363. 20 Unsurprisingly, the edition of Juneteenth without academic notes attached to it was received poorly. James Wood declared at the time: ‘but judged even as an extract – as only a piece of writing – Juneteenth is still a disappointment.’ James Wood, ‘Son of a Preacher Man’, The Guardian, 27 November 1999, http://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/nov/27/fiction.reviews [accessed 12 July 2015]. 21 John Roberts, The Necessity of Errors (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 42–3. 22 Roberts, The Necessity of Errors, p. 43. 19

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a form of such being – it is as Otherness’.23 It reasons that the remains of creative processes trapped in an abandoned state which are often unable to be chopped up into clearly demarcated ‘works’ form the conditions in which culture can be created. This is also mentioned in Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which notes a similar misrecognition and neglected utility in negation: Once negation is formulated, it presents an aspect symmetrical with that of affirmation; if affirmation affirms an objective reality, it seems that negation must affirm a non-reality equally objective, and, so to say, equally real … negation of a thing implies the latent affirmation of its replacement by something else, which we systematically leave on one side.24

Taking Roberts’s Hegelian framework and Bergson’s deductive reasoning into account, the approach of this study is predicated on a vision of cultural production that assumes that there is an inherent historically and culturally constructive nature in abandoning work, and that the unfinished project’s pattern of creation and abandonment is, in itself, a creative act. It is not claiming a total theory of unfinished work, however. Instead, it has a more modest aim: simply that the creative act of unmaking and unfinishing, and the remains of this process, might be considered within their own formal boundaries, or at least compared with other works that resemble a similar form. As a consequence, it hopes to demonstrate that abandoned work can be freed from the normative criteria of completion: a set of circumstances that have left it a dormant and undeveloped cultural form when compared to other categories of remains. While the unfinished text is often construed as a moment of interruption, it can also be read in a multiplicity of directions or provoke a variety of creative responses. Critics can exploit the interminability of the inchoate – the blank pages of unfinished work offering a space for interpretation as much as it presents an unsatisfying absence. To this degree, Blanchot reminds us, during a discussion of Valéry, that the incompletion of an artwork captures this inherent quality of literature: The writer never knows whether the work is done. What he has finished in one book, he starts over or destroys in another. Valéry, celebrating this infinite quality which the work enjoys, still sees only its least problematic aspect. That the work is

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of ‘Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences’ (1830) / Translated [from the German] by William Wallace, Third edition / with foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 135. 24 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, ed. by Keith Ansell-Pearson, Michael Kolkman and Michael Vaughan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 189. 23



On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work

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infinite means, for him, that the artist, though unable to finish it, can nevertheless make it the delimited site of an endless task whose incompleteness develops the mastery of the mind, expresses this mastery, expresses it by developing it in the form of power. At a certain moment, circumstances – that is, history, in the person of the publisher or in the guise of financial exigencies, social duties – pronounce the missing end, and the artist, freed by a dénouement of pure constraint, pursues the unfinished matter elsewhere. The infinite nature of the work, seen thus, is just the mind’s infiniteness. The mind wants to fulfil itself in a single work, instead of realizing itself in an infinity of works and in history’s ongoing movement.25

Blanchot riffs on Valéry’s notion of the finality of a work as an accident, a process where one’s work is arbitrarily abandoned and declared ‘finished’. For Blanchot and Valéry, the unfinished is a metaphor for the confrontation between an eternal creative drive (perhaps a literary ‘vital impulse’, to connect to the Bergson above) and the finitude of being. But what is more relevant here is that it overturns the notion that an abandoned work is a cultural cul-de-sac. Blanchot’s text offers a view of unfinished-ness as an insight into an ‘ongoing moment’, a view of cultural form in opposition to the arbitrarily demarcated ‘work of art’. In making this point, Blanchot manages to capture a sense of perpetuity within the absence that leaves unfinished work inconclusive, alongside a latitudinal view of creative production: as ‘the artist … pursues the unfinished matter elsewhere’. It is in this spirit that this project hopes to free unfinished texts from the stifling rhetoric of lack, lament and defection as expressed above. Consequently, the following chapters study texts that are situated in archives and collections: in part not only because it is where social and cultural records happen to finish up, but also as a deliberate strategy to counter the critical nuisance of abandoned work that has been published by an editor or – worse – has been continued by someone else.

Abandonment in plain sight Accordingly, the working method in this project is something of a balancing act between Blanchot’s notion of the potentiality of unfinished work as an imaginative, unanswerable concept and the work’s more prosaic, muted existence in the archives in which it resides. But it is this toggling, from the supra mundane to the actual mundane, that interests me. Unfinished projects connect the cosmic Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 21–2.

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with the commonplace: where the infinite prospects of the unfinished creative work are forced to contend with the tedium of archival paraphernalia, excessively long ‘finding-aids’ and the furtive glances of over-protective reading room staff. Archives and research collections provide the technical structure to this book, along with the central methodological tenets they follow. Accordingly, it is important to note that it is structured by the materials found within the archives and collections rather than the direct subject matter – making the choices serendipitous and, at times, improvised. This results in a study that possesses elements of autobiography as a research method, with each chapter offering a set of critical and reflexive archival journeys. This is something expressed explicitly in each chapter’s self-narration, describing the process of researching a particular collection – an experience that took some practice, thanks to the counter-intuitive tactics that are required when hunting for negative cultural space in archives. Scott Sandage’s Born Losers: A History of Failure in America provides a perfect methodological antecedent to my own efforts here. In his search for America’s most interesting nebbishes, Sandage has an interesting point to make about searching for contrary narratives in archival collections: Deadbeats tell no tales, it seems. Distinguished libraries saved the papers of history makers, but where might one look for scraps from the fallen – the dead letter office? ‘Those who repeatedly failed in their bids for an independent competence,’ historian Joyce Appleby has written, ‘formed a wordless substratum in a society whose speakers and writers preferred to talk about success’. On the contrary: failure was so common that its refuse landed in myriad libraries, museums, and public archives. This paper trail is the hidden history of pessimism in a culture of optimism.26

Like Sandage’s failures, abandoned projects hide in plain sight. They are both abundant and inconspicuous, while overlooked and considered unremarkable. They are usually informally concealed in archive boxes and folders, frequently under ‘work in progress’, ‘proposals’, or ‘miscellaneous research and notes’. But then, abandoned projects are a miscellaneous subject, and they throw up miscellaneous details, traversing creative production with an insight into a frozen Blanchot-esque ‘moment’ – where creative production is confronted with an interruption, leaving a set of traces as to the event and the consequences of its creation and dissolution. William Kinderman notes just this point, that the drafted work proves a unique ‘intermingling of biographical and artistic spheres’, offering ‘traces of lived experience’ beyond the usual textual particulars that Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 9.

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literary and cultural critics like to extract.27 Saverio Tomaiuolo agrees, noting that unfinished works also offer a natural multidisciplinarity that ‘bring[s] their writers back to their biographical and narrative beginnings … [leaving] a cultural, ideological and narrative project in an unfinished form’.28 Within an archival context, this approach is sympathetic to Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, where Howe notes: In research libraries and collections, we may capture the portrait of history in so-called insignificant visual and verbal textualities and textiles. In material details. In twill fabrics, bead-work pieces, pricked patters, four-ringed knots, tiny spangles, sharp-toothed stencil wheels; in quotations, thought-fragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, graphemes, endangered phonemes, in soils and cross-outs.29

All of Howe’s listed materials provide whiffs of the ‘artistic’ and ‘biographical’ spheres that Kinderman notes the inchoate draft possesses. As such, the following chapters are digressive critical biographies of each abandoned project, tracing the textual, contextual and spatial networks that surround each project. This method aims to produce a kind of historical, as well as a textual, poetics. Such a poetics aims to technically refunction and reinvigorate the cultural value and interpretative opportunities found within unfinished projects. Howe continues with this line of thought: ‘In research libraries and special collections words and objects come into their own and have their place again. This known world. This exact moment – a little afterwards – not quite.’30 Howe elegantly shifts the focus from the materiality of the document to the moment of research and of reading in a particular space at a particular time, and how the archived text traverses different historical periods and spaces during the act of writing and reading history. In this way, the material and spatial qualities of archives and the abandoned work form an important strand in this work. The book uses spatial histories and analysis to expand the scope of archival collections, while making claims about the materiality of unfinished projects – this spatial element enabling a perspective on the text that is mainly applied within cultural geography and architectural criticism.31 Equally, emphasizing William Kinderman and Joseph E. Jones, Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater (Rochester, NY: University Rochester Press, 2009), p. 11. 28 Saverio Tomaiuolo, Victorian Unfinished Novels: The Imperfect Page (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), p. 14. 29 Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), p. 21. 30 Howe, Spontaneous Particulars, p. 59. 31 The unfinished work has a critical tradition in the built environment such as Harbison’s work here, but not when applied to abandoned film and literature. Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). 27

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the space within the project should remind a reader that these works are created, are located and to an extent play a part in constructing our everyday lives. The mundanity of abandoned projects is stressed in part to demonstrate their abundance and function in cultural production, an abundance that often expresses itself in mimetic cultural patterns: abandoned works tending to accommodate and produce other abandoned works.

A model of shelving probability The first item of interest I discovered in my initial survey through the British Library was a slim, attractively designed booklet from the 1970s, produced by an agency called the Centre for the Study of Industrial Innovation (the ‘CSII’), entitled On the Shelf: A Survey of Research and Development Projects Abandoned for Non-Technical Reasons.32 On a first read, it appeared that this book had already been attempted forty years previously, by a defunct industrial research organization based on Regent Street. After some enquiries, it emerged that the CSII had operated for three years from 1970 to 1973, and that On the Shelf was its most popular title, selling over a thousand copies to various interested parties. Yet, despite early interest from industry and academia, a costly mix of an office in central London, permanent staff and economic recession looming on the horizon, meant that the CSII began to suffer from its sizeable overheads and sporadic research output. A sardonically headlined article in the New Scientist seemed to encapsulate the Centre’s destiny: Innovation Centre On the Shelf. Apparently in its last year, the Centre’s chief, George Teeling-Smith OBE, was convinced that the entire project was like ‘banging his head on a wall’, declaring ‘we have failed to convince industry … that we are doing a worthwhile job’.33 The mimetic fortunes of the CSII and its lasting literary contribution to the world, On the Shelf, have largely been forgotten. It was a non-profit organization set up by a man with a modest dream: to investigate the causes of industrial innovation in the British Isles. Its only surviving legacy is a splendidly designed and now very yellowed booklet, filled with superfluous diagrams and coloured charts that attempt to find reasons why firms and individuals give up their ideas. It is mundane in every sense of the word: it is visually mundane, formatted Centre for The Study of Industrial Innovation (1971), ‘Survey of Research and Development Projects Abandoned for Non-technical Reasons’ (London: CSII). Michael Kenward, ‘Innovation Centre on the Shelf ’, New Scientist, 8 February 1973, p. 282.

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and coloured in a uniquely clerical shade of 1970s avocado (part of its initial attraction), and it is also conceptually mundane, in its attempt to find material answers to abstract questions. Read today, the pamphlet offers new possibilities; it has become an eccentric archive of discarded merchandise that never went into production: items such as the ‘Laminated Jar’, which, we are told, was enormously popular in Italy yet was shelved due to its failure to grasp the American market; the ‘Data Generator’, an abandoned invention that appears to the unscientific eye to be an entirely feasible precursor to the internet; or the ‘The Sludge Remover’, an industrial cleaning machine that was rejected due to the lack of interest from the very firm that created it. The items are catalogued in lists with terse descriptions and bulleted points explaining their downfall, inevitably caused by their inadequate marketability, demand, structural integrity, design, or ‘usefulness’. On reflection, an out-of-print pamphlet that primarily concerns itself with discarded ideas and criticizes products for their ‘usefulness’ may seem to be a little ironic. But as it stands, the CSII, nearly forty years after their demise, was suddenly immensely useful to this project, not only in providing me with a working title for a version of this book that I left unfinished, but also in authoring one of the few totally devoted works available on unrealized, unfinished and abandoned ideas. The booklet also has an inexplicably literary quality to it – the lists of objects and inventions sounding like the contents of a book of short stories.34 Specifically, it became apparent to me that Teeling-Smith’s On the Shelf was a belated and distinctly British counterpart to Bouvard and Pécuchet – Flaubert’s great, unfinished tale of industrious folly. Not only do both works provide rich and various accounts of abandoned projects in the name of research – Flaubert’s duo sampling every branch of knowledge available to them through a seemingly random assortment of jettisoned pet projects – but Teeling-Smith’s booklet, like Flaubert’s inchoate novel, contained this collection of unrealized ideas in an organization that was itself, unfinished.35 The theoretical triumph of On the Shelf was its ‘Model of Shelving Probability’. This is summarized in a graph that displays an inverse correlation between the duration of a project’s existence to its potential to be abandoned. In other words, it was the CSII’s view that ideas are abandoned closer to their inception than their proposed realization. The subjects of the forthcoming chapters find data contrary to the CSII’s claim, but I am confident that the agency limited its In particular, the inventions sound like Arthur Conan-Doyle stories that are missing the prefix of ‘the case of ’ … ‘The Laminated Jar’ … ‘The Domestic Pump’ … ‘The Double-headed Cutter’ and so on. Although it is up for debate as to whether Teeling-Smith’s work was in fact, un-finishable.

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theory to industrial innovation, and did not consider cultural texts and artefacts. However, during my research, I discovered one text that fitted the CSII’s theory absolutely: Thomas Pynchon’s unrealized science fiction opera Minstrel Island, which was abandoned soon after a second draft of the first act was typed up. The Minstrel Island manuscript sits in the Harry Ransom Library in Austin, Texas.36 It numbers to about a hundred typed and handwritten pages produced by writing partners Thomas Pynchon and Kirkpatrick Sale in 1958, while the pair were students at Cornell University. Minstrel Island is set in a dystopian future where multinational corporation IBM has taken over the world and takes it upon itself to eradicate ‘Minstrel Island’ – the last refuge for beatniks and artists amid the faceless ‘IBMers’ that now populate the earth. In the first draft the characters include the protagonist, ‘Hero’, alongside a cast of characters whose names include Broad (the heroine), Tubetester, Chicks, Whore, Sailmaker, Gambler, Bomber, Jazzman and a host of ‘IBMers’. True to this notion of the abandoned work as a form of creative production, Rodney Gibbs, a Pynchon critic, has noted that as Pynchon’s earliest work, it very clearly shows the origins of characters, themes and topics that he would develop in his fiction much later in his career. The same goes for Sale, who would

Figure 1.2  Thomas Pynchon, ‘“Minstrel Island”, Handwritten and Typed Draft Fragments, 1958’, Austin, Harry Ransom Centre, Thomas Pynchon Collection.

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later declare he was the leader of the ‘neo-luddite’ movement. Gibbs is specific about this claim: In 1984, twenty-six years after sketching Minstrel Island, Pynchon wrote, ‘Is It Okay to Be a Luddite?’ an essay for the New York Times Book Review, in which an archetype known as ‘Badass’ returns. In detailing the history of Ned Lud, the lionized founder of the Luddite movement, Pynchon praises him as a ‘dedicated Badass’.37

According to Gibbs, Minstrel Island is the origin to some of Pynchon’s most significant thematic strands to be found in his later novels, as well as providing him with an insulated world of self-reference for later novels. This notion of the abandoned project as a resource is explored in subsequent chapters, and is an important strand of re-functioning these works. But my intention here is not just to speculate on what Minstrel Island might mean for Pynchon and Sale; it is also to highlight how the discursive context of Pynchon’s unrealized work resonates with the critical focus of this project. What is most interesting about Pynchon’s opera is that Gibbs, at the time of writing, is the only person ever to have written a scholarly article on it. The play is mentioned in a few pieces of journalism, and is given cursory treatment in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon – where an aggrieved Pynchon scholar notes that Minstrel Island remains ‘unfinished and still unpublished’ – but other than these references, as a publicly accessible work by a major contemporary author, it remains almost entirely unknown.38 It is not just its critical isolation that makes Minstrel Island emblematic of the texts studied in this project. The work’s textuality possesses peculiarities and strange details that would not necessarily be as conspicuous or foregrounded in the manuscripts of a completed or much longer text. Minstrel Island has Pynchon’s marginalia scribbled all over it, including the capitalized ‘SHIT’ above one of the first pages in the manuscript bundle. Other marginalia include Pynchon’s drawings of the play’s scenery among other tangential jottings, which are reminiscent of Howe’s notion of the archive’s potential to reveal contextual clues that propel research elsewhere. One such clue in the Harry Ransom Collection was the reverse of Pynchon’s typed sheets, which appeared to show a series of non-sequiturs next to some unticked boxes. Was Minstrel Island written on Cornell University test score sheets? If so, is this Rodney Gibbs, ‘A Portrait of the Luddite as a Young Man’, The Denver Quarterly, 39 (2004), 35. Boris Kachka, ‘On the Thomas Pynchon Trail’, Vulture, 2013, http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/ thomas-pynchon-bleeding-edge.html [accessed 6 May 2014]; Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 20.

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important? Numbered sentences like ‘said to be destroyed’, ‘be destroyed … and to give’, ‘like the north’, ‘gardens, cabins and they’ are bulleted down the back of every page: a relatively innocuous detail, until the sentences began to blend with Pynchon’s fragmented prose on the other side of the sheets. I showed the Minstrel Island texts to a Pynchon scholar. They told me in the frankest terms over email that the test questions felt like a particularly Pynchonian detail, while the rest of the manuscripts were ‘weird … automatic writing? Dadaist juvenilia?’ This is yet another reason as to why the materiality of the abandoned work is worthy of investigation. Its archived state frames the work in a way that attaches a series of peripheral clues and traces that refract an author’s output. It is often these contextual marks or suggestions in the text’s surround that yield the most informative material, illuminating the work’s function through new unheard narratives. In this fashion, later in this project, we will see Harold Pinter contemplate the brushstrokes that Francis Bacon painted directly over his script for The Proust Screenplay, Muriel Spark’s notes on eavesdropped conversations left among the papers of her abandoned historical epic Watling Street, and the polemical marginalia of an eccentric architect’s attempts to tunnel motorways underneath central London. These peripheral stories, material traces and offbeat details that frame the unfinished work corroborate an untold collateral history that exists behind every text, and have the potential to unsettle received histories and textual readings while bringing colourful historical detail to light. Abandoned and unfinished texts in this way form their own category of collateral culture. As a result, thanks largely to the structures of archives and with the advantage of retrospect, abandoned works show creators in dialogue with ideas outside of their received oeuvre – experimenting beyond the boundaries and categories that critics and the public have appropriated them. Fittingly, while unfinished works are usually created outside a received oeuvre, it is a secondary purpose to try to reframe its surrounding criticism, exploring the boundaries of textual analysis and theory through texts that offer few boundaries themselves.

Waste matters Sifting through the debris of creative work, the commentaries here inevitably comment upon the manifold conversations that surround cultural ruins, remains, waste and wreckage. This is a response in part motivated by the recent revival in ruingazing in the arts and humanities, alongside burgeoning discussions on waste matter



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and discarded material culture.39 Contemporary ruin-gazing develops – or sometimes rejects – the philosophy of the Romantic ruin-gazer, and presents the ruin as a trope or recurring motif of the West’s modern condition: from post-industrial and wartorn city landscapes, to the more abstract vestiges of material progress promised by mid-century modernizers. It is a trope where the ruin’s splintered form operates as the material expression of the agitation and reflexive instability at the heart of the modern condition. Perhaps a catalyst of this wave of interest was W. G. Sebald’s images of ruins in The Rings of Saturn (1995), where Sebald’s narrative landscapes are captured in a set of powerful temporal and disintegrative symbols, operating as the bridge in this discourse between the ruins of conflict and the ruins of progress. But, for all of the ruin’s potential power in contemporary criticism, both its characterization and classification are as unstable as the condition from which it emanates. ‘The ruin has blurred edges in more ways than one. As an aesthetic and conceptual category, it is uniquely ill-defined’ note the editors of The Ruins of Modernity in their introduction, later asking of their volume, ‘where does the ruin start, and where does it end?’40 My own question here is slightly different: not where does the ruin end, but when will the ruin end? Currently, ruins dominate critical discourses concerned with fragments and remains within contemporary cultural studies. This project, therefore, attempts to broaden this discourse to include the scraps of origins, and not merely endings or fragments. The texts studied in this project are nascent ideas trapped in their germination – rather than works abandoned or ruined after their usage. The role of the discarded beginning has long been overlooked. To return to Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Bergson felt that it was a sense of original multiplicity that would reveal the vital impulse or propulsion at the heart of his philosophy of evolution.41 To transfer this focus to the beginning of a creative work, it is a subsequent claim of this work that the multiplicity of beginnings within cultural production can offer as much insight into the contemporary moment as the ruined vestiges of its expired material culture. As such, alternative Works such as: C. DeSilvey and T. Edensor, ‘Reckoning with Ruins’, Progress in Human Geography, 37 (2012), 465–85; Brian Dillon, Ruins (London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery; MIT Press, 2011); Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins Spaces, Aesthetics, and Materiality (New York: Berg, 2005); William Viney, Waste: A Philosophy of Things (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 2002); Brian Dillon, Ruin Lust (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2014); Svetlana Boym, Architecture of the Off-Modern, Reprint edition (New York; London: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012); Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 40 Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity, p. 6. 41 As Lawlor and Leonard paraphrase Bergson: ‘if there is a telos to life, then, it must be situated at the origin and not at the end’. Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard Leonard, ‘Henri Bergson’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, 2013, http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2013/entries/bergson/ [accessed 23 July 2015]. 39

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beginnings – beginnings that lack endings – are overlooked, and the analysis of the emergent unfinished text to partner its decayed, obverse companion is long overdue. On the face of it, the uneven, unfinished forms of abandoned projects and ruins would seem to speak to each other in concert. One of the key differences between them, however, concerns the temporal and symbolic qualities assigned to both. In modern ruinophilia, it is common to see the ruin co-opted as the material and conceptual remains of the past that reside in the contemporary. However, for the abandoned plan, this claims the contrary: that the plan reveals to readers the embryonic contemporary of a former period. In other words, our unfinished plans situate a reader in the immediacy of an earlier time. This is opposed to ruin-gazing, which sees our own contemporary moment interrupted with fragments of the past. Making these distinctions between the two forms is not an attempt to dislodge the ruin from its place in discourse, but rather an attempt to broaden existing critical dialogue. Often, unrealized projects are categorized alongside or obscured by ruins, when they should be used as a counter-text to explore the limits of each form. This is a strategy I have employed several times, using a related text’s ruination as a way of foregrounding the unfinished project, highlighting differences, moments of similarity and their opposing structures and arrangements.42 In this way, it is not just unfinished projects but the discourse itself that is set into relief. Therefore, this project speaks for the silent partner of the debate on cultural remains, and traces its life through archives, text and space, chronicling their quiet influence on modern and contemporary culture. The Afterlives of Abandoned Work, therefore, does not only ponder the nature of unfinished texts; it aims to expand literary studies’ contribution to a metadiscourse on cross-cultural bits and pieces. The project chooses to read un-built buildings, unfilmed screenplays and unpublished novels as categories of text that can help us consider the perpetual fragmentariness and anecdotal construction of cultural form while signalling certain problems with literary criticism’s approach to the archive. It presents the unfinished and abandoned work as a moment of textual interruption and discontinuance, where a creative termination presents an array of critical problems for literary scholars. While there is an implicit understanding in film scholarship that unproduced screenplays are a necessary On various occasions this thesis often compares literary and non-literary texts considered within unfinished or ruinous categories. Equally, it on occasion employs playful elements of distanciation and defamiliarization in its analysis. As a result, it should be acknowledged that these techniques date back to New Historicism, in particular: The New Historicism, ed. by Harold Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989).

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component of cinematic production, or in the architectural historian’s acceptance of the industry’s innumerable un-built plans and designs (some not even intending to be put into production), why does literary criticism not possess a comparable consideration of the profusion of abandoned, unfinished and unrealized works inherent to cultural production? And equally, can these forms provide challenges and opportunities as forms of literary text? As such, I have made a number of arguments in connection with this during my accounts of the unfinished projects featured in each chapter: arguments that make claims about cultural production and the ways that we catalogue and store the works we produce. A variety of finer points concerning the unfinished arise out of this approach, premised on the fact that these projects recount interesting, untold stories that construct the spaces of everyday life; offer an inadvertent source of biography; posit alternative historical narratives; and provide imaginative and experimental spaces for their creators, as well as creative reserves to adapt and morph into publicly disseminated works. Many of these ideas overlap with wider subjects and concepts that cannot be covered here, such as philosophical negativity, impossible certainty, negative capability and aesthetics – even the absurd. The unfinished work is not so much a subject; it is a phenomenon – an outcome that can appear in any act of production. Discussions of the abandoned work date as far back as Pliny the Elder, who explained in his history of art why unfinished works were sold for huge sums of money in Ancient Rome: ‘the reason is that in these we see traces of the design and the original conception of the artists, while sorrow for the hand that perished at its work beguiles us into the bestowal of praise’.43 But, there is an even greater value at stake in abandoned work than their worth and the ‘original conception’ of the artist, which is the life of the text itself; as Benjamin noted somewhat ambiguously in his essay on Fuchs, that ‘for the person who is concerned with works of art in a historically dialectical mode, these works integrate their preas well as post-history; and it is their post-history which illuminates their prehistory as a continuous process of change. Works of art teach that person how their function outlives their creator and how his intentions are left behind.’44 This book is an attempt to grasp the stories that arise from an examination of the ‘function’ and ‘change’ of abandonment, so it can form a case to suppose and interpret the turbulent and shape-shifting lives of cultural fragments. The Elder Pliny, Chapters On The History Of Art, trans. by K. Jex-Blake (London: Macmillan, 1896), p. 169. 44 Walter Benjamin and Knut Tarnowski, ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, New German Critique, no. 5 (1975), 27–58. 43

Figure 2.1 

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The Writing and Rewriting of Place: The Story of Llano Del Rio

Introduction Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer (1939) tells the story of elderly Californian millionaire Joe Stoyte and his scientific quest for eternal youth. A brash, uncultured self-made oil and land tycoon, Stoyte assembles a ragtag party of characters to live with him in his home – a newly built medieval-style castle in the San Fernando Valley.1 Among them are his physician, Dr Obispo, who intermittently injects Stoyte with testosterone and various experimental antiageing drugs; Obispo’s young communist laboratory assistant Peter; Stoyte’s youthful blonde mistress Virginia; and Jeremy Pordage, a portly middle-aged archivist from Woking. Living just beyond Stoyte’s grounds is his old friend and antagonist Bill Propter, a former academic-turned utopian mystic and environmental colonist, who provides the novel’s mouthpiece for Huxley’s polemical observations of pre-war Southern California. After Many a Summer – the title from Tennyson’s poem ‘Tithonus’, a retelling of the Greek myth of the Trojan prince trapped in immortality as an old man – was the first of Huxley’s five Californian novels. It provided the author with the opportunity to structure his impression of Southern Californian society and culture. These can be found in the novel’s array of characters and set pieces throughout the book, from Stoyte’s mistress Virginia as a symbol of the superficial American blonde to the castle’s transient workhands from Kansas, graphically presented by Huxley as the unseen malnourished labour underpinning the region’s success. Propter soon becomes a thinly veiled symbol of the region’s utopianism and pursuit for the good life, and the selfless counterweight to Stoyte’s conceited desire for immortality. Also interspersed throughout the Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer (London: Penguin, 1971).

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novel are Stoyte’s anti-ageing inoculations from Dr Obispo, providing Huxley with some clear signposting towards the absurdity of California’s obsession with youth and Stoyte’s desire for everlasting life. Huxley’s archivist, Jeremy Pordage, is tasked with cataloguing Stoyte’s latest acquisition the Hauberk Papers, the letters of an obscure aristocratic dynasty who have had to sell off their archive, after the family has fallen on hard times. After his initial cataloguing duties and some details of Pordage’s unhealthy interest in the family’s archival curiosa (which includes early editions of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom), a moment of fortune sees the archivist stumble across the eighteenth-century diary of a Hauberk ancestor, Charles Hauberk, who spent his later years experimenting with his diet in search of immortality – largely through the ingestion of carp innards. As soon as Stoyte is informed, he visits the Hauberk residence in England, only to find that deep in the estate’s cellars Charles is still alive – although living in squalor, having biologically regressed into a primate. While the archivist and his dusty crates of aristocratic correspondence initially provide a glaring contrast to Los Angeles’s boundless advertising, copycat architecture and arid scenery, the aspirations of an eighteenth-century earl and a twentieth-century oil mogul eventually merge – the eternal greed of one landowner becoming indistinguishable from the next. This undermines Pordage’s twee transatlantic distinctions in Anglo-American relations as Russell A. Berman notes: Far from endorsing the denunciation of Los Angeles as the barbarian enemy to culture, Huxley – not unlike the German exile philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno – uncovers a dialectic in the Enlightenment which finds its starkest expression in his new home.2

For Huxley, California possessed the most explicit cultural manifestation of modernity and the Enlightenment’s invention of the self. Huxley’s characterization of Stoyte’s quest for youth and Propter’s search for utopia hinges on this logic, and reflects the region that Huxley saw around him when he arrived in America in the late 1930s. Stoyte and Propter provide loose west coast archetypes symptomatic of the region at the time, as California in the early twentieth century had provided a blank canvas for competing systems of belief Russell A. Berman, ‘British Expatriates and German Exiles in 1930s–1940s Los Angeles’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, ed. by Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 50–1.

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to build communities and experiment across cheap and freely available land. California was a final destination – where, up to the outbreak of the Second World War, socialist colonies, cultist outposts and the film industry provided an expanse of potential narrative destinies for newcomers. The state’s rapid economic growth from the turn of the century – thanks in part to the Arcadian mythology unfurled across the Southern Californian landscape by ‘booster’ realtors – initiated a steady stream of early-twentieth-century migration that produced a unique cultural heterodoxy, prepared to write and rewrite its own history in order to secure its own illimitable future.3 On this point, Alexander McClung declares Los Angeles to be: On the rim of a void and at the terminus of a journey. As such, L.A. occupies ‘the future’, both in space and – because it is an unrealized, or unexploited, land that must be made as well as found – time.4

In terms of developing this popular representation of Huxley’s California of eternal youth and McClung’s California as an ‘unrealized’ future space, David Fine points to the characterization of this culture declaring Propter as exemplary of the region’s fiction: Spiritualists and ‘psychic consultants’ [Raymond Chandler’s term] have been permanent and conspicuous residents in the fiction about Los Angeles. … In the literary construction of the city, the charlatans and cults signal the fusion, or confusion, of reality and illusion, fact and fantasy that has been one of the recurring themes of Los Angeles fiction.5

The reality of this was as abundant as its fictional representation. Paul Kagan, the prolific photographer of Californian social experiments in New World Utopias, confirms that ‘the commune, like America, starts as a place – an open space in which to experiment in living one’s ideals. It is open ended; it can go anywhere; there is faith in time … it is intensely Californian.’6 In his investigations, Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999); M. J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman and Greg Hise, Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996); Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 4 William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 41. 5 David M. Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Original Essays / Edited by David Fine (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), p. 14. 6 Paul Kagan, New World Utopias: A Photographic History of the Search for Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 176. 3

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Kagan found ‘scores of communes in California. … I found their ruins in the deserts and mountains and on the seashore’.7 These failed utopias, which were left unfulfilled and unrealized in their ambitions and are now remembered in fragmented remains, provide the antithesis to the other great ruinous trope of California: the ghost towns of the Gold Rush. These are sites where resources have been expended and the town has served its purpose and expired. Surviving ghost towns like Bodie, Skidoo, or Randsberg exist as deceased counterparts in the landscape, counterpoised with the originary remains of Kagan’s utopian communities. Their motives, however, according to Kevin Starr, originate from the same indefinable sense of possibility that sprung from the first Gold Rush of 1848–55, establishing the state’s intrinsic ‘psychology of expectation’.8 Huxley’s archivist maintains an important connection between this aura of the unrealized quest for eternity and the critical function of archives and text. At first, the Hauberk archive is used as a device to propel the novel’s plot, carefully drawing out Stoyte’s path to immortality and carp innards. But it soon becomes a lens to interpret differing visions of landscape – the text eventually eschewing the differences between the Californian oil baron and his landed aristocratic predecessor. As such, the novel’s use of the archive enabled Huxley to draw a connection between Stoyte’s simulated castle and an ‘authentic’ European past, as

Figure 2.2  Kagan, New World Utopias, p. 7. Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2007), p. 80.

7 8



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well as providing the cultural antecedent to the image of Virginia, the Californian blonde, with the volumes of early modern pornography. The Hauberk archives symbolically sequence – or ‘arrange’ to appropriate archival terminology – these chapters of modernity in the text. They reframe and mediate the novel’s culture and setting; and it soon becomes Pordage’s role as the archivist to reveal these connections from within the collection. It is in this notion, the idea of the ideological arrangement or structuration of California, that its historical records can be seen as the ultimate frontier of abandoned and unrealizable projects, its archives collecting the vestiges of a state littered with the beginnings and ends of cultural endeavours. The surrounding landscape resembles a page where short-lived utopian ruins, ghost towns and discarded film sets become the drafted ephemeral jottings and abandoned marginalia in the rewriting of place. As such, in the search for the spaces and storage of unrealized projects, California is a state where the unfinished work resides in the open: physically in ruins, in its historical records and in the psychology of the space that surrounds it. But with this in mind, how is the unrealized or unfinished text kept in archives? How are remains and unfinished projects understood? What are the difficulties in creating a taxonomy of the inchoate project or text? This chapter intends to examine the frontiers of archives, where the centrifugal pull of archival order begins to augment and obscure the texts and remains that occupy the margins of cultural histories. It aims to understand where abandoned texts go missing in archives, and in turn, if it is possible that the abandoned space becomes a kind of archive itself – or perhaps even a break from conventional archival discourses to form a new definition of an archive altogether. It hopes to find the limits of how and where we keep unfinished projects, in an attempt to see these limitations and boundaries in closer detail. It provides this through an analysis that explores the different perspectives and access points to the ‘void’ of McClung’s unrealized spaces. This analysis sets about trying to understand how archives present unfinished work in the backdrop of the American frontier and more specifically, Los Angeles and its desert surround: a place Michael Sorkin describes as ‘probably the most mediated … in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers’.9 A fictive scrim that, as Jeremy Pordage peevishly notes in

Michael Sorkin, Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings (London: Verso, 1991), p. 48.

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a telegram to his mother, merely resembles an infinitesimally larger version of somewhere slightly more pedestrian: ‘Climate being subtropical shall break vow re underclothes stop Wish you were here my sake not yours as you would scarcely appreciate this unfinished Bournemouth indefinitely magnified stop.’ ‘Unfinished what?’ questioned the woman on the further side of the counter. ‘B-o-u-r-n-e-m-o-u-t-h’, Jeremy spelled out.10

Archives After an exhaustive tour around Joe Stoyte’s imitation chateau, Pordage is finally alone with the Hauberk Papers. His excitement is palpable: Like a child dipping blindly into a bran pie for a present which he knows will be exciting, Jeremy picked up one of the brown-paper parcels with which the first crate was filled and cut the string. What rich confusion awaited him within!11

The bran pie, no longer a fixture with small children, was a Victorian confection where small presents were buried deep at the bottom of a brown cereal cake. But, as Pordage notes, the perplexities when faced with ‘the archive’ are even richer. The layers of human interference, chance and organizational schematics that arrange the remnants of information that can be gleaned from the records of a given creator bring a bewildering sense of disorder – but perhaps more conspicuously – mistrust. Paul Ricœur sees this as a constant struggle in the function of the archive: At the same time, every plea in favour of the archive will remain in suspense, to the degree that we do not know, and perhaps never will know, whether the passage from oral to written testimony, to the document in the archive, is, as regards to its utility or its inconvenience for living memory, a remedy, or a poison, a pharmakon.12

The pharmakon makes an appearance in Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy (1981) as well as in the ancient Egyptian myth of Thoth and translates from ancient Greek

Huxley, After Many a Summer, p. 12. Ibid., p. 49. 12 Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 168. 10 11



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to mean, quite literally, both a remedy and a poison. In this case, from Ricœur’s observation of the inherent uncertainty in the passage of knowledge from oral to written communication, can we trust archives? And can we trust archives with abandoned projects? Ricœur puts his concerns more succinctly quoting the historian Pierre Nora: ‘Archive as much as you like: something will always be left out.’13 Archives are in a sense, repositories of unfinished fragments. The early archival mission of the nineteenth century to recover and conserve every available textual residue of medieval and early-modern manuscript culture meant that by their very nature, archives consisted of the total preservation of the scraps and remains of texts, exemplifying the essential partiality of archival collections. In this context, part of the job of this study is to find the traces of unrealized texts among vast bodies of records that are already fragmentary or incomplete. Superficially, this may seem like a conceptually appropriate starting point, as the archive would seem to be not only the right place to unearth the unrealized project, but also the perfect lens in which to view its textual production and relationships: as fragmentary, ephemeral, incomplete and intertextual, with a privileged access to the materiality of the documents. Yet the search for a textual form or historical phenomenon, such as abandonment, is more problematic than it may seem. More often than not, archives are spaces where abandoned texts go un-described or are compiled alongside a completed project. This is, thanks to either the judgement of the archivist or the maintenance of the original order of the creator’s material, where it may have been buried among other works. This is not to say that unfinished projects aren’t valued by archivists and archives today; however, it is likely that if an abandoned or unfinished project is foregrounded in archival description, it is most probably because of the significance of its creator, or its relation to a publicly known text. This means that principally, the abandoned work suffers from a crude selectivity of the canonicity of the creator. In recent years, ‘the archive’ has become an almost universal term for the generic storage or memorization of historical remains, perhaps best summarized as the literary ‘return to the archive’ or ‘the archival turn’ of recent years, its discourse a culmination of critical theory’s attention to cultural stowage in its role both as an agent of historical suppression and as a space of enormous

As translated by Paul Ricœur in: Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 169.

13

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creative potential for renewed cultural analysis.14 What is less frequently seen is contemporary scholarship returning to the formational (albeit technocratic) texts of archival management and thus the very principles of archives themselves, to discuss how archives may actually produce and reframe the texts from within their own autonomous systems. It is not referenced enough how the two discourses can inform or problematize archival research from different perspectives. As Antoinette Burton explains, there is a necessity to: Interrogat[e] how archive logics work, what subjects they produce, and which they silence in specific historical and cultural contexts; enumerating the ways in which archival work is an embodied experience, one shaped as much by national identity, gender, race and class as by professional training or credentials; pressing the limits of disciplinary boundaries to consider what kind of archive work different genres, material artifacts, and aesthetic forms do, for what audiences and to what ends.15

The subjects that archives ‘produce’, in this sense, derive from competing and dialogic archival rationales: the first being one of the founding principles of the archival profession that archives should aim to retain an objective and evidential ‘original order’ from record creators, the second stemming from more critically sensitive practices of contemporary appraisal techniques that implore archives to provide a contingent cultural and social memory in the public sphere. These approaches, not easily divided into the archaic and the modern, provide a constant duality in archival logic and practice. This is a division not necessarily opposed to one another, but rather what Terry Cook describes as ‘two integral sides of the archival coin’,16 the archive designed as either a repository for hard evidence or a porous storehouse for cultural memory, concealing, fragmenting, or even at times revealing the unfinished text at different moments.17

The following works represent a sense of breadth and post-disciplinarity taken to archive studies: Julie Bacon, ‘Archive, Archive, Archive!’, Circa (2007), 50–9; Kate Eichhorn, ‘Archival Genres: Gathering Texts and Reading Spaces’, 2008, https://urresearch.rochester.edu/ institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemId=5351 [accessed 24 February 2014]; Cheryl Simon, ‘Introduction: Following the Archival Turn’, Visual Resources, 18 (2002), 101–7; Margaret Cohen, ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, Representations, 108 (2009), 51–75; Charles Merewether, The Archive (Cambridge, NA: MIT Press, 2006); Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 15 Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. by Antoinette M. Burton (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 9. 16 Terry Cook, ‘“We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are”: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and Future’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 32 (2011), 173–89 (p. 179). 17 Cook, ‘“We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are”’, p. 179. 14



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Histories of archival management show glimpses into the formations of archives and how this development may have begun to occlude the unfinished project. The modern archive began as a system of record management for government, and its pivotal role in public life was intended to be an impassive representation of state, based on the idea of collating a ‘total archive’ of the actions of an administration. Here John Ridener notes how The Dutch Manual (1898), one of the foundational texts of the modern archival profession, treated drafts of minutes: ‘The authors [Muller et al] note that the approved minutes are the important records for the archive, and that the drafts, including rough drafts, memoranda, or the corrected drafts, have no meaning after the adopted minutes exist.’18 This hierarchy of order created within The Manual provides the theoretical and material origins of the obscuration of inchoate and abandoned work. The Manual’s dissonant objective of attempting to keep complete records, yet actively eliminating traces of process, erasure and correction, conjures Derrida’s etymological observation in Archive Fever, that the function of archives as a shelter for ‘the originary, the first, the principal, the primitive, in short to the commencement’19 of social memory. This seems lost on The Manual, and sharply disputes Derrida’s claim, as the origin of cultural production – the drafted text – is rejected from the collection, leaving only the neatened finished article in its place. Archives offer a unique tactility – an experience heightened by the spatial exclusivity afforded to both the time and the site of archival research. And with this in mind, Huxley’s caricature archivist Jeremy Pordage reappears, as he descends greedily upon the Hauberk boxes once more: Tied up in innumerable brown-paper parcels, the Hauberk Papers awaited their first reader. Twenty-seven crates of still unravished brides of quietness. He smiled to himself at the thought he was to be their Bluebeard.20

Pordage’s desire to indulge in the archive is partly blurred with his baser interest in the Hauberk family’s collection of eighteenth-century pornography. Here Huxley is also acknowledging a kind of fetishization of ‘the archive’ – the seductive materiality of boxes, folders, papers, bindings, string and other paraphernalia, a predisposition that has recently undergone a renaissance in John Ridener, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2009), p. 37. 19 Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, 25 (1995), 9 (p. 9). 20 Huxley, After Many a Summer, p. 48. 18

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academic discourse.21 This renewed attention to the material construction, usage and texture of historical records takes the intimacy of archival study and the privileged and privileging elements of the archive into focus. This is not only the exclusivity of access to archives, but also the material texts and spaces that constitute the interpretive activity of the researcher. Accordingly, Carolyn Steedman argues that a kind of ‘potential space between the individual and the environment’ exists – a space related to the material and lived world, almost the materialization of historical time: The Archive then is something that, through the cultural activity of History, can become Memory’s potential space, one of the few realms of the modern imagination where a hard-won and carefully constructed place can return to boundless limitless space, and we might be released from the house arrest that Derrida suggested was its condition.22

Steedman’s assertion that the ‘boundless limitless space’ enacted by the historian through the ‘activity’ of history underscores the potentiality of expansive conceptual space to occur in archives. Furthermore, this implies that the material and experiential qualities of being in and using an archive point to a multiplicity of space and times not covered in most critical considerations of ‘the archive’. To build on this claim, it is clear that the texts on the outskirts of archives (those that are unfinished, uncatalogued, or unlabelled) also offer these same possibilities, as their textual content and form connect them beyond the researcher’s reading, and into a conjectural intertextual relationship with other texts and the historical moment of their creation. Crucially, however, Steedman neglects the agency of the archival institution – centrally in the work of the archivist and the systems of logic that underpin the material text’s space. Steedman’s archive is a static place, exemplified in the title of her work on archives, Dust. The simple fact is that archives are places

Interpreting archives and their surrounding material culture in this way has drawn attention to a topic that has long been neglected by those who use archives as well as researchers who wouldn’t dream of doing so, and has enlivened studies of material culture as a result. The only possible downside to this might be that the discourse exaggerates the glamour and allure of ‘the archive’ from its commonplace reality: the precisely ordered and excruciatingly tedious lists of records that constitute archival finding aids or the quietly suppressive atmosphere of reading rooms. Rarely are these mentioned among the elegies to string, foolscap folders, scribbled marginalia, or index cards. Recent examples of this subject include Markus Krajewski and Peter Krapp, Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Steven Connor, Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile Books, 2011); Spieker, The Big Archive. 22 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 83. 21



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where dust is not really allowed to settle; their texts are regularly relocated and succumb to the various systems of arrangement and preservation imposed by the archivist. So, while Steedman identifies a kind of ‘limitless’ space, it is not produced merely by the act of history. It is the unseen labour of the archivist, and more broadly, the agency of archival institutions. As a result, this chapter attempts to borrow Steedman’s notion of the limitless space, but places it against a more eventful archival landscape that can accelerate or obstruct the work of the researcher at any given moment. As a result, the archival studies in this book are based on the assumption that the material and spatial qualities of archived texts – the archival structures and systems that accommodate them and the unfinished visions held in the abandoned works – all hold a significant and reciprocal interrelationship. This is partly to not only stress that abandoned projects aren’t merely immaterial ideas floating around cultural history to be reproduced in books, but also assert that the texts that constitute an unfinished work and their corresponding archival storage space is one of the few, or sometimes sole, material spaces that represent the labour of unfinishing. Archival collections, therefore, not only signify the space of the stock it has accumulated, but also are a symbolic edifice of the textual imaginary and the processual qualities of cultural production. As a consequence, the space of the archive is emblematic of the abandoned project’s position in critical discourse and society, as works that exist on the fringes of knowledge, holding a peripheral, yet vital, role in the preservation and renewal of culture.

Abandoned utopias A crescent of former utopian colonies surrounds Los Angeles. The locations of Pisgah Grande (1914–20), Llano Del Rio (1914–18), San Bernadino (1852–8), Fellowship Farm (1912–16) and Helena Modjeska’s Colony (1876) in their various forms were once evenly dotted around Los Angeles County.23 One of the longest lasting and perhaps most historically prolific was Llano Del Rio, the socialist colony that was built on the edge of the Antelope Valley – the ruins of which still stand today. Robert Hine draws an excellent map of them. Robert Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), p. i.

23

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In 1990, Llano was brought back into the public eye (in the academic community at least) by providing the setting for Mike Davis’s prologue in City of Quartz. Davis’s prologue, The View from Futures Past, claims Llano’s remains provide ‘the ruins of its alternative future’ and details how Davis, during a stroll through the surviving structures of Llano, meets two Mexican drifters sheltering in the foundations of a settlement that might have once saved them from their plight.24 The prologue then fades out as the author explains that he had ‘just written a book’ – the drifters’ immediate environment encapsulating the spatial politics Davis confronts in his work. City of Quartz’s fleeting reference to Llano sees the town used as an anecdotal mechanism, in part to highlight the faded vestiges of egalitarianism in a city dominated by profiteering, but also to introduce Davis and his spatial critique with a degree of sentimentalism, as a political outsider reanimating a strand of Los Angelino radicalism from the dusty ruins of Llano to return to the city it once tried to flee. Here, Llano will also be used as a device, albeit with a different approach. This is to conduct an experiment with an experiment – the abandoned and unfinished socialist colony providing the material and textual grounds for challenging the parameters of archives and archiving. Llano was, after all, a failed experiment: a socialist commune that briefly crept off the drawing board, surviving for just under four years in harsh desert conditions, before being abandoned – the survivors later resettling in New Llano (later Newllano) in Louisiana. As such, the unfinished ambitions and deserted structures scattered around the remains of Llano’s site provide a vertical integration of unrealized aspiration and abandoned material culture. It is in this way that Davis senses the enduring function of Llano, as a kind of test bed – to be imagined and experimented upon – its remaining structures providing the last traces of the region’s unfinished radical heritage, a forgotten and distinctly alternative strain of California’s condition of destiny. It is important to distinguish, however, the difference between the generic application of the term ‘utopian’ and the relevance of Llano as a ‘utopian colony’. Abandoned work or unrealized projects are not utopias, which by their very definition are unrealizable as part of their nature. Gregory Claeys has noted the difficulty of defining the term ‘utopia’, commenting that there is a tendency for work on the subject to reduce the idea of a utopia to merely ‘a psychological Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), p. 3.

24



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impulse’ or ‘fantasy’. Claeys also proposes that utopian concepts do not include ‘every aspiration to social improvement: proposals to contain sewage emissions or extend public transport’.25 Llano, like Claeys’s definition of the utopic, exists somewhere in the middle of these. While there was a socialist dream that impelled the initial vision of the project, in actuality the idea of Llano’s relationship to a utopia was dispelled almost immediately once practical concerns came to the fore. As a consequence, the unrealized ambitions of Llano discussed later in this chapter form the creative dialogue between this practice and the original imaginary that inspired it. Perhaps it might be preferable to transform the common terminology used about Llano from ‘utopian’ to experimental communities. The common reference to Llano as a utopian settlement in American scholarship is possibly more indicative of its interpreters than it is of Llano itself. From its inception, writers and historians have seen Llano as a holistic experiment – a township that produced architecture, philosophy, literature, commerce and community for a brief early period, only for it to be discarded before it had ever really begun. R. S. Deese notes that in this sense ‘speculations can be a powerful solvent for ungluing our assumptions about the way things are and have to be’.26 Likewise for Robert Hine, these ‘pilot communities’ provide conceptual ‘previews’ into a broader mode of existence.27 So again, contrary to its utopian baggage, Llano is not actually swollen to the unrealizable expanse of utopianism in its conceptual or historical value. Instead its historians regard it as a draft society, not necessarily in a particular textual or artistic form, but in the holistic cultural output of a conscientious and ideologically engaged community. Subsequently, Llano consists of a ‘compendium of data’ for which to draw from and read into.28 At this point Aldous Huxley re-emerges, an early Llano enthusiast, noting in 1953 that the community exemplified the general principle that ‘to anyone who is interested in human beings and their so largely unrealized potentialities, even the silliest experiment has value, if only as demonstrating what ought not to be done.’29

Gregory Claeys, Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2011), p. 11. 26 R. S. Deese, ‘Twilight of Utopias: Julian and Aldous Huxley in the Twentieth Century’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 5 (2011), 236 27 Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies, p. 4. 28 Kagan, New World Utopias, p. 136. 29 Aldous Huxley and Paul Kagan, ‘A Double Look at Utopia: The Llano Del Rio Colony’, California Historical Quarterly, 51 (1972), 117–54 (p. 128). 25

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A brief history of Llano Del Rio The Llano Del Rio colony was founded, managed, aborted and re-founded entirely by one man – a major figure in leftist Californian history, Job Harriman (1861–1925). Harriman has a remarkable story which, at its height, features Harriman running as the Socialist Party of America’s vice-presidential candidate in the election of 1900, having become Los Angeles’s preeminent legal figure in the defence of working-class collectivization. At its lowest seventeen years later, the former politician and Civil Rights lawyer found himself as a beleaguered superintendent of a failing experimental commune in the searing desert heat of the Antelope Valley. In fact, to tell the story of Llano is in part to tell the story of Job Harriman: his appearance, according to Huxley, reminiscent of ‘the face of a revivalist or a Shakespearean actor’. Surviving images of him confirm as much. During research works on Harriman, I came across a damaged photograph of him posing alongside a family and the Civil Rights lawyer Clarence Darrow. Harriman is seated on the left on the image, gazing intensely into a distant ideological future somewhere over the photographer’s right shoulder, while Clarence and the unnamed family stare directly into the camera’s lens with mixed results. For many historians of the Llano colony, this encapsulates Harriman’s vision, idealism and forceful charisma that almost single-handedly impelled the socialist boom in the American West. Harriman featuring as a decisive, bigpicture man of action, until, like Llano Del Rio, his reputation and influence was ground to dust. Harriman was born in rural Indiana in 1861, and initially trained as a minister before switching his studies to the law. He moved to California in order to begin a career at the Bar, first in San Francisco (where he first came into contact with communes, visiting the Alturia colony) and later in Los Angeles. After this move, there are three distinct threads to Harriman’s career. First, there is his pivotal role in the legal defence and organization of union and civil rights groups in Los Angeles, fighting his long-time adversary, Harrison Gray Otis. Otis was part of Los Angeles’s elite set, a powerful conservative newspaper publisher who lobbied for (and passed) legislation barring union organizing, free association and free speech.30 Then there is Harriman’s political activism, which saw him run unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1898, vice president of the Their relationship began in 1910, when Harriman defended the Los Angeles Times bombers with Clarence Darrow. Otis owned The Times and set about persecuting Harriman in all his future endeavours, eventually revelling in the failure of Llano.

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Figure 2.3 

United States in 1900, and mayor of Los Angeles in both 1910 and 1913. Finally, there is his role in orchestrating Llano Del Rio, a community often referred to as the most successful utopian community in Californian history, lasting for nearly four years. Llano’s story begins just after Harriman’s narrow loss in the 1913 mayoral race.31 A third electoral defeat had cemented in Harriman’s mind the impossibility of socialism’s chance to gain a foothold in mainstream American politics; and so, in the summer of 1913, Harriman and a group of his associates looked for a suitable location in which to establish a cooperative settlement. After considering spaces in Oregon, Arizona and Nevada, a tract of land in the Antelope Valley was chosen, the valley located in a north-easterly patch of Los Angeles County. The following section is a synthesis of the following key sources that chart the journey of Llano Del Rio: Paul Greenstein, Nigey Lennon and Lionel Rolfe, Bread & Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles (Los Angeles: California Classics Books, 1992); Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies; Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1979); Kagan, New World Utopias; A. R. Clifton, ‘History of The Communistic Colony Llano Del Rio’, Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California, 11 (1918), 80–90; Hugh S. Hanna, ‘The Llano Del Rio Cooperative Colony’, Monthly Review of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2 (1916), 19–23; Abe Hoffman, ‘A Look at Llano: Experiment in Economic Socialism’, California Historical Society Quarterly, 40 (1961), 215–36.

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This led Harriman to gather together the funds to purchase the ailing Mescal Water Company, which still owned the site. The land overlapped ominously on top of Almondale, a planned garden city from the 1890s that was never built – the Chicagoan developers having bankrupted themselves after failing to properly irrigate the land.32 Ignoring the fate of Almondale, Harriman then proceeded to incorporate the land of the Mescal Water Company as ‘The Llano Del Rio Company’ for $2,000,000. Advertisements to attract settlers were placed in various left-wing circulars and magazines such as Llano’s self-published The Western Comrade (edited by Harriman) and the weekly newspaper the California Social-Democrat. The response was quick and positive. Prospective members were asked to fill out a formal application to be approved by the Llano board and upon the board’s consent, a new member was expected to purchase 2,000 shares at a dollar each, with an initial payment of $500. As part of the screening process, applicants were asked crude screening questions such as ‘Do you believe in the profit system?’ One consequence was that this capitalistic method of selling socialist stock saw the creation of a strange form of quasi-radicalized boosterism, paralleling the contemporaneous culture of California’s cutthroat realtors. One salesman, C. V. Eggleston, would often take a light touch in the vetting process to beef up his sales figures, ensuring an open door to Llano if the price was right. Eggleston’s actions would later prove to be one of the manifold reasons for the unravelling of Harriman’s grand plan. Llano Del Rio was founded on the May Day of 1914, declaring ‘the birth of a new order of social human relations’ in the process. Llano’s initial popularity has been attributed partly to the magnetism of Harriman, who had drawn 35 per cent of the vote in his unsuccessful mayoral campaign of 1913, combined with the enticing prospect of $4 a day wages, which for 1914 was the salary of a skilled labourer.33 The colony soon experienced substantial growth, disproportionate to its ability to feed and house its residents. In May 1914, on the day of its founding, the Colony listed five permanent families (housed in tents), four horses, one cow and sixteen hogs; but by December of the same year, the population had risen to well over 150. By the end of its tenure in the desert, Llano accommodated 1,000 members, 100 houses, 125 cows, 300 hogs, several thousand chickens and a variety of heavy industrial machinery.34 Hayden, Seven American Utopias, p. 293. Hoffman, ‘A Look at Llano’, p. 219. 34 This is difficult to confirm, as Llano tended to exaggerate its figures of permanent residents. 32 33



The Writing and Rewriting of Place: The Story of Llano Del Rio

Figure 2.4  The built environment of Llano also expanded and modernised in the first two years of the colony. The Llano Hotel was one of the first structures to be completed, situated at the heart of the settlement; its impressive two-stories and grand entrance hall provided the hub of political and social activities, as

39

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Afterlives of Abandoned Work well as lodgings for new colonists. The hotel was soon accompanied by twentyfive adobe houses built in 1915, which managed to reduce the population of families living in temporary structures and tents. At its peak, the colony boasted: two hotels, a bathhouse with tubs and showers, a swimming hole, a commissary, a drafting room, an office building and eight ranch houses. Yet much to the discomfort of many Llano residents enduring the unforgiving desert conditions, the colony could never quite build enough houses, many residents leaving Llano in the same temporary canvas tents they first moved into to.35

Over time, life at Llano became more varied and departmentalized. Industrial and recreational branches of the colony emerged, such as an architectural practice, print shop (the ‘Llano Studio’), bakery, barber shop, sawmill, machine shop, blacksmith, rug makers, launderers, newspaper offices, cannery, fish hatchery, vinegar works, cobblers, dyeing plant, tailors and brick makers.36 The Llano library boasted several thousand volumes; there was an industrial school, a Montessori school and night classes on various intellectual and practical topics. Sports teams were organized, alongside regular programmes of evening dances, literary and musical events. The colony’s lively range of recreational activity provided a sense of positivity in an otherwise stark and fractious existence for its residents. One of the first major rifts in the camp came back to Eggleston, the salesman who had neglected to screen applicants. As a consequence of Eggleston’s hucksterism, several of the colonists charged Harriman with misrepresentation of the sale of stock, alongside accusations of low wages and poor welfare standards. As a result, in 1915, the State Commissioner of Corporations inspected the site and launched an enquiry into the colony – their report finding Harriman to be running a ‘one-man autocracy’ and that Llano contained a splinter group within the colony known as ‘The Welfare League’. Despite Harriman’s attempts to negotiate with ‘The League’, known by Llano residents as ‘The Brush Gang’ (they met by sagebrush and creosote weeds and wore a sage pin in meetings), the splinter group demanded that all departments operate on an ultrademocratic mandate with popular votes taken on all decisions. The proposition was a system of rule that Harriman knew would be ungovernable, and caused Hoffman, ‘A Look at Llano’, p. 219. Ibid., p. 220; Hayden notes that while Llano lists itself as possessing all these departments, they failed to mention that many residents were actually picking fruit on neighbouring farms because these businesses were either very small or unprofitable. Hayden, Seven American Utopias, p. 290.

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an ongoing headache for their leader. By 1916, the State Commissioner for Corporations ruled that Llano’s negative report was to be compulsorily included with every sale of the colony’s stock. So, in order to prevent the colony from collapsing, Harriman made arrangements for Eggleston to buy the corporation from the state of California – and incorporate it into Nevada. The Llano Del Rio Company of California thus became the Llano Del Rio Company of Nevada. However, the downfall of Llano was not just due to legal squabbles with the state. Its own political structures had problems. A contradictory set of representative bodies governed the commune: the combination of a mass general assembly that passed laws (which were largely ignored by its own members); a board of directors, an elected commission and departmental heads of each section; meant that there was little order in the colony’s governance. In 1917, after an administrative mishap with some alfalfa harvesting, the assembly abolished itself and its forty-page constitution, leaving a more streamlined directorate under the constitutional guidance of a ‘declaration of principles’ headed by a new ‘general manager’ who, unsurprisingly, was to be Job Harriman. Other problems included more everyday issues: the poor living conditions in the tented settlements, the colony’s exposure to extreme weather, questionable

Figure 2.5 

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care for elderly or infirm residents, the repeated bad press, and ridicule the colony received from mainstream society (centrally from Otis’s LA Times), the reluctance of colonists to put in consistent work hours, maintaining the value of the colony’s internal currency (a single unit being a day’s labour), the condition of housing, the storing of records and paper, and the proper and equal acquisition and distribution of food. To add to this, Llano’s reputation outside the colony faltered when the popular imagination of socialism fell into disrepute, after the United States’ entry into the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. As a result, Llanoites were either conscripted or lured back to Los Angeles with better-paid jobs, as a popular vision of socialism began to fade.37 Alongside this multitude of political disputes, Llano had failed to acquire a constant water supply. The years 1914–18 saw little rainfall fill Llano’s purpose-built reservoirs. This meant that by the time Harriman addressed a crowd of 1,000 Llano colonists on its May Day anniversary of 1917, he had already begun scouting for new locations. The new site was to be in Louisiana and named ‘Newllano’. The settlement was planned on top of an old lumber mill, and in August 1917 as many as 650 families trudged across the country to start anew. Californian Llano was to be kept, but downgraded and used as a smaller settlement to farm fruit. In early 1918, 10,000 pear trees were planted and the colony was left under the care of a Gentry Purviance McCorkle. However, McCorkle mismanaged the colony and the settlement collapsed in May 1918 when the District Attorney invaded Harriman’s Llano offices while he was in Louisiana. Complainants had sued the Llano Del Rio Company, which had claimed involuntary bankruptcy. In October 1918, several suits were brought against Harriman to foreclose Llano, which proved to be the death knell to Harriman’s dream. Shortly after this, Llano was more or less abandoned, the site sacked almost immediately by local farmers – although some stragglers remained in the deserted outpost as late as 1931. Newllano, Louisiana, survived until 1937, several years after Harriman’s death from tuberculosis in 1925. In 1933, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to rescind the dedication of the streets in the former colony and the city was officially given back to the desert, where it sits in ruins to this day. It was made a site of historical preservation in 1980. Thad M. Van Bueren, ‘Between Vision and Practice: Archaeological Perspectives on the Llano Del Rio Cooperative’, Historical Archaeology, 40 (2006), 133–51 (p. 140).

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Harriman’s failure Harriman’s achievements, his political ambitions, the founding of Llano, his civil rights battle against Otis, all in some way or another, failed. But, all is not lost: academics concerned with failure;38 note that historical examples like Harriman’s unfinished business may actually have equipped him with a set of ‘oppositional tools’,39 that are radical in their refusal to cooperate with an entrenched capitalist narrative of success. In this way, Harriman’s mark on history provides a historical trace of refusal, opposition and often, outright hostility. Yet, the task of unearthing those narratives that contain this sense of oppositional resistance is harder than it may appear. It is undoubtedly problematic to overemphasize the concept of the ‘radical’ qualities of failure too simplistically in the context of this inquiry. The idea relies on dichotomous opposites of winning and losing, or success and failure, which cannot translate into the inchoate texts investigated here, even if it is the notions of ‘winning’ or ‘success’ that are supposed to be reframed as a result. Harriman was aware of the practical waste of failure, writing an editorial article in The Western Comrade entitled ‘Fanaticism Means Failure’,40 lamenting the unrealistic goals set by the California socialist party in the face of its dwindling membership base. But what he couldn’t have been aware of was that it was precisely the unrealized and to an extent, unrealizable nature of Llano Del Rio that makes it an enduring and engaging historical period to study, that still manages to disrupt its records in the archive. In this sense, it is Llano’s abandonedness that presents a constantly renewable set of texts and histories, open to multiple readings that reconfigure the contemporary and historical functions of the project. This means that while superficially labelled like other historical collections on the surface, once the itemization and arrangement probes deeper, the cataloguing is unable to tie together satisfactory historical threads of what actually constituted Llano Del Rio, so much of the colony having gone un-built, unsaid, or deliberately expressed in a mode that contests the established structures of archives and archiving. The following inquiry seeks to separate out the various threads and problems Llano creates as an archival collection, in Recent texts such as: Sandage, Born Losers; Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 39 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 88. 40 Job Harriman, ‘Fanaticism Means Failure’, The Western Comrade, October 1915, p. 9, The Huntington Library.

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order to ask a broader question, namely: where can we find abandoned work? The next section will follow the unrealized structures and discourses of Llano that were alive in its print culture, followed by a discussion of Llano’s dispersion into the archive; taking into consideration the geography and organization of the Llano archive against the public reception and historicization of Llano’s ruins in the Antelope Valley, in an attempt to find points of exchange: where the ghost town becomes an archive and in turn, the archive becomes a ghost town.

Unrealized Llano A chronological sketch of events that came to found and dissolve Llano can only reveal so much; a glance of Llano’s in-house magazine, The Western Comrade (later known as The Internationalist), however, shows a vibrant print and planning culture that cannot be relayed through a mere account of the colony’s rise and fall. Most historians of Llano touch upon the emphasis of community building and educational programmes instigated at Llano, but it is hard to convey the optimism, vitality and belief that the unrealized vision of Llano held in the colony’s texts. The colony often spoke of itself as ‘the metropolis of Antelope Valley’, prophesizing Llano as a ‘spot of destiny’.41 It seems that this was more than just propaganda and rhetoric – it was a lived experience within the camp. Various articles from the Comrade’s run from 1913, up to Llano’s relocation in 1917, confirm this consistently across the entire run of the publication. As an article about Llano entitled ‘Impressions of Llano Del Rio Cooperative Colony’ by James R. Nickum, describes, To fully appreciate Llano Del Rio, you must have vision. You must see with the mental as well as the physical eye. You must be able to look into the future and see that which does not exist today. … Plans for these things [amenities for Llano planned for the future] and many more are being worked out, and their concrete realisation, in a comparatively near future seems certain.42

Most articles took this tone when referring to the future of Llano. The existing print runs of the Comrade are littered with references to the ‘permanent’ city that will be installed after the initial tented community was to be replaced, or Quotations from Hayden, Seven American Utopias, p. 293. James R. Nickum, ‘Impressions of Llano Del Rio Cooperative Colony’, The Western Comrade, November 1914, p. 24, Huntington Library.

41 42



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the ‘growing’ number of residents. Llano in text, it seemed, predicated itself on the imagined future. Subsequently, alongside the utopian image of the ideal society, Llano was driven by the strong belief, or at least the public assertion, that the colony was just moments away from turning into not just a larger settlement, but a thriving metropolis. Llano’s planning committees had already commissioned architects Alice Constance Austin and Leonard Cooke to draw up full-scale plans for the settlement between 1915 and 1916. Austin, a radical and prescient architectural voice, was not a resident of Llano, but frequently visited the colony and had a regular column in the Comrade entitled ‘Building the Socialist City’. Austin’s column outlined the spatial, domestic and architectural reforms that Llano’s new society would make upon a women’s role in the new society, demanding that ‘the slavery of the Cook-Stove’ was to be ‘eliminated’. While the residents of Llano were living in tents and crumbling adobe housing, Austin and Cooke designed the settlement of the future, proposing radial plans after Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities – the designs including clubhouses, schools, civic centres and shopping arcades. Austin and Cooke believed that radical design would both rise out of and complement a total transformation

Figure 2.6 

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of social relations. In its more fanciful elements, Austin proposed (alongside electric cars, a necessity for all early and mid-twentieth century urban planning) a recreational drag strip in the outer rings of the radial city – providing a rare glimpse of an American vision for planned socialist leisure.43 However, neither Llano nor New Llano would ever come to be what Dolores Hayden calls a ‘coherent environment’44 and so the unrealized elements of Llano never neared practical completion. But, their existence as blueprints circulated in journals and magazines etched their impression upon residents and the colony’s built environment. As Kathryn J. Oberdeck has noted, participants in emerging

Figure 2.7 

This wasn’t that unusual, however – the cities of Corona and Santa Monica were also built with drag strips. 44 Hayden, Seven American Utopias, p. 310. 43



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and developing environments consider these imaginary spaces ‘no less “real” than those that powerful actors were able to realise in directing the “actual” shape of the village’.45 The unrealized elements of the town played into the politics of the future for Llano. The planned structures functioned as something more than propaganda or an attempt to lift the community’s morale; they were in fact part of a sense of ‘reality’ for the residents. They formed a geographic imaginary or social ‘third space’,46 where the material world of Llano and its illusory future dovetailed into a lived experience. Here the experimental or utopian settlement is also unique in this sense as it is both consciously and unconsciously practising ideology, the texts providing residents with the framework for a unique mode of social performativity.47 Beyond the lived experiences of Llano, this function of the un-built environment crept into the temporary material architecture of the site. Archaeological studies of the town’s ruins claim that in fact, the settlement was structured in alignment to both Austin and Cooke’s radial plans. It appears that from the direction and formations of raised pads and the remaining structures, the foundations align to form a single linear radial spoke of Austin’s plan, leading from the residential area to the central hotel. Interestingly, from the same survey, the archaeological team also found that Cooke’s plan was staked out in wooden markers, meaning that both proposals hold a material presence in Llano’s archives and ruins. As a consequence, the unrealized plans of Austin and Cooke have become the settlement’s central spatial-historical texts, which determine the archaeological interpretation of the site. Rather than fulfilling some distant ‘utopian’ function as an unrealizable vision, Cooke and Austin’s work are in fact texts that have developed their own textual application in discrete futures, pasts and presents.48 Llano’s archaeological reading is a leap into an interpretative space attempting to bridge ‘the dissonance between how people portray themselves in words and writing and what the materials they leave behind reveal about their behavior’.49 To a degree, one’s unfinished projects are an expression of this

Kathryn J. Oberdeck, ‘Archives of the Unbuilt Environment: Documents and Discourses of Imagined Space in Kohler, Wisconsin’, in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. by Antoinette M. Burton (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 271. 46 As discussed by Edward Soja in: Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Realand-Imagined Places (Malden: Blackwell, 1996). 47 Bueren, ‘Between Vision and Practice’, p. 133. 48 Ibid., p. 144. 49 Ibid., p. 133. 45

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midpoint, the material remains of which are indicative of a historical moment of abandonment, providing a juncture between ideational space and material history. The challenges of finding these abandoned projects are often a similar challenge to the ones that archaeology presents; archival study often colloquially adopts the language of archaeology. This spans from the Foucauldian sense of Archaeology to the common idioms associated with the work of the scholar, where researchers ‘dig’, ‘excavate’, or ‘mine’ for new historical information. To return to Kathryn Oberdeck, it is the task of future archival research to cross this divide that entails a rethink: Spatial visions imagined for a specific place but never built disrupt this [assumed] materiality, unveiling a process whereby place and its implied identities are constructed through a process of alternative imagined geographies. Documents of this kind of history escape the conventional archival mandate of proving something ‘that actually existed’, in favor of unfolding what might have been.50

Oberdeck implies that the unfinished project presents a disruption to the linearity of material histories, escaping ‘the conventional archival mandate’. On one level, this point is contentious, even if qualified as relating to ‘conventional’ archives, because like Steedman’s Dust, it diminishes the active work of an archivist. Yet, the ‘escape’ of these kinds of documents is a reference to the obscurity of the unfinished work, and their concealment from the surface level of description a feature that even the most active archivist can do nothing about.

Archiving Llano Llano’s surviving texts sit bookended on either coast of the United States. A significant cache are to be found in Paul Kagan’s personal archive in Yale’s Beinecke Library and some in the UCLA archive, whereas an official collection marked ‘The Records of Llano Del Rio’,51 sits in The Huntington Library, California.52 These official records at the Huntington are situated neatly in the organization’s wider interest in the history of the American West, the documents sitting an hour’s drive from the site of their original production in the Antelope Valley.

Oberdeck, ‘Archives of the Unbuilt Environment’, p. 253. San Marino, Huntington Library, Llano Del Rio Colony Records, mss Llano Del Rio. 52 The Llano Viewbook is at UCLA and the California Historical Society also hold some images and texts. 50 51



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The Huntington’s Llano collections come from the institution’s role in both the making and recording of Southern California’s history. The Library evolved from the personal collections of Henry E. Huntington, the heir to his uncle Collis Potter Huntington’s fortune, one of the ‘big four’ railroad barons responsible for the western stretch of the first transcontinental railroad. Henry Huntington’s library, gardens and palatial residence (one valley along from his fictional doppelganger Joe Stoyte in After Many a Summer) originally provided a kind of hobbyhorse, but as his collections of artworks, rare books and horticulture expanded, so did the public’s interest. As a result Huntington left his $50 million collection to the nation where it was open to the public a year after his death in 1928; his mock-palazzo Mediterranean Revivalist home is now used as the institute’s most prized gallery space. Huntington had moved to Southern California from San Francisco in 1900, having divorced and then married his uncle’s widow. In April 1913, Huntington was one of a small group of men who incorporated the land surrounding his home and gardens at the City of San Marino – now a small, wealthy suburban city district neighbouring Pasadena – just eleven months prior to Job Harriman’s incorporation of Llano. The Huntington Library, therefore, holds a contemporaneity to the ruins and archival collections of Llano, and their ideological opposition to one another lingers in their material remains. Slipping between reality and fiction, the archival collection also retrospectively confirms the fate of Huxley’s characters in After Many a Summer – in particular the dreaming mystic Bill Propter and robber baron Joe Stoyte – as the ambitious socialism of Harriman’s world is preserved within the grounds of Huntington’s palace, just as Propter lives on Stoyte’s land. In fact, Huntington was a keen correspondent and acquaintance of Harrison Gray Otis, Harriman’s great political foe; Huntington publicized his abhorrence of unionized labour and collectivization in the pages of the Los Angeles Times.53 These conflicting historical and textual afterlives, almost exactly a century after their occurrence, conjure up the notions of order that translate to the archival and textual orders of this study. In this instance, the collection’s archival order and its textual mediation are as much explained by chance and interpretation as they are by the indirect spatial legacy of Henry E. Huntington. A collection or fonds54 is usually the legacy of the document’s creator and it is the responsibility of the archivist to label and name the texts in the order that William B. Friedricks, Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 137. 54 Terry Cook clarifies the concepts of the ‘fonds’ here: The fonds, therefore, should be viewed primarily as ‘an intellectual construct.’ The fonds is not so much a physical entity in archives as 53

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the creator left them. In some ways, this makes the archivist a kind of author or editor of the texts. In this light, with the questions of order present, some nagging queries, especially in the context of Llano Del Rio and its inchoate textual construction and ideological consciousness, arise, namely what if there are multiple ‘original orders’ or equally multiple origins or versions? Llano was an organization that reframed and rewrote itself, from the project’s concept as a kind of Marxism-in-practice to its internal struggles with the largely prounion social democrats of the Welfare League, to the very end, where survival became the primary objective for the colony. Additionally – what if the creator is conscious of a future archive or process of archiving, as Llano must have been? Residents at Llano felt they were making history, and so their own archiving as an extension of their ideology became a conscious process.55 Finding aids are the documents that allow ‘intellectual control’ over the specific collection.56 Usually a finding aid details the media, administrative history, format, acquisition, scope of the collection and most importantly, a detailed list of its contents, on every archival level: from the series to the file to the item. Typically finding aids are fairly dry in their descriptions and Llano Del Rio’s finding aid states its process very perfunctorily: Within each series the materials’ original order has been maintained wherever discernible. Items in each series have been arranged in chronological order and grouped by format.57

Notwithstanding, there is something more interesting happening here, a silent tension, as the ideology inherent to the documents of Llano conflicts with the structures of the Huntington’s archive and archivist. Just like the acquisition, or archiving itself, this conflict means texts can go missing, escape the cataloguer’s eye and traverse the shelves undocumented. In this way, official archives become porous, permeable spaces that have a tendency to bleed into other collections and environments. This conflict is realized in the clash between the personality-led approach of archives (the letters of individuals) and the theoretical communality of Llano Del it is the conceptual summary of descriptions of physical entities at the series level or lower, and descriptions of the administrative, historical and functional character of the records creator(s) – as well as descriptions of the record-creating processes. Terry Cook, ‘The Concept of Archival Fonds and the Post-Custodial Era: Theory, Problems and Solutions’, Archivaria, 35 (1993), 24–37. 55 Ironically, perhaps, there are comparatively few archival remnants of Llano. 56 ‘Finding Aid’, Society of American Archivists Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, http:// www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/f/finding-aid [accessed 9 May 2014]. 57 Finding aids available at: http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/chs/llanorio.pdf Llano Colony (secular community).



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Rio (the records of an idea sustained by a collective). As a direct consequence, Llano Del Rio in its collective form is attributed as the official record creator in just ten folders of the four boxes. The material spreads either into the letters of personalities such as Job Harriman and former resident Walter Millsap or into the records of Llano historians Robert Hine and Knox Mellon. The only actual material that attributed to the collective in the ten folders of the official collection are the minutes of committee meetings held over the summer of 1915, the handwritten constitution of Llano, a declaration from the Welfare League and an inventory of food and equipment. Essentially this means that the ‘Official Records of Llano Del Rio’ are almost barren, the collection existing almost as a name only. It means the researcher finds a dead-end in the archive – the records resembling the ruined facade of the Llano Hotel in the Antelope Valley, welcoming enquirers into an empty space. This is not the fault of the archivist or archive. To itemize and catalogue an emergent community that rejects the individualism of twentieth-century modernity would require some paradoxical self-reflection from the archivist. But as a consequence, there are several texts going unlabelled in the finding aids that appear unattributed to an author in the middle of the collection, or seem to belong elsewhere, making the collections permeable and the process of reading through them a constant exercise in cross-referencing and fact-checking. The Llano collection is therefore defined by a sense of disorder and serendipity, where fortune and chance play as much a role in the archiving and cataloguing process as they do in the perusal through its boxes. One periphery Llano collection, The Robert Hine Papers, typifies this sense of an accidental and porous archive. Hine’s papers that concern Llano make up two boxes (13 and 14) and are described as being arranged ‘according to the book or other scholarly project for which Hine obtained them’.58 In fact, combing through these Llano boxes, this sense of Hine’s work is true at first: there are acres of correspondence discussing Llano with former residents and other historians while he is drafting his book, California’s Utopian Colonies (1953). There is also correspondence with Knox Mellon, another Llano historian, discussing Mellon’s eventual success in registering the ruins of Llano as a historical landmark with the state of California. Film-maker Beverly Lewis and Llano chroniclers Lionel Rolfe, Nigey Lemmon and Paul Greenstein are also included, as Hine provided something of a nexus for Llano research and researchers. In this sense, Hine’s Finding Aid for the papers of Robert Hine, 1841–2004 (bulk 1960–1990)’ http://hdl. huntington. org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15150coll1/id/1434 [accessed 23 April 2014].

58

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papers are a meta-archive which traces the canonization of Llano into the historical record of California. There is also an unfamiliar material aspect to Hine’s papers, as the texts slip between written manuscripts in English and then wads of notes in braille. Hine went blind in 1971 aged fifty, and only through a precarious operation in 1984 did he regain his sight. So while flicking through his papers an unexpected material event appears – a reminder of Huxley’s archivist and the perverse intimacies experienced by the researcher.59 Much like the braille notes providing a self-conscious marker of the activity of the researcher, Hine’s unlabelled texts are actually more interesting than their labelled ones. Raking through the folders in each box, genuine Llano remains are somewhat randomly inserted between Hine’s own works. For instance, in Box 13, Folder 7, some postcards of Llano are marked in Hine’s correspondence between 1976 and 1983. The postcards depict the town, one of the hotel and one of a row of tents, which are most probably produced by the Llano Print Shop onsite at the colony. Likewise in Folder 6, among copies of stock certificates and other administrative documentation from the colony (which are officially listed), there is cardboard currency from Llano, entitling the colonist to a free pint of milk or loaf of bread, that are otherwise unrecognized anywhere in the archive’s formal documentation. Finally in Folder 4 – a folder primarily containing ‘miscellaneous research materials’, newspaper clippings, photocopies of Job Harriman’s letters to supporters and potential colonists – there is a folded map, again unmentioned in the finding aid, not seemingly relevant to anything else in the box or with a defined author or date. The map, a photocopy of an original entitled ‘Birds eye view of Newllano’, is a carefully hand-drawn plan of the new city, totally unrealized, presenting a large vibrant settlement somewhat randomly scattered across a sketchily drawn Louisiana landscape. Some small clues appear on the document to give an insight to its history, from Hine’s note on the back merely stating that it was a ‘map of Newllano’, to the note at the bottom that it was printed by the Louisiana Committee for The Humanities (an organization no longer in existence.) Otherwise, the work is anonymous.60

Hine wrote about his experience with blindness in his book Second Sight: Robert Hine, Second Sight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 60 After an informal telephone conversation with Beverly Lewis, director of American Utopia, a PBS documentary on Newllano from the early 1990s, Lewis claims it is most probable that the map was found during her research into Llano, and then donated by Lewis to Louisiana State University’s archives, where Hine then got hold of a facsimile. Beverly Lewis, American Utopia, 1996. 59



Figure 2.8 

Figure 2.9 

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The map of Newllano shows an informally grouped town built into the greenery of the Louisiana countryside. It is a clear departure from the radial garden cities of Austin and Cooke, highlighting totally new and otherwise uncharted discourses within the vision and symbolic landscape of the Llano project. It also demonstrates how the unrealized image of Llano eludes the archive, appearing in neither the ‘official’ collection nor the finding aid to the related collection it is held in. The map also unequivocally establishes the difference between the two settlements. Not only Newllano was built upon a pre-existing lumber mill that determined the basis of its shape and planning, but the map is also characteristic of the settlement’s continuation under a new leader, George Pickett, whose qualities as a manager of the colony were a world away from Job Harriman’s – where rousing political oratory and a network of high-minded and established friends were close at hand in nearby Los Angeles.61 The change in planning style primarily highlights a shift in the project’s symbolic vision, perhaps in line with the colony’s departure from doctrinal socialism. However, there is something else significant to this radical change in the colony’s aesthetic. The voguish planning of Llano Del Rio as a garden city in the relatively contemporaneous tradition of Ebenezer Howard, with its clean modern lines and meticulously regulated movement, appears in a peculiar sense almost dated compared to the lyrical vernacularism of the Newllano map. It is as if in the imagined drafts of a fully realized Llano colony, the planners had anticipated the failure of the mechanized city years before mainstream society, experiencing its own weariness with the prescriptive forms of radial planning. This sense of Llano’s collective imaginary (albeit the codified traces of an imaginary, usually written by the colony’s leaders) relates back to the idea of Llano as an example of the writing and rewriting of place. Llano conjures the idea of a living draft or the unfinished sketches of a social space that emerge and evolve as circumstances changed; and this is readable in the very text of the colony’s constitution. Llano’s constitution reads as a testament to this sense of an emerging vision practised as a lived experience. The document is handwritten, filling up almost every page of a slim multi-purpose hardback notebook, which consists of a contents page, a prologue and then a series of declarations and articles stating the political institutions and tenets that would This is not to say that Newllano lacked ambition; in the 1930s it attempted to drill for oil underneath the Llano site. Sadly, it was the only parish in the whole of Louisiana that failed to find any. It seems that Llano’s failure may not have been all Job Harriman’s.

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govern the commune. The prologue sets the narrative parameters of Llano’s establishment, issuing a bold image of the future and setting the tone for the Comrade’s puffery and sensationalism. The prologue prophesizes that the founders of Llano are to ‘create for ourselves a city’, which would hold ‘a vision of great cooperation’, that in turn would ‘change the hearts of men’. Marginalia and corrections litter the book throughout in black and red ink and provide an immediate visual and textual relation to Llano’s fleeting markings upon the desert, inscribing Llano’s inevitable abandonment. This was the constitution that Llano’s general assembly had abolished in 1917, in favour of a streamlined set of ‘principles’ and so the markings narrate part of the colony’s early expansion of its domestic population and democratic representation. Each note, underlining, rewriting and amendment is clearly a new headache for Job Harriman and the superintendents on the Llano board. Article XVII (later XIX) in the constitution is particularly illustrative of this and provides a kind of legal palimpsest, that, rather ominously for the future of the colony, changes the constitutional rights of the Llano directorate to terminate an appointment to the board. Throughout the document the lines outlining the constitutional procedure are crossed out, erased and rewritten several times; the manuscript provides the ideological counterpoint to the Llano plans – the constitution mapping and inscribing Llano’s internal political struggles.

Figure 2.10 

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Ghosting the Huntington The texts found in the archive all point towards but simultaneously fail to iterate an intangible notion of what Llano Del Rio was meant to be. They present a kind of scaffolding that holds up an elusive idea and in another way add a materiality to McClung’s sense of the ‘rim of a void’. However, this sense of the rim – of an archival edging to an unfinished idea – may originate from the rigidity of the archive itself. It is quite possible that actively engaging with the site of Llano and its archival spaces could provide alternative results. As Caitlin DeSilvey notes, A poetics of suggestion and conjecture recovers stories that might not allow themselves to appear through more direct methods. A ‘different kind of materialism’ governs this salvage of lost things – a materialism that accepts the presence of the researcher as a creative and catalysing element in the construction of knowledge.62

It is the notion of ‘recovering stories’ that is interesting in DeSilvey’s work and as a result, it became clear that engaging with archives and the colony’s ruins in a less static, text-focused approach might offer new clues into the Llano story. In doing so, the spaces of archives might be the first point of interest, as the mediating space between Llano’s historical remains in the archive and its ruins in the desert. Archives are puzzling spaces where material is safeguarded under lock and key; yet, the most crucial materials can go missing from their boxes. In part, the spaces of the archive also determine the activity of the collection. Past the sterile containment of a designated reading room, walking around the Huntington archives, the space and movement in collections become apparent in ways usually invisible to the researcher. One of the suggestions of this inquiry is that an abandoned text is intrinsically related to its archive – the repository symbolic of its collections. Can a work be contextualized in this way when one considers the precious material existence it leads behind the scenes – wrapped in its disaster-proof archival casing? In this light, the management systems, administrative and budgetary pressures, demands for space and the professional practices of manuscript curators might be considered. These factors affect the spaces of documents – where they are stored, moved, presented, imaged and shelved. It impacts content, curatorial practice and access to texts. It is another reminder of the oversight from some corners of

Caitlin DeSilvey, ‘Salvage Memory: Constellating Material Histories on a Hardscrabble Homestead’, Cultural Geographies, 14 (2007), 401–24 (p. 420), http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474474007078206.

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the archival turn (or Caroline Steedman’s Dust), that these larger repositories are eventful places where the possibilities of research exist in the space of the archive itself and not merely through the dialogue between researcher and text. The Huntington’s first purpose-built archival space currently holds the informal title of ‘the old rare books stacks’ where the entire collection of manuscripts and rare books was once kept in ornate metal and glass fronted cabinets. The three stories of earthquake-proofed steel stacks were built in an incomplete ‘E’ shape in 1919 by Myron Hunt, the architect of Henry Huntington’s ersatz palace. The rare books storage was originally a multi-use area with staff desks and work spaces embedded into alcoves along the walls, the room fitted with a steel door cut with viewing slits leading into the old reading room. Older readers can remember looking through the door to see the manuscript and rare book staff busying themselves with their boxes. The space has since changed with the addition of a modern research annex in 2004, and so abandoned computer stations and obsolete cataloguing materials lie disused next to the ornate beaux arts shelves that are still employed for storing rare books. Flanking these old stacks are corridors of offices and further storage where archivists’ desks and shelved materials intermingle behind Myron Hunt’s baroque security grates. These older rooms are just a fraction of the Library’s actual archival space, as underneath the research annex are a series of hermetic white corridors that lead collections staff to a sizeable modern storage hall. Yet, the Huntington is still starved of room – officially catalogued archive boxes and rare books often spill into every conceivable space, into corridors, offices and meeting rooms, reproducing the kind of contradictory entropy-cum-orderliness experienced by the reader of an archival document, the texts growing into the foundations of the building. Various archive staff at the Huntington made it clear that there is no ordered in-traffic for cataloguing the latest acquisitions. Archivists, they say, are just ‘trying to build’ or develop an ‘assemblage’ of significant works.63 Many of the archivists see their job as having to make order out of chaos, because if they’re handed a ‘mess’, they ‘can only go as far as the documents take you’ before imposing their own textual systematics. In this way, archivists are required to connect and build maps between types and categories of collections, curating a physical and intellectual landscape of texts, where logical and illogical orders are pitched against each other, cementing the notion of stumbling and chance that occurs on an object’s entry and retrieval from an archive. Quotes are from informal interviews with Huntington archive staff.

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Nothing is ever discarded from the collections in the Huntington; instead they keep everything they procure, which is not always a conventional archival practice. Despite this, documents can be forgotten about or simply left dormant for years. When acquiring new archival materials, the document and cataloguing process often prioritizes collections that are of public interest or of particular value, butting less-valued texts, places, projects and narratives to the back of the queue. This provides archives with a constitutive, even formational role contemporary culture, as they are the dusty, elitist irrelevance they are often caricatured as being.64 Recently, as many as forty people demanded to see the letters of the science fiction author Octavia Butler when they were acquired by the Huntington. This number was unprecedented, so Butler queue-jumped and her papers were catalogued in just three years. The Llano collection, according to one stack supervisor, is a relatively popular subject: traversing labour, social and cultural histories. But it is nowhere near the popularity of Butler’s papers. Also among the most popular collections are the letters of Stuart N. Lake, the writer, journalist and biographer of Wild West gunslinger Wyatt Earp. Lake left a considerable archive of materials related to Earp (5,000 pieces) with whom he had corresponded with until Earp’s death in 1929. As a result, the Huntington is a perpetual home for Earp enthusiasts, trawling through Lake’s letters to glean new information about his storied life in the American West. In contrast, one frustrated archivist informs me, is another Western archive that is totally abandoned – a ghost town in itself. These are the papers of dime novelist Eugene Cunningham – a major figure in the pulp Western genre of the 1930s who has since fallen out of any scholarly or popular purview, his 6,000-piece collection going unviewed for years at a time. Cunningham’s most famous work Triggernometry (1934), a transcription of interviews with survivors of the ‘real Wild West’ as it was then, was republished in 1996, but even this momentous event in Cunningham’s literary legacy failed to see him appear on any academic or popular radar outside the American Southwest. It is not just the changing spaces of archives, the systems of appraisal, or the collection’s popularity (or lack thereof) that ‘ghost’ can archive. It is often within the eligibility criteria of private archives that institutions implement a kind of personal appraisal system, transforming the perverse material intimacy of Arlene Schmuland’s survey of the image of archives and archivists in literary fiction discusses the sustaining of stereotypes, and the way it impacts the profession. A thorough bibliography is included of archives and archivists featuring in literature. Arlene Schmuland, ‘The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography’, The American Archivist, 62 (1999), 24–73.

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archival study into a perverse material privilege. In February 2013, Huntington Library Director David Zeidberg delivered a lecture where he described the Huntington’s collections as ‘a library of last resort’. The lecture primarily detailed the Library’s embrace of digitization for wider scholarly access, yet in his closing statement, Zeidberg noted the keenness for the organization to focus on ‘serious readers’ who ‘will still have to do it [access the library] the old fashioned way, and you will have to for decades to come’.65 After listening to Zeidberg’s lecture, it quickly became clear that in order to investigate Llano any further, it would be necessary to look beyond an established archive like the Huntington. This was in part because I was determined to meet the numerous outsiders who were barred from the ‘library of last resort’ – the last chance saloon of official record-keeping. Furthermore, the logic underpinning the Huntington’s vast collections was fast becoming stranger and stranger to me – it was an institution that carefully preserved the records of dissenters, yet seemed reluctant to admit any contemporary Llanoites inside its grounds. Aside from this, the search for unorthodox collections and alternative histories around the Antelope Valley seemed worthwhile, if only to avoid bumping into any of Zeidberg’s ‘serious readers’.

Ozymandias The California State Parks Office of Historic Preservation describes the site of Llano Del Rio as: The most important non-religious Utopian experiment in western American history … At its height in 1916, the colony contained a thousand members and was a flourishing communitarian experiment dedicated to the principal of cooperation rather than competition.66

Aldous Huxley was less sympathetic, however: At Llano everything that ought not to have been done was systematically done. A pathetic little Ozymandias is all that remains to tell the tale.67 Download the lecture here: Matt Stevens, ‘A Library of Last Resort’, VERSO | The Huntington’s Blog, http://huntingtonblogs.org/2013/02/a-library-of-last-resort/ [accessed 16 May 2014]. 66 ‘Los Angeles Historical Landmarks’, http://ohp.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=21427 [accessed 23 April 2014]. 67 Huxley and Kagan, ‘A Double Look at Utopia’, p. 129. 65

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Figure 2.11 

Aldous Huxley lived in the Antelope Valley for much of the 1940s, his ranch overlooking the debris of Job Harriman’s life work. For Huxley, Llano was a testament to the hubris of ambition, providing a shattered reminder of man’s evanescent fortunes. Today the remains of Llano are more deteriorated than the ruins Huxley looked over; wooden shacks that had previously stood for years have been blown down and the stonework slowly eroded. The site is still traceable as the single spoke of an invisible radial city and as such, is essentially still a linear strip starting just north of the four pillars of the Hotel (the supposed centre of the site), that extends south towards the lime kilns at the foothills of the Angeles National Forest. Between the ruined lime kilns embedded in the hills at its most southerly extreme, to the structures north of the hotel, are the remains of a large grain silo and various raised beds with decaying stone walls and foundations, scattering the landscape between these two points. While a site of historic preservation, Llano’s ruins contend with the wild undergrowth of the Antelope Valley which includes the chain-link fencing that marks the perimeters of local residents’ isolated dwellings and the Pearblossom Highway, the four-lane motorway that splits the site in two. As a defunct experiment in communitarianism, Llano isn’t quite of the same calibre as the ghost towns of the Gold Rush. Bodie, the finest Gold Rush ghost town in California, is carefully maintained in a state of ‘arrested decay’ by the State Department of Historic Preservation, where the town is suspended in ruination for tourists to wander through the preserved buildings and structures.



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Llano, however, receives no such treatment. Even if it were preserved in such a way, the complexities of Llano’s chronology and ideology would complicate this heritage. Instead, Llano as an unrealized and abandoned space would have to be preserved in a state of ‘arrested realisation’, attuned to the structural anti-logic of the Los Angeles region, as described so astutely in fiction.68 It is in this sense that the ghost town of Llano is at once a set of ruins of the past, yet also a set of implications of what was meant to be. The site’s missing structures, like an unfinished text eroded over time, imply what was planned, as much as what was actually there; the ruins mask the unfinished character of the site. The decaying structures frame both what was actually there and that which was supposed to be. Combined with the fact that Llano was built by a group of socialists, there is little demand from locals or tourists to make the site more accessible, or even to put up a plaque. While Llano is an historic site with layered sequential readings, it is not such an unusual place for a region that is strewn with abandoned projects. The vast uninhabited space of the Antelope Valley invites peculiar endeavours of all kinds, which in their own strange ways normalize Llano’s disparate ruins. Within an hour’s drive of Llano are places such as the Lake Shore Inn, a totally abandoned yet fully intact motel; California city’s colossal un-built suburb, where a myriad of streets have been constructed in suburban formations that sit deserted without houses; the George Air Force Base, an uninhabited military base that sits just eight miles northwest of Victorville; the Burro Schmidt Tunnel, a hand-dug tunnel half a mile deep, dug over a thirty-two-year period by one man; Gold Rush ghost towns such as Randsberg; or even the ‘Vivos Underground Catastrophe Center’, a private nuclear bomb shelter, built for California’s paranoid super-rich.69 With these places in mind, Llano isn’t a strange presence in the desert; it is merely another crumbling memento to drive past on the Pearblossom Highway. It is tempting to call this surrounding assortment of places a kind of alternative ‘archive’ in the desert, as the sites independently contextualize each other as a quintessentially Californian collection – providing the ultimate outsider repository to the Huntington’s verdant sanctuary of early modern British manuscripts on the other side of the Angeles National Forest. However, at best, Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening: A Novel (London: Methuen, 1954), p. 26; John Fante, Ask The Dust (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012), p. 30. 69 For more information on Vivos see: ‘Vivos – The Underground Shelter Network for Long-Term Survival of Future Catastrophes’, http://www.terravivos.com/ [accessed 24 June 2014]. 68

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the valley is possibly a kind of outsider repository or receptacle – and more often than not, a dumping ground.70 The allure of Llano’s ruins invites a small but dedicated following from sympathetic locals in Los Angeles. The internet is abuzz with maps, guides and discussions about the site, and there is even an art collective named after the colony. 71 Here, a publicly shared wealth of information, freely accessed, is exchanged outside of the official records of archives. Having monitored this online activity, it was possible to attend an event organized by Llano enthusiasts to mark its centenary (1914–2014), where a series of film screenings, performances, duplicates of original signage and information slides were displayed around the surviving walls and grain silo in the central area of the ruins.72 One of the main attractions was a ‘historical interpretation center’. This was a re-enactment of one of the original Llano tents, furnished with period fittings, a gramophone and an information board about Job Harriman. The tent was run by a cultural geographer Dydia DeLyser and her partner Paul Greenstein, a co-author of one of Llano’s key histories, Bread & Hyacinths. DeLyser and Greenstein’s creation of an ‘archive of place’,73 in tribute to Llano, was furnished by both authentic and duplicated artefacts from the original settlement. During his time researching Bread & Hyacinths, Greenstein had collected a more diverse

The Antelope Valley is also home to much illicit activity. Robert Hine kept newspaper clippings about a raid on a marijuana farm next door to Llano Del Rio in 1990. It was the biggest cannabis haul in LAPD history. The Antelope Valley has also become a ‘dumping ground’ for undesirable sex offenders, ‘Has Antelope Valley Become a “dumping Ground” for Sex Offenders? | The Antelope Valley Times’, http://theavtimes.com/2014/05/06/has-antelope-valley-become-a-dumping-groundfor-sex-offenders/ [accessed 31 May 2014]. 71 Here are a few: ‘Llano Del Rio Cooperative Colony.’, http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/ view?docId=llano-del-rio-cooperative-colony-cr.xml [accessed 28 April 2014]; ‘Agua Fria – California Ghost Town’, http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/ca/llanodelrio.html [accessed 28 April 2014]; ‘Avoiding Regret: Photo Essay: Llano Del Rio Company Colony, Abandoned’, http://www. avoidingregret.com/2014/03/photo-essay-llano-del-rio-company.html [accessed 28 April 2014]; ‘Avoiding Regret: Photo Essay: Llano Del Rio Company Colony, Abandoned’; ‘DESERT EXPLORER: The Ghost of Llano Del Rio’, http://www.dustyway.com/2009/11/ghost-of-llano-del-rio.html [accessed 28 April 2014]; ‘Election Day Special-The Faded Idea’, http://www.wrightwoodcalif.com/ forum/index.php?topic=12716.0 [accessed 28 April 2014]; ‘Llano Del Rio Creates Guides for an Alternate L.A.’, http://magazine.good.is/articles/llano-del-rio-creates-guides-for-an-alternate-l-a [accessed 28 April 2014]; ‘The Center for Land Use Interpretation’, http://clui.org/ludb/site/llanodel-rio-site [accessed 28 April 2014]; ‘Llano Del Rio Ruins (Google Maps) – Virtual Globetrotting’, http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/llano-del-rio-ruins/view/?service=0 [accessed 28 April 2014]; ‘Llano Del Rio Collective Guides & Speakers Bureau’, http://ldrg.wordpress.com/ [accessed 28 April 2014]. 72 Here is the page of the event ‘Squaring the Circle’, https://m.facebook.com/events/1476949965868122 /?notif_t=plan_user_invited [accessed 16 May 2014]. 73 Tim Cresswell, ‘Value, Gleaning and the Archive at Maxwell Street, Chicago’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37 (2012), 164–76, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.14755661.2011.00453.x. 70



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assortment of texts and artefacts than the Huntington currently have in their archives and so Greenstein was able to display a broader range of material than would have been possible from an institutional effort. Alongside his own collection, Greenstein had photocopied the UCLA archive’s copy of the Llano Viewbook, a photographic record made by Llano residents to advertise the colony. There is only one copy surviving in existence and he had made a photocopied zine of the book, duplicating the images in black and white and stapling them together. Greenstein was able to reproduce and sell the images to passers-by who could then look at the advertisements of Llano from 1915, while walking among its ruins. The UCLA archives are a public collection, and so made it possible for Greenstein to make copies of the Viewbook to sell at the event; yet when writing Bread & Hyacinths, such access to material wasn’t always possible. Greenstein and his co-authors were denied access to the Huntington Library’s ‘official records’ of the colony, as none of them possessed a PhD or a desirable record of publication – the group failing the requirement of what it means to be ‘serious readers’.74 The book was subsequently written without the use of the Huntington’s archives and ironically has now been absorbed into the Huntington Library’s reference collection on the history of the American West. Yet I was assured that he would still not be permitted to go and read his own book there, nor would he be able to see Box 13, Folder 8 of the Hine collection, a file on Greenstein’s own research, recording Hine and Greenstein’s correspondence and shared findings. Perhaps access to official collections and preserved records is not always necessary or even desirable when discussing the collective imaginary of a century-old experimental commune. In the early 1990s, when Greenstein and his co-authors were finishing the first draft of Bread & Hyacinths, their publisher told them of an academic who was finishing a book on power and space in Los Angeles and was interested in looking at Llano. Paul duly met the professor and drove him up to the ruined hotel, where they walked around for a time and he answered all of the professor’s questions as best he could. Subsequently, Greenstein’s Bread & Hyacinths is cited in the prologue of City of Quartz as an unpublished manuscript, before Davis moves on to cite Huxley’s derisive appropriation of Shelley’s Ozymandius.

However, Alan Jutzi, a curator at the Huntington, is thanked in the acknowledgements for helping the authors see materials that were ‘difficult to access’. Greenstein, Lennon and Rolfe, p. Acknowledgements.

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I asked Greenstein while standing in front of his historical interpretation tent among the ruins of Llano whether he and Mike Davis had really met the young Latino men – the illegal drifters found sheltering in the remains of Los Angeles’s most famous cooperative community? ‘What do you think?’ he replied.

Invisible debris The Huntington’s collections on Llano manifest many of the paradoxical qualities of archives that were outlined in the Introduction. The collections explicitly display the full scope of what it means to be a privileged reader; the current exclusivity of access to the Huntington resonates with the history of Llano Del Rio and its relationship to the elite figures and institutions of Los Angeles. It also means that Llano’s presence inside the Huntington produces a kind of historical circularity, where the contemporary elitism that prevents public access to its research collections is the legacy of the original political hierarchy that caused the founders of Llano to break away from Los Angeles. Ironically, Llano has become a victim of its own success and entered the elite private collections of one of California’s most famous railroad dynasties. Moreover, the Huntington also presents the contrary traits of archival collections – not only as a busy, publicly engaged archive with its handling of the Octavia Butler estate, but also as the more stereotypically static, dusty archive with Eugene Cunningham’s papers. Finally, the Llano collections also exhibit an arbitrary orderliness, as many of the more textually and historically illuminating items are absent from the collection’s description. It is a powerful reminder of Terry Cook’s view of the vital duality of an archive – at once an objectively curated repository, while also a permeable and contingent space. Countering the idea that archives are porous, unstable, fragmented and textually problematic places, there are often calls to expand what we know as an ‘archive’.75 There are strong grounds to make this claim – but can any assortment or assemblage of things become an archive? Within the context of Llano and the Huntington, it seems unreasonable to categorize new outsider spaces or Tim Cresswell states for instance, that ‘a broader definition of archive is needed. … Seeing archives everywhere will help to further problematize the notion of the archive as a rarified and imperial space and allow us to include more and become messier ourselves in our archival practice.’ Cresswell, ‘Value, Gleaning and the Archive at Maxwell Street, Chicago’, p. 175.

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alternative collections with the same critical terms as the very institutions that marginalize them. Also, in this case, the expansion of ‘the archive’ neglects the work of the archivist, who, whether active or passive, conscientious or otherwise, is the textual arbiter or agent at the centre of any collection. The static archive, a dusty collection of ephemera, or a colloquial assortment of material culture, belongs in an inert nostalgia and is disconnected from the modern archival world. To temper the problems of naming any collection an archive, perhaps a consideration of arrangement is needed – the methods in which an archivist organizes his/her material – with a focus on the act of collecting rather than merely the collection itself. A more appropriate method of looking at alternative archives is their intrinsic relationship to the fonds or organization underpinning them. This is in part because an archive or collection is defined as much by arrangement or collecting as by the space and objects it stows, thereby incorporating the work of archivist or collector in the process. For many disciplines, looking beyond conventional archives is not a new consideration. Social History is predicated on researching without the aid of conventional collections. Usually, this is when their subjects disappear from the official record, if they ever appeared on it. Perhaps this is less common when contextualized within literary enquiry, which within an archival context has traditionally concerned itself with authors’ papers, but in this instance is concerned with cultural form. In relation to this idea of form, it is apparent

Figure 2.12 

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that the spatial element of this investigation can offer interesting perspectives on this study. Llano straddles official and unofficial historical spaces, and the Huntington enabled me to toggle between these two discourses. This is because the traces of Llano Del Rio – or any other abandoned project in this book – are predicated on documents that begin in archives but point towards implied, fragmented and often obscured spaces in the everyday, drawing connections between the unfinished text and its influence beyond the archive. The archive (as porous and problematic as it may be) offers this study material boundaries to conceptualize the influence of unfinished work. As a consequence, in its conservation of literary drafts, un-built cities, unpublished texts, undeveloped photographs, patents of un-built inventions and incomplete artworks, the archive provides a space of collateral culture and of concealed ambition and a set of distinctly alternative historical narratives. Tracing Llano is an attempt to find a practice or methodology for uncovering and exploring the boundaries of unfinished works. It confirms that the search for the inchoate can involve travelling from the official to the unofficial archive – from the space of a text’s storage, to the sites of its intended but unfulfilled existence – a phenomenon experienced elsewhere in this book. As a result, its analysis has reproduced an element of the textual form itself – slipping between the written and projected, the archive and the outsider collection, the codified and the uncodified. Unfinished works, unlike the relative aesthetic unity of their completed counterparts, present a constant threshold where the work leaps from

Figure 2.13 



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the made to the unmade, forming an edging or boundary where the work leaves its material origins to become entirely abstract. As a result, their fragmented forms lack the internal reference points of a complete text and are instead the evidence of a raw creative trace, providing inherently intertextual and connective objects in cultural history and the historical imaginary. This creates a kind of mimesis, where the text is shaped by the material space of its keeping. This appears to be because the potentiality of the inchoate is in part filled by the contemporary moment of the archive and imagination of the researcher; so abandoned projects will always, in one way or another, feed back into both the space of its storage and the fantasy of the reader, summoning as much the moment one encounters the text as the intended finality of the work itself.

Figure 3.1 

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Town Fictions: Planning the Future in Post-War London

Real-Life Motopias The architect Arthur Ling once declared: We need to think about future towns on the same fantastic but practical basis as we are thinking about space travel and space ships. Perhaps we need some town fiction to help us do this.1

It was 1960, at the annual RIBA conference in Manchester, the theme entitled ‘Rebuilding Our Cities’. Less than a year after Ling’s speech, landscapist and architect Geoffrey Jellicoe published a book called Motopia: A Study in the Evolution of Urban Landscape. Motopia was, in part, the practice of a strand of 1960s town fiction – an investigation into a shifting city landscape that needed to accommodate the ongoing growth of motorization and technology. Jellicoe prefaced Motopia’s text declaring that, ‘Motopia is the diagram of an idea only and should not be taken literally’, proposing that his research should act as a test bed for the discussion of the future of planning. The book outlined proposals for a lattice of motorways running along the tops of commercial buildings, punctuated with circular interchange junctions comprised of housing and residential ‘hubs’. This was the basis for a style of post-war planning that Jellicoe asserted could help architects ‘conceive a town on wholly different lines from those at present adopted’.2 The principles underpinning Motopia argued, not unusually for the period, that it was technology that could save the urban landscape from the horrors of its own progress. Within this paradigm Jellicoe identified that Quoted in Anthony Goss, ‘Moving Pavements’, Architect’s Journal, 1961. Geoffrey Jellicoe, Motopia: A Study in the Evolution of Urban Landscape (London: Studio, 1961), p. 12.

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This mobile shell in which we encase ourselves is lethal soon after it begins to move. … Therefore the ideal town would seem to be one in which traffic circulation were piped like drainage and water; out of sight and mind to go as fast as it likes, to smell as it wants, and to make noises.3

Jellicoe was being quite literal about this point. Motopia’s great stretches of motorways run like service pipes, precariously channelling motorists along the rooftops of enormous structures, making the plan encouragingly direct and high speed, yet inconveniently removed from accessing amenities or housing – all suspended, rather perilously, 500 feet in the air. The supporting architecture, as described in the acknowledgements, owed much to ‘the various works of M. le Corbusier’. After Jellicoe’s opening essay, which contextualizes his motor-city in a selective history of urban landscape – from prehistoric man in the caves of Lascaux, to the garden village of Bournville – he initiates an illustrated review of urban landscape design, his city of Motopia functioning as the critical lens to reconfigure the necessities of modern planning. In the final chapter of Motopia, we see the town in depth, with photographic close-ups of a model Jellicoe and his team had built for the project, with some brief architectural plans and costings, the construction of Motopia estimated somewhere in the region of £60 million. It is also finally revealed where Motopia is to be situated: in the centre of several acres of abandoned marshland on the fringes of Staines. Importantly for this study, Jellicoe opens his introduction stating: Utopias generally come to the fore when there is social discontent, and have the advantage of crystallizing the ideals of the time: that is to say that, all else being equal, they express the state or city in which we should most like to live. Motopia is such an idea, and arises not so much from normal discontent as from the realisation that our present physical conditions are being thrown into chaos by the advent of the one car per family and even one per person.4

This touches upon the historical background of the plans examined in this chapter. Jellicoe’s words manage to succinctly describe the post-war planner’s unease with a motorized society, capturing the dogmatic totality of a vision that promised to separate ‘man from his motorcar’. Naturally, there is a much broader context to this. Two years after Motopia was published, Harold Wilson

Jellicoe, Motopia, p. 7. Ibid.

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delivered his infamous ‘White Heat’ speech, where the Labour leader promised to reiterate socialism ‘in terms of the scientific revolution’. This was a vision of Britain moving in concert with a new technological age, an epoch that could simultaneously offer North American levels of convenience and automation, but rolled out on a mass scale. It was at once futuristic and utterly quotidian: a world of Concordes over Croydon. For many cultural historians of this period, the images of Motopia sit next to the Apollo mission and the great leaps made in computerization and automation in the workplace, forming a historical collage of progress that defined the early to mid-1960s.5 While this might superficially be the case, in fact, before and after Motopia and White Heat, there had been years of discussion of how a post-war city was supposed to adapt, function and importantly, move to serve its inhabitants. This architectural soul searching, suddenly injected with the political momentum of Wilson’s proclamation, led to a great body of hypothetical futures for the city – creating an expansive, creative field of post-war urbanism. Arthur Ling’s opening quotation encapsulates this mood, namely the necessity for the ‘fantastic but practical’. Town fiction in this case must situate itself as a genre of unfinished praxis – enabling the critic to trace the abandonment of a conceptual or material practice rather than the sketchings of fantasy. The abandoned visions of the White Heat era were not just a British phenomenon. In the late 1960s, local authorities in Paris experimented with the idea of Personal Rapid Transit, a network of automated trains to run through the city, before aborting the project after nearly twenty years of research. Critical theorist Bruno Latour chronicled the scheme’s downfall in his academic treatise-turned detective novel, Aramis, or, the Love of Technology (1993). In his investigations, Latour conducted a ‘scientifictional’ analysis into the depths of Aramis’s design, piloting and then rejection. The scheme was a kind of podbased flexible suburban rail service, contemporaneous to the texts and plans in this chapter – a characteristically Kennedy-era invention of the 1960s – a vision of technology that saw the industrial and spatial imaginary push the limits of the engineering feasibility.6

Wilson’s speech is discussed at greater length in Sharr and Thornton’s work Demolishing Whitehall, Adam Sharr and Stephen Thornton, Demolishing Whitehall: Leslie Martin, Harold Wilson and the Architecture of White Heat (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), pp. 6–25. 6 Bruno Latour, Aramis, or, the Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 15. 5

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Within Latour’s novel there is a deeper fiction embedded in the processes of invention and abandonment. These, Latour claims, are the fictions that fuel the origins of innovation, from a project’s abstract genesis and its gradual materialization into a prototype or drafted plan. He notes that we should pay close attention to a process that alternates so delicately between the real and the unreal and the built and the un-built. This involves tracing an idea carefully through its working process: starting with an idea’s rough depiction as a drafted plan, to its evolution into an implementable policy, and then the work’s abandonment and administrative collapse – where it returns to an abstract state, to be absorbed by an archive. Latour clarifies this, stating: Once a carcass, it will eventually revert to the carcass state. Aramis was a text; it came close to becoming, it nearly became, it might have become, an object, an institution, a means of transportation in Paris. In the archives, it turns back into a text, a technological fiction. 7

Latour identifies the abandoned technological imaginary as a fiction, but as a form of fiction writing, entirely free from the burden of scientific scrutiny. Within this framework, Latour makes it clear that the designers or authors of such texts are novelists, ‘with just one difference: their project – which is at first indistinguishable from a novel – will gradually veer in one direction or another’.8 This is one of the main points discussed here, that archived projects like Aramis provide us with the remains of the abandoned imaginary, and subsequently point to a significant gulf in the true variety and extent of textual representations of space in the city. This is quite literally because the urban plan ‘veer[s] in one direction or another’ – through states of realization and unrealization. It is the movement between these states, from realization to unrealization, from town fiction to scientifiction, that this chapter is concerned, attempting to reconnect the marginalized texts of abandoned practice with wider spatial histories and genres in the process. In much the same way that the CSII booklet On the Shelf’s catalogue of unfinished prototypes began to resemble a book of short stories, this chapter asks what the cultural legacy of abandoned plans is on a broader scale. It demonstrates how the unfinished plan, while never manifesting itself physically, creates new cultural texts and

Latour, Aramis, or, The love of Technology, p. 24. Ibid., p. 36.

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spaces elsewhere, and, perhaps even more broadly, attempts to show another method in which to chart the multifaceted textual and spatial legacies of abandoned work. This way of thinking about a city’s various texts has a variety of critical antecedents. Andrew Thacker’s outline for the tenets of a ‘literary geography’, which issues a consideration for ‘the “where” of literature’, emphasizes the need to locate spatial centres within texts.9 Yet the varying functions and transferal of uses of the abandoned project captured in the project’s ‘veering’ from the practical plan to the archived imaginary highlight a neglect in literary studies to accommodate the urban plan’s working cycle of proposition, adaptation, implementation and potential abandonment. Not to mention the capacity to appreciate the processes of production and abandonment that determine the planner’s working practice. While there are some notable exceptions in multidisciplinary approaches to the city,10 there remains a narrow tradition in the study of city texts that focuses on literature produced in or of the city, and not literature produced by or for the city. While the unrealized plan’s liminality and exclusion from the focus of spatial literary studies is significant, part of the reason that projects like Aramis or the texts and plans discussed later are so crucial to consider is precisely because they yield typically productive spatial readings, just as a work of fiction might. Indeed, Thacker’s attention to the interrelationship between metaphoric and material space is a significant line of interpretation for understanding Latour’s investigation of Aramis, and the historical and textual interpretations of the texts that follow. The materialist aspect of Thacker’s literary geography is of immediate use to archival research for unrealized texts, as their archival spaces throw up interesting problems. While their original visions remain un-built, these texts are often valued enough by planning organizations and governmental departments that they accommodate archival and conservation space to contain these texts – the abandoned plan disappearing from one space while creating another, the textual remains of the unrealized city fiction perhaps contributing anew to Huyssen’s declaration that the urban imaginary is an ‘embodied material fact’.11 Andrew Thacker, ‘The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography’, New Formations, 57.1 (2005), 56–73 (p. 56). 10 Restless Cities, ed. by Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (London; New York: Verso Books, 2010). 11 Andreas Huyssen, Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 5. 9

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Richard Lehan notes that key to understanding the construct of urban space is to know how the city is textualized: Textualizing the city creates its own reality, becomes a way of seeing the city – but such textuality cannot substitute for the pavements and the buildings, for the physical city. Before the city is a construct, literary or cultural, it is a physical reality with a dynamics of its own.12

Lehan’s analysis suffers from a reductive contrast of the symbolic and the material, but his notion of the textualization of urban space is important for the following case studies. Centrally, because urban plans are overlooked as forms of literature that textualize the city in a way that connects these two realms. Not only does the plan manage to construct the discursive and symbolic aesthetics of the built and lived environment, but also, in their practical application, the usage and dissemination of the urban plan enables the creation of the material structures that actually constitute the city itself. This neglect of the urban plan within cultural and literary studies, alongside the unfinished project, only stresses the extent of the swathes of texts, genres and urban documentation that have gone unrecognized into the cultural textualization of space. This chapter examines the abandoned plan as a document or idea that performs a connecting function between metaphoric and planned physical space. Through the historic and textual connections produced from texts sitting in various London archives, I suggest that contrary to the neglect they have received from literary and urban studies, these works are significant discourses that reveal a spatial imaginary connecting the technological, discursive and cultural histories of urban space, and provide alternative historical pathways to the germinations of the built environment and spatial intellectual history. Taking a set of residential and transport plans for London from the 1960s that feed into the key themes of motorized paranoia, technology and the future that dominated the period, can we reroute the unfinished urban plan to become a more generative resource for historicizing and connecting spatial discourses in the city? It is from this starting point that I ask whether we can begin to connect genres of city texts, breaking down an apparent division in urban studies between the discussion of urban culture and contemporary geopolitical urbanism. As the following texts, in Latour’s words, constitute ‘what might have become, an object,

Richard Lehan, The City In Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 1998), p. 291.

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an institution, a means of transportation’, the remains of such plans form a textual frontier where literary fiction confronts the creation of urban space.13 This is also an important strand of the project as a whole: Having just visited Llano Del Rio’s hazy boundaries of archives, space and ideology, to forthcoming chapters concerning lost cinema and unfinished novels, abandoned projects present new histories and narratives that find themselves in a rubric of their own. This chapter plays a part in definitively tracing and outlining this category more fully.

Underways: A subterranean plan for London Deep in the Department of Transport’s records in the National Archive sits box MT-106/427. It contains the remnants of a six-year campaign of selfpromotion from architect and planner A. E. T. Mathews. Mathews spent 1966 to 1972 attempting to persuade the British government to build a new kind of subterranean transport network underneath central London. The records hold the majority of correspondence, news clippings and minutes of meetings that the Ministry had with Mathews over the course of his campaign, a relationship that began with intrigue, as the government launched an enquiry into the plan’s feasibility, only to later dismiss the proposal due to its engineering impracticality and enormous costs. Mathews later continued the campaign without the Ministry’s approval, managing to get the plan debated in the House of Lords – only for it to be dismissed almost immediately. Mathew’s file then concludes on a hopeful note in 1972, wherein he writes directly to the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, asking for the government to reconsider his project – presenting Heath with his final draft, entitled simply Underways. The Ministerial records outline Mathews’s continued and unshakable vision of a cure to London’s traffic crisis: that the Ministry of Transport and the Greater London Council (GLC) must build tunnels 60 feet in diameter and 160 feet deep, underneath the entirety of Greater London. Each tunnel was to be equipped with two travelators for pedestrians, two monorails and a four-lane motorway going in both directions. Captured in an archival bundle of correspondence with the Ministry’s bureaucrats, the documents provide a fragmented narrative of the architect’s repeated failure in his attempt to change the direction of London’s infrastructure, at a time when futuristic visions of urban modernity Latour, Aramis, or, the Love of Technology, p. 24.

13

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were in their abundance. In this light, Mathews’s plan is an intellectual relation to Latour’s Aramis, as a typically technophilic vision of urban modernity from the same period. The work sits in two significant historical contexts, namely the broad expansive thought injected into the city of the future, stemming from a contemporaneous tradition outlined in the work of Buckminster Fuller, Geoffrey Jellicoe and Gordon Cullen and in the radical architectural collectives such as Archigram,14 coupled with the more localized history of the GLC’s battle to prevent congestion in the capital, famously documented in the GLC’s largely unrealized proposals in their Greater London Development Plans, which contained blueprints to build the infamous Ringway orbital motorways and redevelop the entirety of Covent Garden.15 However, while these historical backgrounds are worth noting and certainly bear influence on the Underways texts, some of the most enduring and compelling elements of Mathews’s work are found in their visual and descriptive environments, rather than in its direct historical context. Here, the architect builds a narrative that sits in a web of other proposed, conjectural and fictional ventures into London’s buried space. Architectural forbears include John Evelyn’s Londinium Redivivum, proposed after the Great Fire of 1666. The plan – one of many drawn up in the wake of the fire, including Wren’s design to turn the Fleet River into a canal – incorporated an underground city to service the surfacelevel’s geometric plasas and widened streets. Evelyn’s idea was rejected, in part due to London’s complex land ownership, and in part because of the unfeasibility of an underground ‘service’ city.16 Likewise, John Keith’s 1872 drawings of a ‘sub-riverian arcade’ that was meant to challenge the designs for Tower Bridge recommended 55-foot-wide gas-lit underground streets, wide enough for horse Richard J. Williams, The Anxious City: English Urbanism in the Late Twentieth Century (London; New York: Routledge, 2004); Peter J. Larkham and Keith D. Lilley, Planning the City of Tomorrow: British Reconstruction Planning, 1939–1952; an Annotated Bibliography (Pickering, North Yorkshire: Inch’s Books, 2001), http://www.lhds.bcu.ac.uk/strategicdevelopment/docs/reconstruction_ bibliography_updated_for_website.doc [accessed 7 August 2013]; John R. Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2007); Jellicoe, Motopia; Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002). 15 John Davis, ‘Simple Solutions to Complex Problems’: The Greater London Council and the Greater London Development Plan, 1965–1973’, in José Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London: Vintage, 2008). 16 John Evelyn, Londinium Redivivum, 1748, British Museum, http://www.britishmuseum.org/ research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3308502&partId=1&people =125726&peoA=125726-2-23&sortBy=&page=1 [accessed 17 March 2015]; Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, London Under London: A Subterranean Guide, New edition (London: John Murray Publishers, Ltd., 1993), p. 64. 14



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drawn carriages, which, like A. E. T. Mathews’s plan here, was to function as a form of traffic relief.17 After Keith’s scheme, Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan proposals included the submersion of mainland trains under the city, as well as an extension of the underground system. These unrealized plans sit closely with the literary relations to Mathew’s plans, and in this respect, the work of J. G. Ballard obviously speaks to the Underways directly; Ballard’s trilogy of Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise provides chilling contemporary parodies of the rationality of planning and, in particular, can frame Mathews as a commanding protagonist at the heart of his Underways design, coupling two of the underground’s most prevalent literary motifs: technology and catastrophe. Through the lens of an antirational Ballardian London, Mathews’s architectural campaign conjures Kafka’s mole-man, who warns his reader: ‘But you do not know me if you think I am afraid, or that I built my burrow simply out of fear.’18 Mathews, like Kafka’s digger, is convinced of his underground plans to the point of devastation, tunnelling further and further to perpetuate his sunless, unplumbed paranoia. While the Underways suggests a slightly Kafkaesque parody of the rational, the scheme was not merely a knee-jerk reaction, but rather an iteration of a deep London that possesses a prescient, alarming inevitability. Traced together, blending planning and fictional histories, Mathews’s work appears to provide a series of images that snake between literary and architectural history, conjuring an inescapable architectural destiny echoed in contemporary projects for London’s subsurface, notably Crossrail. On this note, Nora Plesske has commented that within the world of the underground, we are exposed to a dreamscape that flits between the material and the imaginary, ‘more often though, because the underground is material as well as imaginary, it symbolises the dreamscape between the conscious and the unconscious – the inbetween of an “oneiric space”.’19 Like the opening vignette to an unfinished novel, the Underways floated into the government’s view and vanished as quickly as it appeared, leaving a trail of intriguing questions in its wake. But, beyond its parallels to fiction, it is precisely the ability to conceptualize the original text as a fiction that is worthy of critical attention. Working from this premise, Mathews’s plan displays a narrative composed of an unsustainable dichotomy of freedom and order, the very nature of which connects it as an interesting response to the dominance of architectural John Pudney, Crossing London’s River: The Bridges, Ferries and Tunnels Crossing the Thames Tideway in London (London: Dent, 1972), p. 131. 18 Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 354. 19 Nora Plesske, The Intelligible Metropolis (Bielefield: Transcript Verlag, 2014), p. 228. 17

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Figure 3.2 

modernism at the time, offering a vision of underground space that connects fiction, politics, the built and the un-built environment. This is alongside the plan’s significance to the history of urban space, in which we can see the spatial imaginary confronted with the complex technological and social processes of industrial innovation. As a result, Mathews’s Underways becomes a nexus to join various textual genres and build upon a new multidisciplinary spatial discourse, alongside the more conventional literary representation and interrelation of urban space that the plan produces.

The City of Guided Order: Tracing the Underways in the archive A. E. T. Mathews began his Underways campaign in 1966, writing a letter to Transport Minister Barbara Castle. Enclosed with his letter was a copy of his first booklet Tunnel Motorways: City Centres.20 An intrigued Castle initiated a review of the idea. The review, authored by a civil servant named C. G. Havers, is All future references are to: London, National Archives, Tunnel Motorways In Greater London, MT 106/427.

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damning of Mathews’s plan. Havers declares witheringly in his conclusion that in ‘an admittedly not very profound study … there is no future for such a system of motorways as he proposed’. Three copies of the report fill the archival record, and were it not for the perseverance of the architect, Havers’s condemnation might have been the end of Mathews’s plan. In March of the same year, Mathews, Havers and three other Ministry employees held a meeting at the Ministry. The minutes reveal much about Mathews’s intention in writing the project; the first six paragraphs record Mathews’s justification for his tunnels, and there appears to be little interruption from ‘Ministry Officials’(as they are described in the minutes). After a few paragraphs detailing Mathews’s presentation of his plan, the architect capitulates under questioning over his figures. He states that his text was only supposed to be ‘provocative and stimulating’ (the word ‘fiction’ is not used), later telling the Ministry Officials that his drawings and estimations were ‘purely diagrammatical’. Some time after this, Mathews is asked if he believed the Underways could work in cooperation with a set of surface roads, as a possible innovative adaptation of the scheme, to which the architect denied any usefulness of such a compromise. Following the meeting, a Hansard report on a House of Lords debate is filed. The report shows an hour of debate initiated by Lord Popplewell, concerning the merits of the ‘most eminent’ A. E. Mathews and his tunnel plan. Much of the debate involves peers from both sides sympathizing with the difficult commutes they endure trying to get to the House, and some doubt the Ministry’s judgement when they reject innovative ideas such as Mathews’s underground plan. Rebuffing these accusations in defence of his government’s actions, Lord Winterbottom ends the debate declaring the unfeasibility of the Underways’ gigantic costs. What then follows in the bundle is scattered correspondence from the summer of 1967 to 1970, where questions concerning the exploration of Mathews’s Underways are forwarded to the government, only for the Ministry to repeatedly send out Havers’s original 1966 report and restate the impracticality of the idea. On 27 January 1971, Geoffrey Finsburg, MP for Hampstead, asks in writing about Mathews’s scheme. Finsburg’s request is dealt with the usual flat denial. Mathews’s character is noticeably foregrounded throughout the correspondence and official notes, with internal memos noting that Mathews is ‘extremely persistent and that such a step [engaging any further in the scheme] could precipitate a spate of further requests for information’. This is supported by the Ministry’s unwillingness to entertain the idea, and by Mathews’s staunch defence against any compromise to it. After Mathews’s original roundtable

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discussion at the Ministry in 1966, one official, a Mr Garlick, states, ‘We certainly need to dispose of the Mathews proposal again as firmly as possible.’ By the late 1960s, it is clear that Mathews had become a nuisance. Bundles of gossamer paper repeating the Underways’ utter economic and engineering unfeasibility follow, indicating Mathews’s unfamiliarity with London’s planning bureaucracy and his status as a relative unknown to key decision makers. The bundle ends in a letter dated 19 July 1972, where Mathews writes directly to the office of Prime Minister Edward Heath with a strongly worded letter to reconsider his newest draft. Here the memoranda end. Further correspondence remains inaccessible, so is either classified or, more likely; Mathews’s project received its final denial and was deposited in the Ministry’s archive. This final draft, written in 1972, is the final and fullest version of the Underways, and the one chiefly referred to here. Within this final draft, the most revealing qualities of the project and of Mathews as an author are encapsulated in his rebuttals to his critics. The architect must have keenly examined a copy of the Havers report. The 1972 plan, sent directly in his last letter to Edward Heath, only accentuate the features of the first work that were rejected. Mathews emphasizes his stature as a planner and repeatedly stresses the need for the Underways to be a holistic ‘environment’, to be adopted in its entirety, or not at all. Supporting this renewed draft of the Underways is an attached CV, summarizing some of Mathews’s more noteworthy accomplishments, which included town planning in Airdrie, a portion of a military site in Gibraltar, and importantly: He [Mathews] was also responsible for preparing a document that was submitted to Government concerning the location of the third London Airport at Foulness, in 1966, which paper lead to the abandonment of Stansted as the Third London Airport site.

Mathews’s central achievement, it seems, was the abandoned project, which for a contemporary readership brings a strange anachronism to Mathews’s work. Unable to hide his apparent glory at the abandonment of a professional colleague’s work elsewhere, Mathews emphasizes the quality of his study through the shelving of a rival project at Stansted – at odds with the fact that in a contemporary reader’s London, Stansted is currently a busy international airport. The development of the Foulness airport site has its own dedicated study in Peter Hall’s book Great Planning Disasters. The following chapter of Hall’s text involves an extended examination of the Ringways project. As an inadvertent



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consequence, for much of Great Planning Disasters, the work of A. E. T. Mathews is silently entwined through the majority of Hall’s survey of London’s most significant voyages into abandonment.

Catacombs of confusion: Reading the Underways Mathews’s final 1972 draft provides archival researchers with a fully mapped fictional London, where colour photographs, maps and designs are edged with sparse, abrupt commentary. Once drawn for their proposed application, these texts now offer an expansive documentation of an anonymous urban fiction filed away in the National Archive. Scheduled for completion in 1981, Mathews’s network formed a flared grid system of underground motorways that spanned from Wood Green to Tooting, and West Ham to Ealing. Underways tunnels were to be bigger and more technologically advanced than anything that had been built underneath London before. A single Underways passage was approximately six times larger than an underground train tunnel, a size calculated specifically so that Routemaster buses could run down the one-way motorways with room to spare for the monorail systems moving above and below in the same shaft system. Drivers using the Underways would be able to glide, traffic-free, from Woolwich to Wembley, oblivious to the city above. Pedestrians could hop on a monorail to Hendon, taking particular care to catch the right monorail from one of the excessively complicated junctions of right angles that formed the Underways’ central London ‘interchange points’. Alongside these tunnel interchanges, junctions, stations and street entrances were mammoth underground car parks, accompanied by ‘passenveyors’ and ‘pedways’ that shuttled pedestrians in and out of the system, enabling a swift return to the suburbs. Mathews had effectively dreamt up a cross-London commuter grid, and to this effect, the Underways plan was a suburb-to-suburb transport network: Mathews believed that central London was served adequately, and as such, there would be no access in or out of the Underways in inner city London. Mathews was conscious enough of both the geological and social strata he was tunnelling through. In a passage entitled ‘UNDERWAY Environment’, the architect declared, ‘Security patrols would be necessary as in any well ordered private or public parking area. The parking areas could also be supervised by a central control Television system.’ We also learn that ‘Breakdowns would be dealt with by special UNDERWAY breakdown crews’, and that to avoid driving

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distractions ‘there would be no advertising in the highway sections of the system’. Complementing this description of the Underways environment is Mathews’s usual assault on the ‘petty restrictions’ and ‘wasteful system of law enforcement’ experienced by the surface dweller. Mathews dedicated a significant chunk of his Underway plans with this sort of wholehearted revulsion for traffic regulation, and with it, the GLC’s proposed destruction of London’s residential areas to make way for their radial modernist motorways. Despite this, Mathews underpins this sense of protest with a complex mechanized system of his own, banishing an alternative form of modernist order beneath the city. As a consequence, Mathews’s work is an unrealized text that plugs a gap between contemporaneous popular protests against the GLC’s road building with the technological holism of much of the planning culture at the time.21 Throughout his plans, Mathews is troubled by this dichotomy of the surface and subsurface, as the motif of the surface dweller and the Underways are revisited constantly, framing a disconcerting relationship between order and freedom. Here the architect is at the peak of his narrative world building. His Underways’ ‘security patrols’ regulate an unseen threat in the underground, an implicit danger that lurks like the Toshers roaming Bazalgette’s sewers, the menacing voices echoing around the digger’s sett in Kafka’s Burrow, or even Wells’s race of Morlocks. But the literature that really comes through in this scientific environment is an inherently Ballardian dynamic of a cold regulation doomed to fail – the drawings of a unitary, concrete order revealed as a tinderbox of impending chaos. In this way, Mathews’s final vision attached to his letter to Edward Heath is an inverted High Rise plunged under the earth, where the figures populating his car parks, in their cross-hatched pencil skirts and trench coats, or the professional monorail couple in his tunnel cross section, are liable to descend into animalistic entropy at any moment. Though this would be supervised entropy, under observation from the ‘central control television system’, a close circuit network one can only assume is overseen by Mathews himself. The unsustainability of this vision is readable in the architectural qualities of Mathew’s plan. At its heart, the Underways produces a circular logic, perhaps as a result of the architect working in a period so strongly dominated by modernism. In fact, Mathews’s text issues a prophetic warning against the potential blight S. Robertson, ‘Visions of Urban Mobility: The Westway, London, England’, Cultural Geographies, 14 (2007), 74–91.

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Figure 3.3 

of the GLC’s ring road plans, yet can only express a fundamental shift away from this method using an almost identical concrete urban vision. In other words, the Underways offers a solution as regulated as the schemes Mathews dismisses, having effectively reproduced the prevailing planning discourse of the early 1960s. This results in Mathews’s counter-intuitive planning model, where the architect entombs a classically modernist vision underground, exasperated and unable to escape the schematics of the day. This paradoxical resistance to and absorption of the era’s dominant mode of planning manifests the Underways as a product of architectural interpellation. Mathews’s campaign for planning authorities to explore underground alternatives to transport design as a critique of the status quo encompasses and reproduces the dominant ideology of the period. This is the essence of the Underways’ texts, and this polemical and paradoxical vision of policed liberty underneath London reaches its apogee when Mathews concludes his final plan with the proclamation: ‘Underways policy is a policy not of bureaucratic restraint, but of guided freedom [italics added].’ The documents forming the Underways provide the remains of an embedded architectural SOS call, attempting to free itself from modernism by producing a coded expression of spatial protest, articulated not only in the architectural design, but also in the textual and material remains of his work. This evidence of protest is partly found in the Underways’ archival location, which not only elucidates the text in its passage through the decision-making

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process of the GLC, but also is worth noting because it is symptomatic towards the qualities Mathews holds as a historical outlier. Mathews promoted his scheme to the central government rather than a local authority, perhaps illustrating something about the architect’s unfamiliarity to London’s administrative structures, or even a sense of grandeur, assuming that only central government should be informed of the Underways. This corresponds to the architect’s selfimage: as this was the man who had destroyed Stansted Airport. For whatever reason, the storage of the Underways project in the National, as opposed to the GLC archive, sets a considerable physical distance between Mathews’s work and the bulk of the GLC’s coinciding schemes, substantiating Mathews’s catacombs as a historical outsider of the period. Within the Ministry records, it is clear that A. E. T. Mathews is also a professional interloper, intruding into a national debate with his plan, the aims of which present the contemporary reader with a unique narrative, a considerable distance from conventional histories of the period, yet embedded in a series of texts that display the internal processes of key decision makers in the governance of London. This historical exchange, switching between texts that document granular detail in carbon-copied correspondence, to its dislocated relationship with the broader

Figure 3.4 



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themes of London and its abandoned structural heritage, begin to outline new historical discourses, using abandoned work to find alternate paths and connections to the established events of the period. In the words of Guy Ortolano: There is much to be learned from cities that were never built. Not only about how the future was imagined, but also how the present was managed: opportunities that beckoned, obstacles that threatened, and strategies available to deal with them both.22

It is through sources like A. E. T. Mathews, which have lain dormant since their absorption in the archive, that material of this kind can begin to disrupt conventional teleologies of the period, and to connect this function with its qualities as an Aramis-esque work of technological fiction. In this context, the Underways presents a set of very real problems that came together through a strange and ultimately unsuccessful dialogue. On the one side, there is the politic of the period; Barbara Castle’s initial interest in Mathews is either sheer optimism or desperation, as the Minister was clearly looking for grand answers to urgent questions. On the other side, an architect in crisis is campaigning for an unworkable vision, a plan that presents a truly 1960s ontological insecurity – a cathartic dissection of order and freedom above and below ground – presented in a fiction of modernity equally enthused and disturbed by the cultural climate of the time.

Monorails, alternative futures and the GLC Beginning with the Underways’ historical context, there is a clear process of historiographical reproduction at work. The Underways was abandoned in deference to the greater rejection of the Ringways proposals, which in turn saw the political abandonment of the search for a major infrastructural solution to London’s congestion. It is a shelved project within a shelved period of London’s planning.23 This abandonment within abandonment mirrors the repeated circularities of argument and genre in the Underways texts themselves, creating a vibrant series of theoretical suppositions, questions and hypotheses surrounding the text – the mimetic motif at the heart of the unfinished project. This conjectural flux, stemming from the necessarily resourceful and imagined Guy Ortolano, ‘Planning The Urban Future in 1960s Britain’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 477– 507 (p. 482). Gold, The Practice of Modernism, p. 108.

22

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readings of unfinished or unfulfilled forms, means that contextualized and networked readings of shelved texts into other histories and cultures become inevitable. A repeated trope throughout the project, the unfinished text sees itself spill over into other forms, or creates theoretical short circuits, mimicking its surroundings or disappearing from view. Subsequently, the Underways engages in a dialogue with criticism concerned with the culture of the period. Appealing to the ‘London Gothic’ in its subterranean gloom,24 as well as originating from the same cultural palette as the settings of Ballard’s ‘Concrete and Steel’ novels; 25 Mathews’s confused notion of ‘guided order’ resonates profoundly with the fiction, history and politics that illustrated a wider disillusionment with modernism.26 Sue Robertson’s summary of the Westway’s construction (1964–70) identifies the motorway project initially as a bold ideological modernist historical marker, but notes that this marker would fade, and the Ringway radial would eventually symbolize a conflation between a redundant technological future and social dislocation and protest. Again, it is clear that the Underways operates within the same historical debate. The final rejection of the project in 1972 illustrates that the plan had stretched well into a period where faith in the technologically ordered city had long been abandoned. Mathews’s final recorded letter to Prime Minister Edward Heath is dated 19 July 1972, only weeks away from the date that architectural historian John R. Gold finishes his history of the movement in The Practice of Modernism. While historical readings of the plans and spaces shed a unique light on the political climate of London’s planning, and show the Underways as a kind of cultural resistance and isolation to the popular planning models of the time; if we consider the intertextual potential for the visual, and literary qualities of the work, we can actually plug in the Underways as a typical work of fiction of the period. This is where the intersection of the Underways as a literary amalgam, part representation and representational, begins to form. One such intertextual reading of Mathews’s work can be drawn if we consider the Underways’ inclusion of monorails in the design – the monorail, a perpetual symbol of the future, more prevalent in fictional and unrealized environments than the material world.27 Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn”’, Textual Practice, 16.3 (2002), 527–46. 25 Laura Colombino, ‘Negotiations with the System: J. G. Ballard and Geoff Ryman Writing London’s Architecture’, Textual Practice, 20 (2006), 615–35. 26 Robert Hugh Kargon and Arthur P. Molella, Invented Edens Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10237088 [accessed 7 August 2013]. 27 ‘See Colin Buchanan’s Traffic in Towns, the key proponent of 1960s traffic mania, advocating the use of monorails alongside hovercrafts and jet packs as alternatives to the motorcar; Fred Pooley’s 24



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In the same month as the publication of Mathews’s Underways in the summer of 1966, François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 saw general release.28 Truffaut, surrendering to Ray Bradbury’s fetish for monorails, made them an aesthetic centrepiece of the film, and shot the picture partially in the Alton Estate in Roehampton in south-west London, only minutes away from the beginning of the Underways’ proposed ‘E1’ motorway and monorail entrance on the Underways’ gridded map.29 As a consequence, in the autumn of 1966, Putney became the fictional monorail capital of Great Britain. Within months of this, the GLC was privately experimenting with the idea of running monorails down Regent and Fleet Street. It mocked up photographs of monorails soaring above black cabs and commuters – the GLC monorail study providing a neat airborne counterpoint to Mathews’s subterranean network. Here, Mathews’s text conjoins the fictional and built environment, and for literary geography, highlights intersections where the fictional imaginary interferes with technological and architectural practice.30 Accommodating Mathew’s underground vision into a broader definition of literary geography and urban cultural studies forms lateral connections across a variety of spaces, and the relevance of his plans to the contemporary moment is renewed. The monorail map in Mathews’s work opens the Underways scope from that of an unrealized public works programme to one of a much broader body of monorail texts, creating textual reticulations across archives. Among a variety of contemporary and modern examples already given, Ballard scholarship already points towards this interdisciplinary direction where, through a contemporary critical lens, the construction of space seems thoroughly integrated with the

unrealised monorail city in north Buckinghamshire; Richard Roger’s London As it Could Be; or even contemporary claims that the Battersea Nine Elms underground extension should be replaced with a monorail. “Build Monorail to Serve Nine Elms”’, The Evening Standard, http://www.standard. co.uk/news/transport/build-monorail-to-serve-nine-elms-8472267.html [accessed 1 November 2013]. Additionally, there is also an entire episode of The Simpsons dedicated to the proposal of a monorail to run through Springfield. The project is abandoned, as every town with a monorail turns into a ghost town. 28 François Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451, 1966. 29 Ray Bradbury was a monorail maniac. He lobbied his hometown of Los Angeles to build a monorail in late as 2006, in order to solve the city’s dire congestion problems. Bradbury had been constructing monorails in his fiction since the late 1950s, and saw the transference between the fictional and built environment as part of a fluid process. Bradbury declared: ‘The freeway is the past, the monorail is our future, above and beyond. Let the debate begin.’ See: Ray Bradbury, ‘L.A.’s Future Is up in the Air’, Los Angeles Times, 5 February 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/05/opinion/op-bradbury5 [accessed 7 August 2013]. 30 Katherine Hayles and Danielle Foushee, Nanoculture Implications of the New Technoscience (Bristol, UK; Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2004); Adam Rutherford, ‘From Fantasy to Reality: How Science Fiction Has Influenced Technology’, The Guardian, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/lg-talkingtechnology/science-fiction-influence-on-technology [accessed 28 November 2013].

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construction of text.31 It therefore seems plausible that the next logical step may be to exchange, vary, or contrast the kind of fictions one employs in these comparative studies. The relationship between the unrealized urban vision and the novel is potentially very fertile. One example might be Mathews’s attempts at worldbuilding or dramatizing his project in his description of the ‘Underways environment’. When compared to Ballard in this sense, whose own inspiration from technical instructions and the language of manufacturing and marketing pamphlets is well known,32 Mathews’s professional production of an actual technical manual to develop his own architectural ‘environment’ provides the two with inverted but entwined working methods. In this light, a second Ballard parallel appears, in which Mathews manages to form his own Concrete Island of sorts, where we see Mathews (analogous to Ballard’s tragic architect protagonist, Robert Maitland) fall victim to an isolated concrete image of his own making. When considering the plan as a genre of fiction, it appears that the role of the master planner and the novelist, as Latour indicated at the very beginning, collapses into a single function of the author of the city text. The next documents are produced by centralized government, as official GLC publications. The first is an internal feasibility study, and the second a text published in the middle of the fracas that surrounded the Greater London Development Plans. The first text attempts to consider the engineering feasibility of expanding London’s transport, and the second text composed within the heated political context during the GLDP Public Inquiry.

Monorails in London Monorails in London, published in 1967, is a forty-page feasibility study for a proposed network of monorails running down the streets of central London. With ‘confidential’ crossed out on the front page, the usage of the booklet was purely for reference within the GLC. Unbound, other than three staples holding the publication together, there are no signs of authorship apart from a generic title page reference to its publication within the GLC’s Department of Highways

Colombino, ‘Negotiations with the System’; Sarah Edwards and Jonathan Charley, Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity (London; New York: Routledge, 2011); Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Joanne Murray, ‘RE/ Search, J. G. Ballard and New Brutalist Aftermath Aesthetics’, European Journal of American Culture, 30 (2011), 151–68. 32 Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009). 31



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and Transportation. A stamp inside the first page notes that it was absorbed into the British Library’s lending division on 13 September 1978, which for a formerly confidential document might illustrate the relatively short lifespan of the monorail within the organization. The introductory text explains that, as with many monorail plans, it is a response to the rise in car users: ‘one of the first needs of a modern and efficient public transport system is the ability to provide a service which in total competes with the travel time, comfort, and convenience provided by the car.’ Drawing upon other urban monorail systems, the plan aims to decide whether monorails are beneficial for Londoners. After brief technical summaries of various monorail systems from other cities and developments outside of Britain, a series of maps and designs fills the booklet. These include estimations to fit four loops of monorails surrounding and travelling through London’s infamous ‘box’, where images of monorails superimposed onto images of Fleet Street and Regent Street follow as visual aids to the study. The conclusions, however, are downbeat, stating that monorails, while not entirely unfeasible in their construction, would have an effect on the environment through the streets of central London that ‘might not be acceptable to the public’. The monorail would also be incapable of replacing buses, due to its fixed movement. The muted conclusion states that a more comprehensive study could only be undertaken after a close assessment. The booklet is a strange reading experience, offering both the ironic and playful futurist images of London, but accompanied with all the dry prose and staid opinions one would expect from a local authority report, certainly tests the endurance of even the most dedicated paleo-futurist. Yet, Monorails in London typifies Ortolano’s notion of how the unfinished project highlights the managing of the present, both in its textual detail and material form, rather than the mere speculation of alternative futures. There is a contrast to Mathews’s Underways texts, where the engineering feasibility is based on access to official facts, measurements and statistics, as opposed to professional hypothesis. The text is largely technical, every section exploring the physical feature of monorails grounded by a comparison to an existing or proposed system elsewhere, or the physical conditions and restrictions of London’s streets. There is little to no speculation, merely costing, engineering, and operational estimations. The monorail is not mentioned as a signifier, gateway, or catalyst to rapid social change; this is solely a prosaic study to discuss the case for a monorail’s ability to ‘wholly or partially replace the distribution function presently carried out by existing forms of transport, particularly the buses’. Lists and grids fill the booklet in this technical tone. However, the booklet finishes with the two striking images of suspended monorails superimposed

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onto photographs of Regent and Fleet Street. Both are photographs edited to scale, in reference to the fact that it [the suspended monobeam system] would clearly dominate the streets along its 40 miles of its length. The effect of noise, vibration and invasion of privacy can be measured. The reaction of the public to these factors can only be judged from other places. In Washington D.C. an overhead system was considered but it was decided that in the centre of the capital city it would not be tolerated and it will be placed underground.

The text is curious in comparison to the memoranda surrounding the Underways, as it appears that the GLC was engaged in very similar research at almost exactly the same time as the Ministry of Transport were meeting Mathews and steadfastly dismissing his underground monorail plan. The images of Regent Street’s Beaux Arts buildings obscured by what is effectively a set of suspended electronic buses would have sent A. E. T. Mathews into an apoplectic fit of letter writing, yet, while it is not identical – the images bear strong theoretical similarities to the alternative transport network Mathews proposed. Both Underways and Monorails in London draw up feasibility studies centred upon Desmond Plummer’s ‘box’, which was widely considered to be the technical framework for defining London’s most congested area. As a consequence of the

Figure 3.5 



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uniformity of this concept, the two works overlay each other, both roughly the same size, the monorail map attempting to form modernist linear grids along the unaccommodating layout of central London’s ancient streets, with Mathews’s plan tunnelling through sediment to create the same effect. Superimposed over each other, we can see a subterranean and airborne alternate transport geography for London, drawn up at the same time by professionals in the same industry, highlighting the abandoned but alternate critical and technical discourses surrounding London’s transport history of the period. This intersection between experimentation and administration identifies precisely Latour’s notion of the ‘carcass state’ of innovation, where abandoned praxis is transformed as it reverts back into being a textual future, a future that the GLC would later manipulate for political gain.

Tomorrow’s London: ‘New ways of moving around may appear’ The abandoned or unfinished work always offers a notional design, and depending on which particular cultural form is taken into focus, this design can posit different implications. As stated above, for the architecture of White Heat, the abandoned plan always posits a particularly irretrievable social future; and perhaps no planning text was more speculative and prognostic than the GLC’s document Tomorrow’s London, published in 1969. This was a public information book from the GLC, tasked with imagining a variety of speculative and soon-tobe-planned urban futures, written in order to keep concerned Londoners abreast of the Council’s plans for the city over the next decade. The text, composed of a polemic and an extensive photo essay and collage, sits in a liminal genre between science fiction and the history of urban planning, finding itself in a broad constellation of reference: reading as a jilted political elegy to science fiction and architectural modernism, enunciated in the officious tones of local bureaucracy.33 Tomorrow’s London’s extensive and predictive bricolage of the future bears a strong comparison with a concurrent work of science fiction published in the same year, the 1969 Hugo Award winner Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Brunner’s work is a distinctive example of what would later be known as science fiction’s ‘new wave’ of the late 1960s, as Brunner punctuates his narrative with snippets of advertisements, political speeches, news media and eavesdropped conversation that work together to create a hyper-mediated cacophony of everyday life in Brunner’s fictional 2010. Stand on Zanzibar, like Tomorrow’s London, is incredibly literal about its vision of the future and possibly as accurate; the novel was set within an austerely neoliberal United States in the grip of global terrorism, its population glued to twenty-four-hour satellite news, communicating through online avatars, all led by their benevolent elected leader: President Obomi. While it is clearly not the purpose of science fiction to prime readers for the distant future, the striking, if inadvertent, clairvoyance of Brunner’s work might nonetheless help it float back into the popular consciousness, as the imagined dystopia of nearly half a century ago collides into the contemporary reader’s present. John Brunner, Stand On Zanzibar (London: Hachette, 2013).

33

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The book was originally to be part of eighty-six GLC displays in public libraries across every London borough. There was a print order from the Council’s in-house press of 5,000, 4,330 of which were to be sale copies. This meant that printing costs came in at £6,600, producing a net loss of £1,190 for the Council in the creation of the project (comparatively, this is about £13,000 today). It is also revealed in correspondence with the Director General of the GLC planning unit in 1969 that the editors were under such pressure to produce the text that some diagrams and figures are incorrect in the final draft.34 This pressure from above and the subsequent time constraints surrounding the production of the book seem instrumental in the text’s urgency and dogma; its form, production and authorship are to some extent determined by this tumultuous political context of the city. Divided into two sections, the first is a chaptered essay, laying out the vision and thinking of the GLC. The second is a visual photomontage of possible futures for London, accompanied by snippets of provocative text. The epigraph to the second section states knowingly, that the images are ‘a glimpse of what some parts of London could be like in the future … they are pointers, but also perhaps warnings.’35 The first section of the book, the essay, is divided into chapters looking at London’s ‘region’, ‘anatomy’, ‘growth’, ‘priorities’ and ‘transport’ among other topics. The authors seemed intent on using this book as a polemical rejoinder to the criticisms of the GLDP inquiry, and so the text includes a notably terse depiction of ‘howling’ opposition groups to their plans, and much self-validation for the benefits of technology, adaptability and change in London’s cityscape. The second section of the text supplies a range of photographs, plans and images, forming an extended photo essay that juxtaposes images of London’s timeworn landscape with modernist infrastructure across transport, housing and architecture. The essay then develops by interspersing imagery of actual proposals from the GLDP, such as the Primary Road Network (the Ringways) or Covent Garden redevelopment plan, with speculative abstract imagery of urban ‘futures’ that include imagery of hovercrafts, ‘mono-taxis’ and a modernist aquacentre equipped with a ‘dolphinarium’. Etymologically, the term ‘dolphinarium’ is another unique invention from the GLC. The OED has included the term ‘dolphinarium’ in its dictionary since 1989 and describes it to mean ‘a large aquarium in which dolphins are kept and trained for public

Greater London Council, ‘Tomorrow’s London’, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC Archive, GLC/ DG/PR. 35 Greater London Council, Tomorrow’s London: A Background to the Greater London Development Plan (London: Greater London Council, 1969), p. i. 34



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entertainment’.36 Their citation for its origin stems from a write-up of Tomorrow’s London in The Daily Telegraph in 1969, meaning that one of the GLC’s most futuristic creations was actually realized, if only for its unique approach to aquatic classification. It is also worth noting that when Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986, one of the first commercial enterprises to move into the GLC’s old home at County Hall was the London Aquarium. If the dolphinarium provides us with an interesting, if whimsical, example of the cultural re-emergence of abandoned texts, especially the elements of that tacitly reside in the contemporary, it is worth digging into the text further. The other images in the book attempt to embed the GLDP plans into a state of conceptual techno-progress, oscillating between the processes of normalizing and abstracting the GLDP. In the conclusion to the essay in the first section, the GLC outline their argument in a synthesis of their opposition to the protesters, and the social cause behind their faith in modernism. What will not do is for limited pressure groups to make all the noise – the aesthetes, the preservationists, and others with their own special interests. They all have a legitimate viewpoint, and they were often right in the past where the local authority was wrong. But they are not the only people we have to consider we must also safeguard the not-so-articulate, the old, the very young and the unborn generations. London is not a museum piece. We will preserve our heritage, our good buildings and our trees, but we will not allow the city to choke in a welter of antiquated rubbish.37

It is worth noting that the GLC published this text after the gas explosion at Ronan Point flats, after the failure of new towns such as Cumbernauld with their inflexible concrete central megastructures, and during the height of the Homes Before Roads campaign. But the GLC’s disregard for opposition groups was well documented at the time, and the conclusion continues in this belligerent tone:38 We did not think it right to fill this volume with futuristic visions of what life in London might be like in the twenty-first century, with all the new technologies to come, the changes in working and living habits yet to be revealed. This is why there is little here about towers a mile high, about one-man helicopters and cities underground. By the year 2000, we might have clothes that we throw away at the ‘Dolphinarium, N.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press), http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/56634 [accessed 31 October 2013]. 37 Greater London Council, Tomorrow’s London, p. 79. 38 Professor of planning Donald Hagman, reporting on the Inquiry at the time, described an ‘intimidating’ atmosphere inside the Inquiry for protesters, GLC representatives often dismissing non-technical arguments during proceedings. Donald G. Hagman, ‘The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 37 (1971), 290–6. 36

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The authors of the text generously and unironically acknowledge that their polemic may well be considered generically ‘futuristic’, after lecturing the reader on life in the twenty-first century. There is, however, a more developed reading than just the placement of ‘futuristic’ transport next to the everyday landscape of 1960s London. Initially, the text connects their abstract montage with the realities of day-to-day planning in London, making the same point as Ortolano’s historiography, denying any utopian ambitions other than to raise residents’ quality of life. On a first reading, the text appears to illustrate almost a conscious application of Ling’s Town Fiction alongside the everyday. It embeds a Londoner’s daily commute or weekly shop into a modern progress narrative, providing handy illustrative signposts to the direction of London’s technological advancement. Again, there is a subtler temporal composition in the text that muddies the already debatable intentions of the essay’s conclusions and photomontage. After establishing a fictional future in the year 2000, – a world of disposable clothes, all-you-can-eat food capsules and smartphones – there is a reversal of this notion of progress with an even more generalized assertion of social conservatism, where the reader is assured that the readers of 1969 are ‘more or less’ the same people they were in 1950. This artificial division is also found in Mathew’s Underways, which presents a similarly naive vision of technological and architectural progress detached from social relations, where behavioural patterns and social norms remain constant against an undulating cityscape.40 Asserting this principle, despite providing the introduction to pages Greater London Council, Tomorrow’s London, p. 80. This was also claimed in the controversial reassessment of modernist architecture by Alison Coleman: Alice Coleman and Design Disadvantagement Team, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London: Shipman, 1990).

39 40



Figure 3.6 

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and pages of large colour images of futuristic hardware, is the consolation that the whole Development Plan isn’t ‘dreamt up by a remote computer’. However, the image of the dreaming computer, or even a ghost in the machine, only serves to accentuate this unstable dualism of the social and the technical, rather than provide any realistic context for the reader. This politicization works on both a superficial level, where it attempts to directly confront criticism levelled at the plans, and a deeper ideological level, where the fluidity between the text’s references to time, variants of the future and interest groups provide a highly politicized bricolage to introduce the ideas in the book. This attempt to reclaim lost political ground, by running the images of the everyday with those of a technological future, is a crass attempt to reignite the zeal of Wilson’s White Heat, as it fizzled out towards the end of the 1960s. Within the montage, pages 108 and 109 display a man in a miniscule one-person car stuck on the page in a collagic playful effect, alongside an image of a man controlling a nonspecific computer of the period, which is in turn, situated above a workman wheeling crates of Stork margarine along the street. Accompanied is some floating text, which states: ‘New ways of moving around may appear’. On the other page, a set of ‘controlled taxis’ (taxis on monorails) sit next to an ‘automated pedway conveyor’ with the words ‘high speed starglide belt’ written along the walkway. In the next double page spread on pages 110 and 111, the images show a jet and a hovercraft, interspersed with images of the newly built Victoria Line (finished in 1968), supported with an image of a working monorail in Seattle and a high-speed railway, while the text breezily declares: ‘New ideas and services are being brought in by public transport – things need to be made easier and better for the traveller.’ To this effect, the montage is an attempt to normalize notions of progress for the lay reader, playing into their supposed conceptions of time, leisure and quality of life. A repeated merging of the built, yet to be built, proposed and the outright speculative, attempts to generate a sense of abstract ‘possibility’ for the reader. Quite simply, the GLC is attempting to lull the Londoner of 1968 into imagining their own lives somewhere between hovercrafts and Stork margarine, belying their previous intentions iterated in the text – crucially that these may be ‘warnings’ as much as they are ‘pointers’. The reader is also introduced to yet another layer of time within the text, the pacing of the photo essay itself. No text in the montage is more than two sentences long, and the images are scattered so that readers can glide across the forty pages of pictures, with their reading picking up a sweeping pace, in order to blend heterogeneous and incompatible visions of leisure, time and movement.



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The city in a book: Hook, The Planning of a New Town We now come to the sad history of Hook, the new town that never was. The story begins with a decision made by the LCC to build a new town, within about sixty miles of London, which would grow to an ultimate population of 100,000. … The project appeared, or at least to the general public, to be developing well, when it was suddenly announced that LCC had found it impossible to reach an agreement with Hampshire County Council. … and that the whole project had consequently been abandoned. There was consternation among planners at the collapse of this promising venture. … The work done in preparation for Hook, however is likely to have a profound effect on the thinking that will underlie the fresh wave of new Towns now germinating.41

Hook, The Planning of a New Town (1965) was an acclaimed planning text during the 1960s, reprinted into six different languages. Hook, the name of the proposed town and the area of Hampshire marked for development, was to be a secondgeneration New Town planned in the late 1950s, devised independently by the London County Council, separating it slightly from the administration of the official ‘new towns’ programme. This ‘Second Generation’ of new towns was a secondary wave of developments to compliment the first batch of new settlements built under the New Towns Act of 1946, which passed control of town planning for new sites to development corporations. The first post-war new towns were attempts to disperse Britain’s heaving metropolitan populations; examples include Bracknell (1949), Basildon (1949), Harlow (1947) and Stevenage (1946). Constructed in the early 1960s, this second generation attempted to moderate the population change in the country even further, with the construction of new sites including Runcorn (1964), Redditch (1964) and Telford (1963). A third wave followed in the late 1960s including a newly expanded Peterborough, Milton Keynes and a somewhat augmented Northampton.42After political complications between Hampshire County Council and central government, the Hook site was abandoned in 1960, no building works having taken place – but with the planning stage nearly at completion. At the heart of Hook’s design was, to paraphrase John Gold, an attempt to capture a sense of the rurality of the Garden City, merged with the clustered John Madge, ‘The New Towns Program In Britain’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 28 (1962), 208–19. 42 See the following for further details Anthony Alexander, Britain’s New Towns: Garden Cities to Sustainable Communities (London; New York: Routledge, 2009); Madge, ‘The New Towns Program In Britain’. 41

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Figure 3.7 

high-density housing of the modernist movement. A linear town, Hook had an elongated centre that was focused around a multi-level concrete megastructure within walking distance of the outer residential areas. Within the central structure would be a clear vertical segregation of space – cars and buses entering at ground level, and residents ascending escalators, lifts and walkways to a pedestrianized deck above. The centre was to contain all the modern conveniences of city life, which would be serviced from the transport links on the ground floor, delivery vehicles using a complex system of pulleys and levers to lift goods and utilities up on to the pedestrian deck. To prevent wastage, the LCC published the work that had gone into the project, the study having generated international interest, proving highly influential during the building of Cumbernauld in Lanarkshire, Vallingby in Sweden and the development of Thamesmead in London. The text was then reprinted several times; the particular text in this study is the sixth impression of the work published in 1965 by the GLC, selected because it is a comprehensive and retrospective shelved plan. Although actually composed by its predecessor the LCC, GLC leader Bill Fiske’s preface to the sixth edition adds a layered historicity to it, unknowingly imbuing a rare sense of textual value in the function of a shelved plan. The ‘Hook Book’ as it is known, is a 182-page hardback from the Greater London Council Press. It is a holistic town plan, from the selection of the site in Hampshire, to illustrating irrigation and residential desire lines in the fully developed town centre. With chapters divided up into progressive stages – listing



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‘The Main Aims of The Town’, ‘The People’ and ‘The Master Plan’, the chapters then follow the division of land use from the central area, to recreation and open spaces, to engineering services, and to finally costs and an appendix of data. Serving as a contrast to A. E. T. Mathews’s Underways or Tomorrow’s London, the Hook Book demonstrates the purpose of the shelved plan in the public sphere, as opposed to the archived or politicized consequences of abandoned space. While the monorail forms an alternative discourse to the prevailing themes of planning history during the period, the Hook Book was an internationally known work, the labour of the LCC architectural department resonating through the textual transmission of the abandoned project, alongside their built work. Bill Fiske, leader of the GLC from 1965 to 1967, opens his preface to the volume stating: When the London County Council first published ‘The Planning of a New Town’ in 1961 … It could not have been foreseen then that the book would gain a world-wide reputation, be published in Japanese and in an abridged version in German and enjoy a continuing demand from universities, research students and local authorities in many countries.43

Bill Fiske’s preface to the Hook Book shows a curiosity in the popularity of an un-built city. Yet his successor, Desmond Plummer, only two years later published the contents of Tomorrow’s London, a politically motivated and entirely speculative vision of urbanism. The Hook Book, however, is an attempted urban plan, not an abstract photomontage, and this is clear in the images drawn up with the work. Hook’s success was in its logical construction and strenuous research – almost a realist strain of town fiction. This is a key difference between Hook, Tomorrow’s London, and the Underways. The Hook Book is the abandoned vision within the public sphere, circulated in a popular material text. In this light, Hook presents a different discursive account, which is the influence of the shelved work as a form of textbook. For a contemporary reader, Hook appears to be less of an abstraction, as the text accentuates the pragmatics of the abandoned city. The finely tuned schematics demonstrate the transferability of technique and expertise in planning, as opposed to the aesthetic or symbolic power found elsewhere in this chapter. Soon after the initial abandonment of the plan in 1961, The Architects’ Journal rued the cancellation of the project, yet recognized the principal aims within the study:

London County Council, The Planning of a New Town: Data and Design Based on a Study for a New Town of 100,000 at Hook, Hampshire [Fifth Printing], Fifth Printing edition (London: Greater London Council, 1965).

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The design team took a fundamental view of the problem of the motorcar. … This multi level [town centre] method is the only way of preventing town centres being surrounded by a sea of cars, divorced from the surrounding residential areas, and is another means of establishing a continuous and compact urban environment.44

Again, we see another text, this time in international circulation in 1965, demonstrating alternative urban living in response to the motorcar. We can see that motorized paranoia is still present in the discourse surrounding the design, but as this was planned before Traffic in Towns and the debates in the House of Lords, there is not quite the same frenzy surrounding the topic. Instead this is demonstrated in design. As a consequence, the plans display the ever-present theme of segregation between pedestrian and cars: The pedestrian platform is a complete contrast to the mechanical grid of the road network beneath. At this level the scale can be more intimate because of the elimination of motor traffic. … In this way quiet areas, entertainment areas, market, education areas, governmental, public, ecclesiastical areas could be created, the common link in forming the spine of the whole central area being the community of retail shopping.45

The LCC planning department presents an inverted Motopia, the lower deck serving the same purpose as the Underways, which is the mechanical servicing of movement, juxtaposed with the freedom of the pedestrian on the surface. This notion of segregation was prolific for the period and possible to see in the SPUR group’s plan for Oxford Street, or even in the built environment in the Bull Ring in Birmingham city centre. As such, readers can see this publication of the untested, un-built city vision perpetuating the pedestrian deck, which went on to become so symbolic of the ideology of the period.

Figure 3.8  ‘News’, The Architects’ Journal, 2 February 1961. London County Council, The Planning of a New Town, p. 56.

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The Hook Book states of the town centre: The central area at Hook must inevitably be a complex mechanism. It is planned to provide the main focus of the town’s social life and be the centre of specialised amenities and services for the local and surrounding population. This could only be achieved in the central area by keeping all pedestrian movement on a platform, raised to a sufficient height to enable a network of roads to service the area from beneath and to cover the necessary car parks.46

This physical segregation in a fixed city centre was to be the undoing of Hook, however. In the built environment, Cumbernauld’s own central megastructure saw almost an immediate decline, was partially demolished in the mid-1970s, and has since been voted one of the most unpopular structures in Britain.47 Hook’s ‘flexibility’ of movement is undermined by the innate immovability of the building itself. However, a key theme that parallels the proposed structure is the text itself, in that it possesses a striking and cohesive integrity, the text hinging on its perfectly interconnected planned state – every concept from every chapter slotting in perfectly with one another. It invokes the image of Hook’s social order: as tranquil and lawful as the plan’s infallible and comprehensive internal logic, the whole community encased in a durable hardback jacket. In time, Hook’s significance gradually disappeared, as it was found that fixed multi-tiered concrete town centres failed to adapt to the shifting needs of urban Britain (Cumbernauld’s demise being a key sign of this). Today, Hook is only ever mentioned as a historical indicator in the development of New Towns, and never as a marker of the material text where the shelved city influenced landscape around the world for nearly a decade. This is a text wherein the form follows this immovable centre. The landscape of the central area is one where buildings and building groups, the spaces between these, their silhouettes and their hard surfaces dominate, together with their lighting, finishes and display. Within this context, the use of planting in the centre would need careful handling. The essential contrast, between the highly organised building complex of the centre and the free disposition of trees and lakes to the west of the central area should not be weakened. … At the south of the centre, and forming its southern limit, the existing National Trust property of West Green House, with its fine trees, is shown preserved as an area of repose.

Ibid., p. 53. Cumbernauld is also described as accidentally creating a network of freezing wind tunnels, which meant that the centre was largely deserted when it was completed.

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In their description of Hook’s surrounding landscape, a careful blend of hard and soft surfaces is outlined. An ‘essential contrast’, with a careful need for trees and green spaces, the planners were aware of the necessity to aesthetically juxtapose the predominantly concrete centre. A National Trust property is deemed as an area of ‘repose’, which in architectural landscaping terms might signify an attempt to justify Hook’s structure in harmony with West Green House.48 Yet, the term also implies a much-needed respite from the busy modernism of Hook. The sole example of its kind in the text, it is only in comparison to a heritage property that Hook’s centre is at all historicized, where the existing sense of the text’s duration – commuter times, walking distances, construction schedules – is transposed onto to a sense of architectural lineage. Furthermore, this emphasis on a harmonious contrast between concrete and nature highlights an absence of tension that arises in the work; the benefits of outlining a city without constructing it seem to be a semi-utopian outcome, a result of the work being a completed text within an abandoned project. Hook’s legacy draws on an interesting and different methodology of tracing unfinished work. Rather than the discursive or archival qualities of the work, it is the study of its history as a material text that is most profitable. The sales, distribution, translation and availability of which demonstrate a practical network of influence, unlike other texts in this study. Being the first available fully formed text of its kind, ready for students, planners and interested parties to deconstruct and apply a way of understanding the underlying research to constructing a new town, it is unique; but alongside Traffic in Towns, the plan forms a mini-canon of 1960s practical planning reports that found legitimate popularity outside of the industry. The Hook Book contributes to a distinctive age for planning and popular literature in the 1960s, a fleeting moment that marks the legitimation of the shelved project as acceptable reading material, a phenomenon that in itself is a kind of repose against the often unobserved spaces that stow the unfinished project from public view.

Textualizing town fictions The works in this chapter have touched upon the intersection of proposed space, textual production and the historical residues of unfinished work. In a West Green House was later the home of a construction magnate Alistair McAlpine.

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sense, I have taken planned works from a particular period of British design and architecture and mapped them on to broader discourses than their original application. As a result, the plans create an interesting new form in tracing urban space. They expand critical literary geographies, in creating a textual juncture between materially planned and imaginative space. Abandoned visions in this way perform a crucial function, challenging a currently reductive divide epitomized in Franco Moretti’s consideration of either ‘space in literature’ or ‘literature in space’.49 Another clear benefit of rereading the abandoned plan is the enormous wealth of information it provides as an outlying historical narrative, to either challenge or respond to received periods of modern history. Recent works looking at abandoned plans highlight that tracing these projects not only provides alternate architectural and urban histories, but also enables a new reflexivity about the critical tools used to write them, challenging notions of completion, failure, historicism and textuality.50 From a cultural standpoint, abandoned plans provide another link in a chain of spatial cultural histories that would otherwise elude its authors, and in the instance of the Underways, this is to be found in its exploration of subterranean London. Historical references to the actual subterranean geography of London are found deep in the bureaucratic notes of the project, when a civil servant remarks that the government had already experimented with tunnels of the kind Mathews had outlined, but refuses to disclose any more information, most likely referring to the remains of wartime bunkers, or possibly yet undisclosed tunnelling projects. Acknowledging these seemingly innocuous textual details in these aborted projects, in turn, begins to reveal chains of spatial and cultural antecedents and descendants. This themed assemblage of urban space is most useful as a way of identifying and historicizing the repeating cycles of ideas that resurface and re-emerge every few years, producing recurrent images of city life, each time seeming novel or new – from John Evelyn, to John Keith, to the Underways to Crossrail. In the case of the Underways, the host of compulsory purchase orders, underground drilling and holistic cross-city transport that form Mathews’s Underways vision is without doubt a direct relation to the abundant cultural imagery of today’s Crossrail project. The construction of Crossrail has, of late, flooded public discourse with images of the gigantic bored tunnels underneath central London: underground spaces that are no doubt of the scale, ambition and ethos befitting of Mathews’s Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1999), p. 3. Sharr and Thornton, Demolishing Whitehall; Ortolano, ‘Planning The Urban Future in 1960s Britain’.

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Underways. On a similar note, at the time of writing, local media in London has been covering new proposals for ‘London Underlines’, a plan from multinational architecture firm Gensler to use abandoned tube tunnels as high-speed cycle lanes.51 The firm’s promotional video makes a familiar claim half a century after Mathews’s very own: that London’s unprecedented level of congestion is leading us to disaster, a tidal wave of traffic so dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians that there can only be one answer – a new life for Londoners below the surface. The narrator states in the promotional video: ‘The answer is already here right under our feet, a hidden London, brought back to life.’52 In a cursory sense, this is what the archives explored have demonstrated, except in answer to a set of different questions. What this clarifies is that texts like the Underways and even the ‘Underlines’ represent the dialogue between the imagined, the abandoned and the assembled, in a crossdisciplinary literature repeating and reproducing itself. This is undoubtedly part of a process where fiction, politics, urban temporalities and material space are beginning to collapse: ‘that which proceeds effectively unnoticed in the hegemonic social and cultural forms of the urban present’.53 This is a situation where we confront the politics of the Underways, which is concerned with the openness and accessibility of past texts for researchers in public and private archives, alongside our own attention to what is unravelling in city spaces in the contemporary, and laying these visions alongside one another to enable an urban literary criticism that has the tools to encounter contemporary urban space. Put simply, while science fiction has the apparatus to criticize the present in literature, it makes equal sense that literary scholars appreciate the impact of fiction on cityscape, and can turn their critical skills upon the built, the un-built, and their relationship to the contemporary moment. The materials have also re-textualized a period of London’s history during a time of profound intellectual transition in the 1960s, in an effort to salvage and incorporate un-built architectural and planning works to form a broader textual genre, and try to appreciate the multiplicity of the city text between the division of the physical and the spectral. Re-textualizing the city would be to read, connect and map the textual construction of the city in terms of its material and conceptual Feargus O’Sullivan, ‘Bike Paths in Abandoned Tube Tunnels: Is the London Underline Serious?’, The Guardian, 5 February 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb/05/bike-pathsabandoned-tube-tunnels-london-underline [accessed 26 March 2015]. 52 The London Underline, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkw8BngECz0&feature=youtube_ gdata_player [accessed 26 March 2015]. 53 David Cunningham and Alexandra Warwick, ‘Unnoticed Apocalypse’, City, 17.4 (2013), 433–48 (p. 433). 51



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practices. It would collapse the dichotomy of the seen and the unseen, the public and the archives, and would encourage one to read city texts synchronously – in order to highlight alternative discourses, networks and intellectual pathways. From this we can investigate the spaces of Ling’s Town Fictions, understanding the praxis of the un-built as part of the built, and introduce the architectural historian’s fetish for the un-built to the literary scholar’s fixation on the draft, so that when the ‘where’ of literature is discussed, the attention upon the processes and inchoate formulation of other disciplines is not obscured. Alongside this, it should also be possible to consider the Underways, Tomorrow’s London, and Hook New Town to be collectively assembled on the same map as that of the built environment, and the broader cultural images that both influence and draw from the kind of work that provide the foundation to the fictions of Ling and Latour. It is more productive to map A. E. T. Mathews’s plans and Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 monorail system as companion texts, rather than study them in isolation, both working with the same technology in the same location with the same intentions, as the boundaries of Scientifiction spill over into Town Fiction. The effect of this is symptomatic of the inherently ‘unfinished’ form of the abandoned project. The natural drift into the negative and absent space of the un-built means that the text is full of guesswork, assumption and supposition. As a result, unfinished projects are intrinsically intertextual and connective. Translated to their historical position or function in culture, they become objects that link to additional texts and historical events, presenting a set of latent connections beyond the void that follows the design. A textual multiplicity occurs as a result of this. On a descriptive level, this substantiates the metaphorical application of palimpsests and other visual or material metaphors that are so often applied to the city – while also building textual networks across both implemented and discarded visions in reality and fiction. We can see critical antecedents to this approach in literature. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the city of Berenice, a space that possesses a striking similarity to the inner mechanics of Hook’s tiered town centre: I should not tell you of the hidden Berenice, handling makeshift materials in the shadowy rooms behind the shops and beneath the stairs, linking a network of wires and pipes and pulleys and pistons and counterweights that infiltrates like a climbing plant among the great cogged wheels.

Calvino’s description of the inner workings of hidden Berenice, like Hook’s unseen ground floor deck servicing the pedestrian streets above with pulleys,

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levers and wires, sees this veiled element of the city as one and the same as its pristine exterior: From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other confined, crammed, inextricable.54

The image of Berenice crystallizes the gloomy spaces of pulleys, levers and service decks behind the subterranean world of the Underways or the tiered platforms of Hook, and alerts us to the crepuscular mechanics behind every sleek modernist vision. But, Calvino’s text provides an even greater analogy for the unfinished city – as Berenice’s futures are ‘inextricable’ from one another. Calvino’s reader is asked to accept the multiplicities of Berenice as a composite city, interconnected as one complex identity. Here, Berenice’s ‘network of wires’ and obscure dark spaces remind us of the conceptual territory of unrealized projects residing underneath every built work, symbolic of the obscured inchoate threads of innovation that are implicit in every city’s physical reality. To return to Lehan’s notion of textualization as discussed in the Introduction, perhaps we can shine a light on these spaces if we negotiate the unconscious predilection for the completed idea, and include the unfinished urban plan within literary and cultural geographies. In the case of many of the texts discussed, their archival location mirrors and perpetuates their role on the fringes of both the built environment and major historical narratives of the period. Latour’s Aramis project is more than just a useful way to reconfigure the relationships between texts and culture in the city in a network; instead it is a precise enactment of Latour’s approach, which is to treat a genre of text, the city plan, as both fiction and political record of urban space. It is this practice of enacting that also underscores the multiplicities of urban texts that constitute the city in both cultural and political fields. The urban plan reifies the city in a set of textual, symbolic and material conditions, and functions as the silent unrealized partner in the built environment, fortifying Peter Fritzsche’s comment that ‘the city as place and the city as text define each other in mutually constitutive ways’.55

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 163. Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 1.

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Figure 3.9 

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Figure 4.1 

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A Shattering Achievement: Piecing Together Pinter’s Proust

Writer killers Screenwriter William Goldman has an original take on the process of ‘Development Hell’, as experienced by most writers working in Hollywood. Development Hell is the process of excessive process, where scripts and plots can be lost in a series of rethinks and rewrites, as a range of stars are attached to and then detached from the proposed picture. The film, often an optioned novel or a script written on spec, will probably never be made. The process usually lasts for years. Crucial to the path towards unmaking the film is the producer or executive demanding script after script, often changing or ‘killing’ the writer halfway through. This is the figure Goldman calls the ‘writer killer’: What writer killers do is they work with you on a project, and they ask for apples and you try and give them apples, then they say no, pomegranates would be better, so you try and write pomegranates. Then that doesn’t satisfy them and it goes on rewrite following rewrite, until your mind is fucked around.1

When this particular writer has had their mind fucked around long enough, the project is given to another writer or dropped altogether. But the film project in question, now composed of apples, pomegranates and whatever else the executive in charge of the project wanted, isn’t thrown away; it is kept as a potential commodity. The unrealized projects of film can never be waste matter – they are simply much too valuable. As Martin Amis’s John Self confesses, I spared a tender thought for my project, my poor little project, which I had nursed in my head for so long now. Good Money would have made a good short, William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting (London: Macdonald, 1984), p. 212.

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with a budget of say, £75,000. Now that it was going to cost fifteen million dollars, though I wasn’t so sure. But I must keep a grip on my priorities here. A good film doesn’t matter. Good Money didn’t matter. Money mattered. Money mattered.2

Money’s unreliable narrator demonstrates the industry’s dependency on the commercial value of the creative process – regardless of the end product, or even the origin of the idea. What matters is merely that there is an idea. Part of Amis’s play with industry’s machinations is that often the narrative underpinning the writer killer’s proposed script is usually based on a novel. The text will have had its rights purchased, and those film rights will remain the studio’s property on the off-chance that the project is ever realized or even revived. The text has become surplus to requirements, but a necessary surplus: one created in order to satisfy the commercial pressure of producing successful box office films and of retaining a healthy profit margin. Of all the arts, the film industry is probably the most observable example of a holistic cultural and industrial form that is utterly dependent on the collaborative unrealized project. It is almost entirely the process of unrealization that creates the grounds for its commercial enterprise, and this process of unmaking on an industrial scale often manifests itself in strange ways. For instance, most major studios kept (in some form or another) script warehouses, which are now indexed databases. The production house Miramax reportedly kept an aircraft hangar of film scripts – an industrial archive of dormant texts, containing stacks upon stacks of worthy rites-of-passage dramas, dubious historical adaptations and predictable rom-coms. For many companies, however, leaving a full script unproduced is a luxury. In the 1970s, film houses producing schlock B-movie fodder often tried to bypass the process of scripting altogether and go straight to market simply with a concept. These production houses did not have the time or budget to gather together more than a title and an actor before mocking up a poster, advertising it in Variety and waiting for the public’s feedback. If their response were positive, the producers would consider giving the project more substance than merely a tagline. The chief proponents of this strategy were Empire Pictures and Cannon Films, who worked on a 5:1 ratio for advertising a premise to actually shooting a film. Director George A. Romero, of Night of The Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead fame, was often attached to these imagined films – one notably popular proposal was called Apartment Living. The feature’s snappy title captures Martin Amis, Money (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 75.

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Romero’s contempt towards American consumerism (Dawn of the Dead (1978) is set in a mall), but more importantly, it managed to capture the film’s compelling premise in just two words: a fresh-faced 1970s yuppie couple move into a new apartment, only to find out that the apartment is alive and is trying to eat them. ‘A nice place to live in … if it wasn’t alive!’ the tagline says. Advertised as a completed feature in Variety, there must still be an audience somewhere eager for its eventual release. Although unmade or unfinished films are not always consigned to a nostalgic scrapheap and revisited as forlorn curiosities, often they can be subject to a peculiar kind of cultural re-functioning: reappearing, evolving, or morphing into other media. Sometimes they live beyond a yellowed image in the pages of Variety and become a repository for several new works, or accommodate new contexts and ideas. This chapter tries to develop the work of the previous, but with a slightly different aim. If the last chapter intended to demonstrate how a kind of contemporaneous mapping of the unrealized work allows access to alternative historical discourses, either destabilizing dominant accounts or generating new landscapes to broaden its examination, this chapter aspires to see the unrealized project’s textual legacy or afterlife. Rather than map a series of unfinished texts consecutively, this chapter will follow one text from the moment of its creation, to its anticipated production, to its eventual disappearance from public life. By doing this, the study will unearth traces of the unrealized in the contemporary,

Figure 4.2 

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following the textual form of the unrealized as it emerges from private archived papers, back into the public sphere. The case study here is an unfilmed Harold Pinter script that was meant for a collaborative project with his film-making partner, the director Joseph Losey. The project was an adaptation of the entirety of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu into a single four-hour film, an idea that proved too esoteric to lure the required funding and distribution costs. For a celebrated playwright to have such an obscure text is a rarity, especially when engaged in an interpretive dialogue with another major literary figure, and on both of these counts, it is therefore probably no coincidence that it is an unfinished project.

Proust in pieces Before their final collaboration working on an adaptation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey had developed a nuanced and critically acclaimed film-making partnership, producing what are widely considered to be Losey’s finest films and Pinter’s best screenwriting. Their three films, The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971) show a distinct approach to narrative time and memory within what had been typically ‘Pinteresque’ scenarios of interference, entropy and discord.3 The unfilmed Proust adaptation, entitled The Proust Screenplay, written by Pinter in 1972, and eventually published as a stand-alone script in 1977, was to be the climax of the pair’s dramatic and visual ambitions. On a first read of the script, this mutual interest in time between Pinter and Losey did not mean that the temporal elements of their adaptation would be recognizable to Proustian scholars. Pinter’s on-screen memory noticeably lacks the security of Proust’s Marcel. Furthermore, the unease and instability of events in The Servant or Accident are not a representation of recollection that possesses the sanctuary of remembrance – in fact Pinter’s time spaces prove quite the reverse. Pinter’s screenplays show memory and time as a space for the exposition of narrative and emotional uncertainty (particularly in Accident), rather than the archetypal Proustian notions of retrieval or the potency of art to recover previously lost time. For Pinter’s filmic work and Proust’s texts, narrative ‘Pinteresque, adj. (and n.)’, OED Online, March 2013, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/144333?redirectedFrom=Pinteresque& [accessed 18 May 2013].

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realities and their corresponding time spaces (represented in memory, flashback or flash-forward), while clearly concerned with the experience of time, are at odds with each other.4 Pinter commented in 1972: I think I’m more conscious of a kind of ever-present quality in life. … I certainly feel more and more that the past is not past, that it never was past. It’s present … The only time I can ever be said to live in the present is when I’m engaged in some physical activity. … The whole question of time and all its reverberations and possible meanings really does seem to absorb me more and more.5

Interviewed at the time of writing and researching The Proust Screenplay, Pinter was ensconced in the themes of the novel. Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder note that Pinter presents a view of time where ‘human interaction is a loop feedback system in which causality depends on where a person enters the circle of events and interactions’.6 Houston and Kinder have framed Pinter’s remarks within the language of Pinter’s screenplays (the playwright admitting that his films consist of a number of ‘interruptions’), just as James Fox’s genteel universe is gradually unravelled by the arrival of his new butler, Dirk Bogarde, in The Servant. This is also true to The Proust Screenplay in its manipulation of flashback and flash-forward. Pinter scatters a linear chronology with interjections of montage, building a permanence and impermanence in the work’s application of time, a back and forth rhythm between scenes of remembrance and plot. As a result, the screenplay reads like an echo chamber, an impression that spills off the page and into the very story of the text’s creation. The accounts of the eventual demise of the Losey and Pinter’s À la recherche vary from text to text. Often overlooked by critics, who favour diving straight into the screenplay, the story of the project’s demise has strange resonances of the text itself.7

Enoch Brater, ‘Time and Memory in Pinter’s Proust Screenplay’, Comparative Drama, 13.2 (Summer 1979), 121–6; also Martine Beugnet and Marion Schmidt, Proust at the Movies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 74. 5 Mel Gussow, ‘A Conversation (Pause): From an Interview with Harold Pinter,’ Performing Arts, 6.6 (June 1972), 25–6. 6 Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder, ‘The Losey-Pinter Collaboration’, Film Quarterly, 32 (1978), 17–30 (p. 18). 7 Paul Newland and Gavrik Losey give by far the most thorough account of the period; examining both the Joseph Losey archive at the BFI, and using first hand interviews with Harold Pinter. See ‘An Involuntary Memory? Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter and Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ in Dan North, ed., Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 33–54; Michael Billington also details the project in Michael Billington, Harold Pinter (London: Faber, 2007), pp. 231–2. 4

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The Proust project is abandoned The decision to produce a full adaptation of Proust’s work began when the actress Nicole Stéphane, who held the screen rights, approached Losey and Pinter to adapt the novel after a string of other writers and directors had abandoned the task. François Truffaut had turned down the chance to direct an adaption of Du Côté de Chez Swann and Stéphane had also considered René Clément, who toyed with the idea, before Luchino Visconti agreed to adapt the fourth volume of the novel Sodome et Gomorrhe with writer Susan Cecchi. After an expedition scouting for locations (the same Proustian scenes Losey and Pinter would visit a year later), Visconti eventually turned the project down, instead choosing to make the film Ludwig (1972). In January 1972, a contract was drawn up for preproduction with Losey and Pinter to deliver a script. The duo recruited BBC producer and Proustian authority Barbara Bray to act as a consultant, and the three went to locations in France to visit significant Proustian sites. Losey approached Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez to compose the film score, but both declined. The script was finished in November, Pinter having adapted the entirety of Proust’s novel into a single four-hour script, notably against the advice of Samuel Beckett, who suggested that the team start with Le Temps Retrouvé. Initial reactions to Pinter’s script were extremely positive, yet the logistical difficulties of financing the project manifested themselves from the very beginning. The script’s length and bold literariness, coupled with the demands for complete artistic control from both Losey and Pinter, were to prove too difficult to appeal to commercial film backers. Pinter and Losey were even averse to the idea of the film being divided up into sections or episodes, without complying with certain conditions. These initially included: No interference. No casting dictation. No cutting without approval. No division of the film into more than one unit. No television release without at least six to eight months in one major market first. All additional television releases to be limited. No commercial interruptions If divided into two units must be shown within same week or two subsequent weeks latest.8 Joseph Losey, ‘London, British Film Institute Archive’, Joseph Losey Collection.

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After a series of proposed budgets spiralled out of control and various attempts to obtain a feature release proved impossible, in a moment of compromise, Losey negotiated a possible release of five fifty-minute episodes with the French division of Gaumont. It was now 1975, three years after the script’s completion, and Pinter and Losey travelled to France to flesh out the deal. Many years later, Pinter recalled what must have been an unsettling meeting: We went once to Gaumont in Paris. We got news that they were right behind it, so they were going to finance it. So we went to Paris. … We went there and were invited to the Ritz, and Proust’s table, for the celebration, to raise our glasses to the film which was going to happen. … but there was one chair that was empty, and that was the man who actually ran Gaumont, Seydoux. So we were celebrating that we were going to make the movie, but we knew, looking at the empty chair, we were not. It was an extraordinary gathering, actually.9

True to the screenplay, Pinter’s memory of the meeting points to a moment of simultaneous Proustian revelation and Pinteresque discord, as the director and writer of the film make a toast in celebration of their lost film. In 1977, Pinter wrote to Losey, five years since originally writing the script, stating his opposition to the division of the film into episodes and to confirm the end of the project and its chances of funding. Pinter declared, ‘I feel that we are left with this great unmade film. I think we should recognise this and call it a day.’10 Some time later in 1995, Pinter narrated an adaptation for Radio 3 and in 2000, Di Trevis adapted the text to become Remembrance of Things Past, performed at the National Theatre – the only visual interpretation of Pinter’s Proust ever produced.

Pinter’s Proust in drafts and marginalia The Proust Screenplay was published in 1978, not long after Pinter had written to Losey reluctantly terminating the project. The motivation behind the text’s publication seemed to stem partially from the positive reassurance Pinter had received from colleagues and readers and as a final half-hearted attempt to attract financial interest in the project, which in the end never materialized. Pinter’s choice to finally mark an end to the wilderness period of Proust’s life essentially underscores the utter conviction both Pinter and Losey felt in their script. They were utterly uncompromising about the totality of the screenplay, apart Dan North, ed., Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008). North, Sights Unseen, p. 45

9

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from one potential deal with Gaumont. This conviction from the pair – that a single feature should be brought from the adaptation – is purportedly traceable to the very origins of the play’s composition. Naoko Yagi, in the essay Pinter the Adapter,11 piles through Harold Pinter’s notes and drafts and duly recognizes this attachment to the totality of Proust’s work in Pinter’s early sketchings of the play. The trio of Losey, Pinter and Bray had, at the draft stage, decided to adapt the entirety of À la recherche into a single film and so with the resulting sacrifice of a number of key characters and scenes, the screenplay’s narrative form was to be vital in the adaptation to, in Pinter’s words, ‘distill the whole work, to incorporate the major themes of the book into an integrated whole’.12 Yagi quotes Pinter’s personal notes on his manuscripts, in particular from manuscript 1, as: The shape of the film depends on how we treat the extra-temporal considerations in the work; the most important considerations, since they make it possible for the author to write the book. Since these are not susceptible to the destruction of time, [?] art, which springs from this intuitive understanding, is equally unsusceptible [sic]. (ms. 1)13

This marginalia from the screenwriter may touch upon the moment where Pinter described taking ‘hundreds of notes while reading but was left at the end quite baffled as to how to approach a task of such magnitude’.14 However, it is clear that since time ‘makes it possible for the author to write the book’, the necessary temporal circularity of the text was already formulated at this stage, Pinter knowing that he must finish the text with Marcel about to write the book that has just been read – or the film the audience has just watched. This summary of the huge task ahead of Pinter is made much clearer further down the page, however, where Pinter begins to construct the technical scripting devices to adapt the novel: The characters are trapped in time but above all there exists a perception into where & how time can be and is obliterated (ms. 1). [the] [o]nly way to approach this film is as a dream (ms. 1). The narrator reflects, remembers, receives impressions. Certain impressions & certain kinds of memory are more significant to him than others. This crucial Naoko Yagi, Pinter the Adapter: The Proust Screenplay in Notes and Drafts, http://dspace.wul.waseda. ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2065/26920/1/001.pdf [accessed 12 May 2013]. 12 Harold Pinter, The Proust Screenplay (London: Methuen, 1977), Introduction, p. viii. 13 Yagi, Pinter the Adapter: p. 2. 14 Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, p. vii. 11



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distinction which he makes has to be made evident. The use of voice over [sic] may be necessarily [sic] but, if so, I would think most sparingly. (ms. 1)15

From Yagi’s transcribed snippets, it is clear that the oneiric effect of Proust was to be reflected in the form of the film, through a sensory combination of sound and montage. With this drifting, destabilizing approach used by the writer, could a reader imagine this dream sequence being interrupted by the elements opposed by Losey and Pinter? Could advertising breaks or episodes with credits after every piece follow a montage sequence? It is ironic perhaps that a work of literature so famous for its power to represent the fragmentation of experience was so strictly protected as a single coherent work. Yagi proposes that Derrida’s notion of ‘Written Improvisation’16 is at the heart of this, claiming that the totality of the writing was produced all at once, as if it were involuntary speech. With the drafts resembling the final screenplay, it is hard to find evidence to counter this claim, yet it denies the collective effort between Stéphane, Bray, Losey and Pinter.

Reading The Proust Screenplay In his brief introduction to The Proust Screenplay, Pinter makes a few key statements that illuminate the central focus of the script: We decided that the architecture of the film should be based on two main and contrasting principles: one, a movement, chiefly narrative, towards disillusion, and the other, more intermittent, towards revelation, rising to where time that was lost is found, and fixed forever in art. … When Marcel, in Le Temps Retrouvé, says that he is now able to start his work he has already written it. We have just read it. Somehow this remarkable conception had to be found again in another form. We knew we could in no sense rival the work. But could we be true to it?17

In accordance to these principles set down by Pinter, Bray and Losey, the screenplay is a condensed À la recherche. Centred on an edited collection of significant narrative moments from the novel, these scenes are interspersed with extended sequences of ‘extra temporal’ montage. The narrative of the screenplay Yagi, Pinter the Adapter, p. 2. Ibid., p. 7. Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, pp. vii–viii.

15 16 17

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is ostensibly a somnial chronology of Marcel’s passage through the Parisian bourgeois and nobility, culminating in his unhappy marriage to Albertine and his growing disenchantment with the duplicity and pretense of a social world he had idolized as a child. These two principles, one of ‘disillusion’ culminating in the physical decay of his social peers through the progression of time and the other of ‘revelation’, where Marcel gradually discovers the potential of art to contain moments, previously lost in time, are expressed in narrative counterpoint. The script is structured around twenty or so scenes and locations from the novels,18 where montages, consisting of both flash-forward and flashbacks, are used as transitions between these scenes. At the beginning and the end of the script, along with some extended transitions between scenes, the montages become their own distinct filmic passages (almost their own scenes made from other scenes) representing both memory and art at work. These interspersed montages consist mainly of stills, scenery, close-ups and point of view (POV) shots from Marcel that the audience has seen, or will see, in the plot. So while a distinct component in the script, the deliberately involuntary drift of images from narrative to montage places uncertainty within each shot, constantly collapsing narrative reality and nebulous recollection. This is Losey and Pinter’s preference to practice or perform, Proust – to ‘be true to it’,19 rather than merely attempt to ‘rival it’, by re-enacting a collection of scenes of the novels. Stanley Kaufmann in his review of the screenplay in The New Republic described this overall effect as ‘a Fugue of European History … where all the years exist simultaneously’.20 This is certainly the broader effect of the work in a general literary sense, but while these contrapuntal elements of the script clearly follow Pinter’s two architectural principles to the screenplay, they counter, rather than harmonize, with each other. The narrative scenes in the script are clearly the route to Marcel’s disillusionment with society, and its moral and physical decay, the montage representing fleeting moments of revelation about art and its relationship to time. As the narrative works itself through Marcel’s ruined relationship with Albertine, his experience in a sanatorium and then his re-entrance to high society to find a group of old acquaintances ‘grotesquely made up, grotesquely old’,21 his artistic fulfilment becomes complete. If not a fugue, this repeated counterpoint expressed in filmic interchange between narrative and montage underscores an analytical likeness between the approach A precise figure is hard to pin down, scenes being repeated throughout the script. Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, pp. vii–viii. 20 Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, 177.26/27 (24 December 1977), 22. 21 Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, p. 161. 18 19



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of Pinter and that of Walter Benjamin’s Proustian ‘dialectics of happiness’. Benjamin’s dialectic grounds the novels in opposing hymnic and elegiac forms – the elegiac spending an eternity attempting to restore the original ‘height of bliss’ found within moments of Marcel’s memory.22 The opening montage is one of the most keenly discussed parts of the screenplay, taking up the first forty-two shots of the script. Here are the first eight: Yellow Screen. Sound of a garden gate bell. Open Countryside, a line of trees, seen from a railway carriage. The train is still. No Sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen. The sea, seen from a high window, a towel hanging on a towel rack in foreground. No sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen. Venice. A window in a palazzo, seen from a gondola. No sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen [. ?] The dining room at Balbec. No sound. Empty.23

The audience are shown a yellow screen; a close-up that is a patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft; a POV shot of Marcel’s view of the countryside from a train; Vermeer; an empty shot of Marcel’s holiday resort Balbec; Vermeer; an empty window of a palazzo, a window Marcel will later see of his mother sitting in during a narrative section of the script; Vermeer; and the empty dining room at the hotel in Balbec, unoccupied without sound. As the montage progresses, music, image, sound and action are overlain each from various moments of Marcel’s life – from the ‘crackle’ of a stiff napkin to the sight of the garden gate at Combray in the dimming evening light. The opening sequence has a distinct rhythm. Clear instructions for a ‘quick fade out’ and a ‘yellow screen’ punctuate the series. It is a memory for Marcel, but not for the reader, who is yet to discover or structure these scenes. As the yellow screen persists throughout the film, the montage provokes questions: who is seeing that patch of yellow wall? Is it merely an image, or Marcel’s observation? Unexplained in the directions of the script, the yellow screen is truly ‘extra-temporal’, providing a series of scripted beats in the passage.24

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999). Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 3. 24 In an interview in 2008, Pinter discusses the critical obsession with the Pinteresque ‘pause’. A longtime admirer of David Mamet, Pinter states that he wished he’d called his pauses ‘beats’ as Mamet does. Beats were often used in the technical approaches to film scripting. Mark Lawson, ‘Harold Pinter Interview’, Front Row, BBC Radio 4, 2008, http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00gy71c/ Front_Row_Harold_Pinter [accessed 19 May 2013]. 22 23

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These opening eight scenes use the yellow screen as a clear pulse. A plain screen, filled with what the reader soon finds out is art, marks the memory of a physical moment of place and time for Marcel. Shot nine, however, sees Pinter introduce a long shot of Marcel walking towards the Prince de Guermantes house. Marcel is middle aged, ‘hunched, his demeanour of defeat’. Here, the reader is introduced to Marcel at his oldest, about to visit the gruesomely aged high society of his younger years. Exposed to the climax of the narrative in just the ninth shot of the montage, by the time the reader rediscovers the origin of this flash-forward at the end of the screenplay, it too is a memory for the reader just as it is for Marcel – the montage sowing brief seeds of disconnected familiarity for audience and protagonist alike. If the montage sequences represent the movement ‘towards revelation, rising to where time that was lost is found, and fixed forever in art’, Pinter punctuates memory and art in spaced intervals, at times combining them: snatches of narrative shots (Prince de Guermantes house, decrepit aristocrats) and memories of art (Vermeer, numerous shots of landscape), which are linked with silence and sound. The final montage finishes the text, zooming out of the yellow patch to reveal the painting in full, Marcel uttering, ‘it was time to begin’.25 Pinter took further license with his adaptation, cutting many of the book’s better-known sequences. The Proust Screenplay does not open with eight-yearold Marcel sending a note to his mother from his bedroom to say goodnight, as we encounter in the original text. We eventually get to this scene at the fortieth shot of the script. An even more noticeable absence, however, is the famous madeleine scene. Superseded by Vermeer’s yellow screen under the instruction of Joseph Losey, Pinter leaves no explanation for omitting the sequence, other than forming extended sections of montage that provide similar episodes of sensory transcendence. But this is only the first of many absences in the text. Foremost is the production of the text itself, the script a product of an absent film, the unmade picture constantly directed and anticipated by Pinter’s scripting instructions to Losey, marked by italics next to the dialogue. To understand the text, one must read Pinter’s italicized directions as a narrative voice, yet they provide an alternative dialogue in the script – another duality aside from montage and narrative form, a workspace behind the scenes and behind the text, to engage with the film’s director, running consistently alongside the film itself.

Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, p. 16.

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In the textual directions structuring the script, we see an unfulfilled artistic conversation to be shared with a director who could never act upon it. Just as Marcel spends most of his life anticipating his career as a writer, the screenplay is read in anticipation of a moving image that we know we can never see, because like Marcel’s great novel, we have just read it.26 The mimetic circularity of Marcel ending The Proust Screenplay in a declaration to write the work that has just been read is echoed in Pinter’s introduction. Pinter states, ‘We then tried to get the money to make the film. Up to this point the film has not been made.’27 According to Pinter’s introduction, there is a film – it has just not been made. It exists in anticipation, in the same proposed finality as Marcel’s novel. Here Pinter and his protagonist are united in their ability to only show their working – both writers’ texts are projected, awaiting completion. The absence of the final creation for Pinter means that just like Marcel’s, the workspace in the text – his italicized directions to Losey – is no more than a circular claim to create the work that has just been read. In this light, can The Proust Screenplay be as autobiographical to Pinter, as À la recherche was ostensibly supposed to be for Proust? Because the project is incomplete, the screenplay increasingly becomes a testament to lost time, in particular Pinter’s lost time. The writer in a stand-alone passage stated: Working on À la recherche du temps perdu was the best working year of my life.28

Pinter wrote the text with the intention of it being creatively interpreted by an accomplished director, and then shown in cinemas. But is it a text written to be watched, rather than a text written to be read? Should it be read creatively as a script, as opposed to a textual adaptation? These are some of the many complications of the form of the unfilmed screenplay. The text, acting as a mediating placeholder between novel and film, framed with technical language and instruction (crucial to details within the story), runs the risk of getting lost in this translation between mediums. The ‘Yellow Screen’, we learn later, is a close-up of a patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft, so to a reader of the script, the oil on canvas texture of the yellow screen may not be clear until midway through the script. One of the problems of The Proust Screenplay is not only whether to read it as an original Marcel is described twice as a writer in the narrative – yet we never see him producing any work in the text. 27 Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, p. viii. 28 Ibid., p. viii. 26

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of Pinter, or an adaptation of Proust, but as a film or a text-film. The implied multimedia written into the text (sound, cinematography, dialogue, movement, editing) sits as a technical discourse alongside the narrative, reminding the reader that the film will probably never be made. Yet are we to respect the intention of the film direction within the script and read it as a moving image? Do we imagine what isn’t there or instead accept the shot direction as part of a historical record of abandonment sitting next to the text? Let us consider this last point, and consider it an inadvertent context to the work.

Unfinished afterlives: The Proust Screenplay’s letters in the Pinter Archive Pinter’s experiences during the writing and abandonment of the The Proust Screenplay, and the work’s personal and private resonance can be traced in the Pinter Archive in the British Library. Beyond the notes and drafts of the screenplay, Pinter kept a file of professional correspondence related to his film work, the only files in the box surviving being related to his four collaborations with Losey. Perhaps indicative of the nature of unrealized projects, despite receiving the least critical attention, The Proust Screenplay’s file makes up the vast majority of its contents. Pinter had kept letters from 1972 until roughly 2001 that included initial script feedback, letters of congratulations, exchanges concerning the script’s development and his later correspondence about stage and radio adaptations. The letters are filed chronologically, and begin with a telegram of brief congratulations on the completed script in 1972 from producer Nicole Stéphane. Tens of letters follow the telegram, with Pinter’s new script heralded with admiration and anticipation from former collaborators, friends and readers. The actor Charles Boyer in 1973 called the script ‘a shattering achievement’, director William Friedkin ‘beyond comment, beyond superlatives’, and Terence Stamp ‘Superb’. Joseph Losey had made a list of some of the reactions to the script, philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim declaring it ‘Beautiful’ and Peter Hall ‘Cinema’s first domestic epic’. Immediately after this is a small piece of paper parodying Losey’s table of praise, with ‘Wonderful … from a man’.29

MS 88880/7/7 and MS 88880/6/26 Harold Pinter, ‘Harold Pinter Archive’, British Library.

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By 1975, the letters have changed in tone. The project was officially in jeopardy. Pinter is urged in private to publish the script, and correspondence in 1977 follows with letters to and from Methuen in New York. Pinter’s revealing introduction to the first edition, a text later proving crucial to scholarship of the screenplay, was dragged out of Pinter at the last minute. The introduction ‘nearly killed me to write’, Pinter tells his publisher, whether through the pressure of a quick turnover or through anguish at sealing the end of the project and publishing an unfilmed script it is hard to tell. Post publication, Pinter receives a new round of plaudits. A still faintly scented note from Jackie Onassis expresses her delight with her inscribed copy of The Proust Screenplay, a text she found ‘as moving on a second reading’. Stanley Kubrick, also a fan, suggests a BBC adaptation: 6th August, 1982 Dear Harold, I loved the Proust Screenplay. I was very moved by it and intrigued by its intricacy. Not having read the novels I can attest to its ability to stand alone. I intend to start ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, after which I’m sure I will appreciate even more what a difficult accomplishment this work must represent. I earnestly hope that you and Joe manage to get the film made, but if the film companies prove insurmountable have you considered doing it for the BBC? Just think, if it’s a big hit we can have ‘Remembrance – 2’. Best Regards, Stanley

Little did Kubrick know of Losey and Pinter’s stringent ‘no episodes’ rule, yet ‘Remembrance – 2’ was not the kind of commercial concept they could have foreseen in their artistic stipulations. The 1980s sees Pinter distribute Proust to further interested parties, marked in the archive by letters of thanks. Strikingly, it seems that despite all the other work Pinter was engaged with, the screenplay still resonated with the author ten years after writing it. Proust’s biographer George Painter receives a copy in 1983. Moving to the 1990s, we can see the beginnings of the project resurfacing, television and radio producers’ letterheads becoming more frequent, in anticipation of the radio and stage adaptations that were to follow. In 1993, Pinter wrote to the academic Christopher Prendergast, after reading Prendergast’s article in the London Review of Books on Proust in translation: ‘I wonder if you’d read my screenplay, anyway here it is.’ Prendergast’s gleeful reply is filed directly after. The year 1999 sees Pinter writing a letter to The Guardian regarding his

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work with Losey on Proust, stating that he was still ‘very proud’ of the work he did on it. The letter went unpublished, according to Pinter’s own handwritten note on the heading. Despite his unpublished letter to The Guardian, this succession of later correspondence is written in a warmer tone: Pinter is pleased that Proust is getting the attention it deserved. It appears that time has healed the unspoken but acute sense of loss captured in Pinter’s earlier letters: the loss of the best working year of his life, the loss of his film-making partner and the loss of an artwork in an unnerving imitation of the screenplay itself – Pinter’s Proust journey seeming closer to that of Marcel the protagonist than to Marcel the author. However, the correspondence in the archive ends with a strange turn of events. In 2001, Pinter received a letter from a man called Barry Joule. Joule had made himself famous by befriending distinguished artists; in this instance the painter Francis Bacon, where just before Bacon’s death in 1992, Joule had inherited a substantial portion of the painter’s estate.30 Joule’s letter offers to give Pinter a copy of The Proust Screenplay that had once belonged to Bacon. Since its publication, Pinter had been distributing copies of his unfilmed screenplay for nearly twenty-five years – this was the first time he was to receive one. According to Joule, pages 144 and 145 in Bacon’s copy of the screenplay held studies and drawings, etched directly over the text of the book, which formed the basis for Bacon’s last unfinished triptych, left incomplete shortly before the painter’s death. Joule wrote in his letter: He often pondered what the Joseph Losey film might have been. … That, like his unfinished triptych we shall never know.31

This seemed too good to be true – the abandoned work overlapping, even informing another abandoned work. Notions of Houston and Kinder’s model of a feedback loop of memory jumped out of Joule’s letter, where ‘causality depends on where a person enters the circle of events and interaction’ – had Bacon entered an abandoned feedback loop? There was no mention of this anywhere on the internet or in physical archives. The connection between an unfilmed Pinter text and Bacon’s last unfinished triptych seemed too obvious, sitting in plain sight in the British Library archives – why wasn’t this mentioned somewhere?

Maeve Kennedy, ‘Disputed Bacon Art Works Go on Display’, The Guardian, 2008, http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/feb/08/maevkennedy [accessed 20 May 2013]. 31 Joule Letter, Pinter Archive, British Library. 30



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The answer is to be found in an excerpt of the BBC documentary The Strange World of Barry Who? – a fly-on-the-wall documentary following Joule that aired in 2004.32 By chance, the documentary’s climax features the very moment Joule meets Pinter in order to ceremoniously hand over Bacon’s copy of the screenplay. Joule, a self-publicist, apparently wanted to arrange the meeting to be filmed anyway, and so the documentary makers follow him to see the serial inheritor in action.33 The meeting is awkward, heightened by the fact that Joule wears an outsized bright blonde wig. Joule shows Pinter pages 144 and 145 of his screenplay, complete with Bacon’s alleged sketches or brush marks covering the page, the text just about visible underneath the paint. Halfway through the meeting, the text’s authenticity is contested and its provenance questioned by the documentary maker Margy Kinmonth. Like much of Bacon’s estate connected to Joule, the book’s connection to the unfinished triptych and its authenticity are dubious and Bacon’s possessions as much a device for Joule to meet the rich and famous, as they are the remains of his creations.34 What is striking about that meeting, however, is when Pinter tells a story of how he had met Bacon once before in the 1960s. In the video, from 3:05 to 3:08, Pinter hesitates (or ‘pauses’) for two or three uncomfortable seconds, before

Figure 4.3 

Margy Kinmonth, The Strange World of Barry Joule (Darlow Smithson Productions, 2002). Watch it here: http://vimeo.com/5308092 34 Richard Dorment, ‘All your own work, Bacon?’, The Daily Telegraph, 2001, http://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/4721816/All-your-own-work-Bacon.html [accessed 18 May 2013]. 32 33

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launching into the anecdote. It is revealed to Joule that he and Francis Bacon had met once before, through a man unknown to Pinter who had introduced himself as a friend of Bacon, but who later turned out to be unfamiliar to both men – possibly an imposter. Whether intentional from Pinter or not, the irony is lost on Joule. Bacon’s last unfinished triptych, Triptych 1991, is now in MoMA in New York. It is not on display. The Triptych shows three separate figures climbing out of dark backdrops with a self-portrait of Bacon and a portrait of the racing driver Ayrton Senna on the right and left canvases, respectively. The quotation the curators at MoMA have chosen to accompany the painting on their website has echoes of the strange meeting with Pinter, noting that, Bacon said his triptychs were ‘the thing I like doing most, and I think this may be related to the thought I’ve sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of the images separated on three different canvases.’35

Bacon produced numerous triptychs over his life, and the MoMA quotation is from an interview in 1979.36 The juxtaposition of images on different canvases was a lifelong interest of Bacon’s, and so the connection is coincidental, yet Bacon may well have admired Pinter’s text as this sense of juxtaposition is so clearly applied in the montage and memory sequences. Pages 144 and 145 of The Proust Screenplay, where the ‘sketches’ are drawn, are some of the screenplay’s most dramatic sequences of narrative and montage. Marcel learns of the death of Albertine in a letter as, ‘A riderless horse gallops away from the camera. The camera pulls back slightly to reveal the suggestion of the broken body of a girl.’37 A montage of empty interiors follows. Whether authentic or not, Bacon’s sketches had led Pinter to confront his text in person, revisiting his lost Proust year of twenty-nine years previous, though not for adaptation for radio or theatre: instead for a moment of distorted remembrance outside of Pinter’s control. The brief scene in the documentary shows Joule forcing Pinter to return to particular pages of his writing that are obscured by sketches and heavy brushstrokes. Perhaps this is the (anti-) climax of Pinter’s Proust, the last letter in his personal archive of Proustian correspondence leading to this strange videoed scene. The peculiar meeting highlights the fact that perhaps the most tangible legacy of his Proustian year was in fact Pinter’s own Bacon’s last triptych: http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=88170 MoMA: http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=88170 37 Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, p. 144. 35 36



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lived experience, expressed in the trail of private correspondence. Something possible to read directly through the narratives captured in his archive: the author’s Proust file stuffed with personal and heartfelt letters praising him on a film that was never made.38

Interminable texts Pinter’s next film project commenced during the years of Losey’s misfortune with film financiers and it seemed that the playwright couldn’t rid himself of unfinished work. His next job was to compose a completed adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. Pinter’s finished adaptation saw cinematic release in 1976 to largely mixed reviews. Steven H. Gale cites The Proust Screenplay’s incompletion as a root cause of its apparent lack of critical attention, a total anomaly among Pinter’s other and frankly better-known works.39 This critical neglect provides yet another absence surrounding the text of the screenplay. The incompletion of the project not only provides a difficult series of questions of how to read the screenplay – the unfinished film implied in the text existing in its own extra-temporal space – but it leads one to think that the project is extra-textual, the project demanding to be studied holistically, beyond the pages of the script. This is expanded when the problematic form of film scripts is considered. Although published and distributed as a work of literature in the form of a complete book, The Proust Screenplay in its printed form is presented as an elegantly typeset work of literature with all the paratextual trimmings – the work in essence is unchanged from its original scripted form. As stated previously, the very form of the film script is understood as a mediating structure with the text framed by a uniformly codified and technical layout for professional practice, which negotiates and mediates the transfer from text to visual direction. The project’s abandonment at the point of scripting allows the reader into the space of production and process between writer and director, accessing a creative dialogue usually obscured by the presence of a final text.40 This is further complicated when one thinks about the film script as a literary Billington, Harold Pinter, p. 213. Steven H. Gale, Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter’s Screenplays and the Artistic Process (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), p. 219. 40 This is not to subscribe to auteur theory or authorial intentionality, just the format of the script as a means to communicate artistic ideas for production. 38 39

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genre and its difference from its formal antecedent, the stage play. The play as described by Jill Nelmes ‘can only ever be the formulation of a possibility whereas the screenplay published post-event, will always be determined by a singular source’.41 The Proust Screenplay, especially in its form as a published book and a singular adaption of a canonical work of literature, defies this categorization, anchored only in its relationship to the original Proust text, and by the conjecturally possible ‘film’ it supposes. If we follow Nelmes’s logic, Pinter’s unfilmed screenplay inadvertently takes on the qualities of a scripted play, a ‘formulation of a possibility’. This is a notion that may have some value, as one of the key purposes of printing scripts of plays is to sustain their performances and interpretations. It is possible that by publishing Proust, Pinter and Methuen were attempting to attract financial interest or that it was just to sustain the formulation of the possible in its purest form, as an idea – albeit an idea with a substantial set of rights attached to it. While the mediating form of the script anticipates and directs a film that never was, the introduction created for the published edition discusses the picture in its genesis, referencing the research and inchoate structures outlined in notes and drafts between Bray, Losey and Pinter. This interchange between a past history and a prospective film changes the role of the published screenplay from that of a concluding end text of an unrealized project, to the published form actually clarifying the script’s function as a bridging fragment of a much larger endeavour. This distillation of a textual fragment into a marketable literary form is therefore defined as much by the absence of either the prior research or implied film project as it is by its role as a publication, functioning as a publically disseminated historical trace, as much as a new literary text. Pinter’s last line of his introduction states: Up to this point the film has not been made.42

It is a self-conscious statement, aware of the overlapping fates of the script and its narrative, perhaps deliberately drawing the reader’s eye to the project’s short-circuiting. But what is Pinter asking of his reader? We can only assume that because the film has not been made, one is asked to appreciate that the text is not fixed and bound to a film, existing symbolically instead of as a definitive signpost to a finished product. Subsequently for analytical enquiry, it raises

Analysing the Screenplay, ed. by Jill Nelmes (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 245. Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, pp. ii.

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the question: Despite its publication making it the public-facing construction of the project, is the script the ultimate or primary text for reading The Proust Screenplay? Were it not for the difficulties of material access to archives and the lack of digital reproductions of Losey and Pinter’s notes, drafts, location photographs, and correspondence, the screenplay would surely not be the only significant textual evidence to build an understanding of the project. The publication of notes, research, edits, cut scenes, dialogue, future adaptations and images would generate further or subvert current readings of the script, reopening the project for additional discussion and filling the critical void. Barbara Klinger’s notion of studying the ‘discursive surround’ of a film text (borrowing Fernand Braudel’s notion of a ‘histoire totale’) demands that a ‘panoramic view of the contexts most associated with cinema’s social and historical conditions of existence’ should be considered in the process of the analysis.43 This would seem to align with the idea of opening up archival and historical evidence to further understand the production, textual construction and intertextual activity of a project of this sort. However, with no film ever actually created, what does it mean if there is only ‘discursive surround’ to the project?’ In this light, Klinger’s notion requires modification when the work in question has no central text, often existing in discourse and context. In terms of its sheer expanse and the apparent inability to locate a textual centre, the unfinished project can generate more material than most because by its very nature, without a completed text, there is a natural spread of focus into an exclusively discursive surround. This spread, or surround, like Pinter’s script, possesses a disorientating circularity, beginning and ending with archival study – established with research into the origins of the work (Pinter’s archive), to the implied project (the textual structures of the intended film, the drafts, the screenplay), and then the subsequent correspondence and discourses that followed after its abandonment (back to the archive, as well as its subsequent critical and public reception). Here Pinter’s Proust can extend, or even challenge, Klinger’s notion, problematizing the historical selectivity for completed film texts and a slight inattention to the industrial processes that create them, Klinger’s notion needing to contend with the fact that the ‘panoramic view of the context’ may often be the text itself. Barbara Klinger, ‘Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies’, Screen, 38.2 (Summer 1997), 109.

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Regardless of how the remains of Pinter’s project are theorized, reading The Proust Screenplay is a unique experience, especially alongside the corresponding spread of notes and miscellany that constituted its creation, the full extent of which cannot be covered here. However, the experience or panoramic view of this textual surround to the project is uniquely, precisely that of the very themes the text discusses. It is a continual reverberation of Pinter’s lived experience of lost time – each document, whether a letter, telegram, or draft, provides a fragment of a lost work in the absence of the realized version. The boxes that encase the project in the Pinter Archive form a Proustian meta-text, a discursive surround of a lost moment, addressing the issues of the text in its fragmentary form that demands the reader to subjectively piece together the remains of the project in their own time. It has been suggested that Proust belongs to an ‘unfinishable genre’,44 an idea that was a lived experience for Pinter, a trace of which lingers for contemporary readers of his script. As a consequence, the remains of The Proust Screenplay are as much about the temporal and spatial forms of the remains of the project as about transforming Marcel’s experiences to the screen. The archival fragments that exist between Losey and Pinter’s papers in the BFI and the British Library share the remains of the project, the material contained in both collections stretching before and after the published screenplay’s release. It’s a relationship that forces the researcher into a fragmented time space – travelling between locations, constantly forced to refer back to a screenplay that negotiates between these two figures – crystallizing the moments in time shared between the two collaborators. This is why Pinter’s introduction is so crucial to the continuing function of The Proust Screenplay, because it is clearly as autobiographical as it is an explanation of the development of the text. This is transferrable even to the parts of the introduction that focus entirely on the narrative of À la recherche: where the story of the eventual failure of The Proust Screenplay becomes ‘a movement, chiefly narrative, towards disillusion’ – the published text then finding its new role as an artistic mediatory space, providing a few moments of ‘revelation’ where ‘time that was lost is found, and fixed forever in art’.45

Michael Wood, ‘Last Night of All’, PMLA, 122.5 (October 2007), 1395–1402. Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, pp. ii.

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Intermission The form of The Proust Screenplay manages to desynchronize itself out of genre and more broadly out of criticism. Neither the focal point of a film nor the purposeful formulation of the possible, it instead acts as the historical trace of a collaboration spread across archival remains. Pinter’s attempt to compound a canonic seven-volume novel into just four hours of screen time and the project’s resulting incompletion fragments not only the original text, but a sense of time and genre and has subsequently seemed to confound literary critics to see the text as anything more than an arrested adaptation. As an unrealized project, albeit with a completed text, The Proust Screenplay has provided a juncture where literature, film and criticism are confounded by the historical disruption to a project that subsequently rendered a Nobel-prizewinning author with an obscure and out-of-print work. As a consequence, the screenplay produces a split reading, unsettling critics between the endless conjecture of an absent film, coupled with the raw connection to its historical origins and failure, which provides a challenge to the reception and theorization between disciplines and genres. If anything, The Proust Screenplay is all at once a set of archival remains fit for a museum exhibit, the blueprint of a spoken production, and an unfilmed feature. Yet while this liminal genre indicates the mutability of Pinter’s unrealized work, what is its function beyond its reading? What is the intellectual legacy of the unfinished project, and what are the intertextual and dispersive qualities of an unfulfilled text, replete with conjecture and absence? To pursue this question further requires an extension of Braudel’s panorama, to an expansive aerial view. It demands a consideration of Klinger’s notion of the historical narratives that enabled the text’s ‘social and historical conditions of existence’. Subsequently, the screenplay’s conditions of existence, or non-existence in this instance, can be diagnosed as a symptom of a wider historical manifestation: the abandonment of the entire British film industry. The following section investigates the broader economic forces behind the rejection of Pinter and Losey’s work, accepting the text and its rejection as a form of cultural wreckage or collateral – one of many unfulfilled texts that were discarded in a period of enormous economic retraction for the whole country.46

Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went out: Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber, 2009), pp. 9–18.

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In cinematic terms, texts like The Proust Screenplay were not the only cultural form sacrificed in the industry’s retrenchment. At first glance, there was a more conspicuous casualty in the early 1970s: the cinema theatre and its dwindling audiences. Corresponding victims of industrial decline, the abandoned film and cinema have since left parallel trails of debris that run through the landscape and archive. In a similar approach to the Llano papers, there is a point where the sites of unfinished texts’ intentions can tell us as much as the conjecture the text supposes. It is in the void of criticism and cultural history that surrounds Proust and its fellow unfulfilled narratives of the period that a view of a parallel filmic culture may bring the function or even legacy of Pinter’s lost work into relief: in other words, an exploration of the spaces of Proust’s proposed projection – drawing on the legacy of discarded cinema theatres to tell us what the Pinter records cannot. While ontologically opposed to one another, the unfulfilled text and the ruins of Britain’s cinemas provide textual fragmentation from the beginnings and ends of the cinematic process; and this comparative approach can demonstrate the function of remains over time and clarify what is unique about the unrealized text, as distinct from the swathes of ruins and cultural fragments that exist alongside it. To explain Pinter and Losey’s lost work further, tracing the fate of a cinemagoing culture contemporaneous to the working lifespan of The Proust Screenplay offers an economic and structural logic to its abandonment – the very visible ruins of one form would enable us to see the obscured contemporaneous path of another, and allow a perspective on the text beyond the inhibited literary criticism that exists on it already. Perhaps this is due to the ruins’ ability, like the unfinished work, to operate in a ‘pluritemporality’,47 meaning that the scavenging of texts and objects in ruins, according to Buchli et al., forms an act that works towards constituting that which has fallen outside the realm of discourse for a wide variety of reasons (all of which are usually sympathetic of the contradictions of modern experience). It also serves as a critique of the discourse-dependent disciplines.48

To reiterate: the act of retrieval from remains, according to subscribers of the archaeology of the contemporary, provides evidence that can critique ‘discourse dependent disciplines’. In other words, a textual archaeology of a contemporaneous cultural form might shed light on both the function and DeSilvey and Edensor, ‘Reckoning with Ruins’, 465–85. Victor Buchli, Gavin Lucas and Margaret Cox, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 16.

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reading of the screenplay from an alternative perspective that reveals new readings and historical standpoints. It was during this scavenge through the archives of ruined cinemas that the first striking similarity between Proust and the Cinema occurred. Like Pinter and Losey’s project, the entire exhibition industry was aware of its decline over exactly the same period, and was actively encouraging the material adaptation of its cinema sites. As it turned out, these cinema texts could be quite literally transposed onto the fortunes of The Proust Screenplay; as the physical changes endured by the cinema provided an inverted template for the latent role of the unfinished text – a function confronted, and to a degree realized, in the negative space of unfinished work itself.

The Proust Screenplay in the context of British Cinema in the 1970s Michael Billington, in his description of the downfall of The Proust Screenplay, makes a rather personal aside: The Proust Screenplay may not have achieved cinematic life, (indeed, in a medium that seems increasingly aimed at backward adolescents and is dominated by the sense–bombarding editing techniques of rock videos and commercials, it is unlikely to ever do so).49

Billington’s depiction of the film industry’s focus on ‘backwards adolescents’ and a new cinema of ‘sense bombarding’ editing, while reactionary, may inadvertently touch upon a broader theme of British film culture contemporary to Pinter’s Proust text. Was The Proust Screenplay from a bygone era where the art film could no longer be played in popular cinema? According to Pinter’s letters, it was only when pre-production of the film ran adrift and potential sources of funding began to narrow that the pair considered the script for episodic adaptation. While there is no doubt that this was a contributory factor to the collapse of the project, in the background of Joseph Losey’s papers at the BFI, there is a more expansive narrative of abandonment affecting the entire British film industry at the time.50 In his attempts to find backing for the project,

Billington, Harold Pinter, p. 232. Subsequent quotes come from files ITM-6300, British Film Institute Archive, Joseph Losey Collection.

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Losey spent 1973 to 1978 in correspondence with many of the major Hollywood studios. His faith in Pinter’s script was not reciprocated. In his correspondence, one particular mogul, Sam Goldwyn Jr, wrote to Losey stating that he found the very idea of Losey and Stéphane’s proposed budget of US$5.5 million for a film based on an abstruse modernist author ‘slightly frightening’. A friendly letter from the renowned agent Robert Lantz seems most devastating, however.51 Although sympathetic to the intellectual aims of the project, Lantz confirmed that Pinter’s script was too cultured for the audiences of the 1970s. Lantz was frank with Losey, stating in a letter to the director that the script was: special, remote, lacking in action and generally ‘literary’. This is the age of Gene Hackman and Barbra Streisand. There are no roles for them here. … Therefore I wonder where one would go [for funding]. In addition to the reason I have already stated, it seems to me that we have to face the fact that all the big studios are in trouble, or virtually all of them.52

Lantz’s letter hit upon the wider economic reality for British film during the period. British (or part-British) productions no longer featured in Hollywood’s plans for the 1970s. The former model of American studios funding British pictures that had prospered in the 1960s was no longer feasible, as American studios had bankrupted themselves with box office failures that were both epic in their genre and scale. Instead, the early 1970s saw Hollywood’s attention turn to indigenous narratives, investing what capital it had left on domestic features and thus sidelining British projects.53 Pinter’s esoteric screenplay combined with Losey and Stéphane’s spiralling budgets had no place in an increasingly austere and divergent culture of British film-making. In this light, The Proust Screenplay is just one of many projects that fell by the wayside in a period that many historians see as sea change or ‘transitory’ period in the history of British film.54 In fact, this may be something of an understatement, as within a relatively short period British cinema underwent a

Tim Weiner, ‘Robert Lantz, 93, Agent to the Stars, Dies’, The New York Times, 20 October 2007, section Arts, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/arts/20lantz.html [accessed 18 September 2013]. 52 Letter from Robert Lantz in: Losey Archive. 53 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). 54 See Andrew Higson’s chapter ‘A Diversity of Film Practices: Renewing British Cinema in the 1970s’, in The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure? ed. by B. J. Moore-Gilbert (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 216–39. 51



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rapid transformation. After a relatively prosperous start to the 1960s, the British film industry’s fortunes began to decline towards the end of the decade and by the early 1970s, the outlook was bleak. In 1968, 90 per cent of British production capital had come from America and by the early 1970s, this had almost entirely disappeared.55 Film production halved in the 1970s: from approximately eightyfour features a year to forty-one, and this had a direct impact on the careers and working projects of some of Britain’s leading film-makers.56 As Robert Shail notes, Major filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, Jack Clayton, Karel Reisz and John Boorman either seemed to dry up creatively or found themselves driven to Hollywood to keep their careers afloat. The lively experimentation of the 1960s was forced to the margins, while popular mainstream cinema became dominated by cheaply produced exploitation horror films, tawdry sex comedies and uninspired spin-offs from television sitcoms. With declining cinema attendance, British films appeared to be aiming at the lowest common denominator in trying to win back audiences.57

Sue Harper and Justin Smith argue that ‘this instability was partially responsible for the dramatic schism between popular and critical taste, and the polarised relationship between the two’.58 The economic circumstances surrounding the cinema clearly form the beginnings of a critical elite disapproving of the Confessions of … and Carry On series or the later British-produced blockbusters (such as Superman, 1978), that stoked a renaissance of British film-making at the box office. This critical polarization may still be kept alive by Billington’s displeasure at ‘sense bombarding’ cinema, despite the fact that in some respects, there are few better words to describe any of the montage sequences in The Proust Screenplay. As a consequence, alongside the common interpretation that the writer and director demanded too much, the charge for the demise of the Proust adaptation lies not only at the hands of Pinter and Losey, but also with the stagnation of the British film industry. The landscape of British film in the early 1970s requires careful description, as a series of interrelated cultural changes in exhibition, film funding and technical

See Sian Barber’s work in Sue Harper and Justin T. Smith, British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 10. 56 Robert Shail, Seventies British Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 57 Shail, Seventies British Cinema, p. Xii. 58 Harper and Smith, British Film Culture in the 1970s. 55

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innovation emerged over a short period. As major US studios withdrew their financial backing at the beginning of the new decade, British cinema attendances continued the steady decline that had begun in the late 1940s. Cinemagoing was no longer a routine part of mass entertainment and audiences unwaveringly peeled away from them throughout the rest of the decade. The increased availability of colour television and a focus on prime time family entertainment from the BBC and ITV also played a strong part in further domesticating screen culture for British families. Later, technical advancements such as video cassettes, first introduced in 1978, also allowed a degree of choice and freedom to the viewing public in what and how they watched a film, a development that the major cinema circuits of the 1970s seemed to have no rejoinder to until North American investment would later change their fortunes in the mid-1980s with the advent of the multiplex.59

High street ruins The national decline of cinema attendances was a post-war phenomenon that spanned a forty-year period from the late 1940s to the 1980s. A combination of the rise of television, the diversification of leisure activities, the growth of consumerism and managerial inertia from the major cinema circuits saw the cinema’s widespread cultural and material deterioration. In the 1950s and 1960s, it became apparent that cinemas weren’t even in the right places. Britain’s post-war slum clearances had moved a total of 3.1 million residents around the country, and cinema exhibitors failed to move with their core workingclass audiences. City centre locations of Gaumont, Essoldo, ABC and Odeon cinemas were now no longer within the reach of the newly suburbanized working population and in 1962, only three of the new towns, Harlow, Basildon and Hemel Hempstead, had been planned with new cinemas for residents.60

For the rise of the VCR see Mark R. Levy, The VCR Age: Home Video and Mass Communication (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1989), pp. 50–69. The first multiplex was ‘The Point’ Cinema, built in 1985, which has recently failed a sustained campaign from The Twentieth Century Society to acquire grade listed status. It is now due to be demolished. 60 There were moves against the decline: from government regulation to the Cinema circuits’ own organization FIDO (The Film Industry Defense Organisation), created to combat the rise of television. For more details see Stuart Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain Since 1896 (Manchester; New York, NY: Manchester University Press; 2007), pp. 87–111. 59



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A cinema was also notably absent in the ill-fated plans for Hook New Town.61 For Sam Goldwyn Jr and Robert Lantz, The Proust Screenplay spoke to a miniscule share of an increasingly waning demographic, and it was clear that Marcel’s synesthetic disillusion with the French aristocracy was too risky an investment in comparison to guaranteed box office successes. While Pinter was writing The Proust Screenplay in 1972, the film adaptation of On the Buses toured British cinemas with eventual box office takings of £2.5 million. It was a roaring success for Hammer productions, raking in half a million pounds in profit – the total budget for the film standing at just £50,000 – a hundredth of Losey and Bray’s proposed Proust budget. The decline in film production and cinema attendance made a rapid impact on Britain’s townscapes. In 1969, there were 1,559 cinema theatres open in the UK. By 1984, however, there were just 660 sites. In fifteen years, 58 per cent of British cinema theatres had closed down, from 3,000 capacity ‘atmospherics’ (hugely ornate art deco cinema halls that often doubled as theatres), to the inheritors of ‘Penny Gaff ’ spaces (earlier cinemas with smaller capacities).62 This meant the creation of an enormous material and structural surplus as former cinemas were either converted into other commercial ventures or left to deteriorate, strewing British high streets with misshapen enterprises housed in vast auditoria or more likely, providing neighbourhoods across the UK with a local ruin.63 This was the broad historical shift behind Losey’s letters to Goldwyn. Beyond the shelving of Pinter’s ‘domestic epic’ was the symbolic abandonment of the British Cinema in its material form. These were concomitant processes as the same set of financial circumstances saw the rejection of both the textual and the physical spaces of British film – sites of production and exhibition literally halving in their production in less than a decade. Throughout the 1970s, just like the Proust project and its refusal to fit into episodes, the cinema was being compromised into segmentation in order to make way for the birth of mass television audiences, who demanded greater choice and accessibility. The ‘drop

Some more on cinema stats: In 1946, cinema gates totalled at 1,635 million admissions, twenty years later in 1966 the number had fallen to 288 million, with the number falling even further in the 1970s. Stuart Hanson notes that there was a remarkable 500 million fewer admissions in just ten years from the mid-1940s to the 1950s, where cinema attendance still found itself in the billions. British Film Institute, BFI Film and Television Yearbook (London: Concert Publications, 1983). 62 David Atwell, Cathedrals of the Movies: A History of British Cinemas and Their Audiences (London: Architectural Press, 1981). 63 Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen, p. 122. 61

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wall conversion’ was the most common form of this subdivision, where a false wall was built underneath the balcony of the auditorium, creating an insulated space on the ground floor where two smaller screens were installed.64 A look at the number of screens, as opposed to physical cinemas in the UK, confirms this change. In 1969, there were 1,581 screens available and in 1984, this number had remained at a fairly consistent 1,271.65 A direct result of this was that by the mid-1970s, most people lived twenty miles away from their nearest cinema, and were instead much more likely to live in close proximity to one of the reclaimed cadavers that once exhibited films. It was clear that economic retrenchment had created a material symbol of decay that had, in turn, become a metaphor for not only the changing behaviour of the masses, but also the cultural surplus that was being generated elsewhere, the countless scripts, plots, characters and mise-enscène that would never see the light of a projection box.

The rise and rise of Cine-Bingo The architect Maxwell Fry declared in 1975: Cinemas – those really dreadful by-blows of unawakened commerce that failed to achieve a total form of any consequence, but merely added to the corruption of the High Street.66

Fry’s moralizing scorn, like Billington’s contempt of the big brash blockbuster, again provides an indicator of a broader historical consensus.67 In the 1970s, Odeon closed down half their suburban cinemas in London. The few survivors either limped on into the 1980s or received reinvestment. The year 1975 saw Gaumont alone close twelve cinemas in one month.68 Besides the drop wall conversions and the twinning and tripling of screens in conventional Both volumes describe the drop wall process: Allen Eyles, Gaumont British Cinemas (Burgess Hill: Cinema Theatre Association, 1996); Atwell, Cathedrals of the Movies. 65 This was a loss of only 310 screens, as opposed to the more significant 899 actual cinema sites that had to be closed or redeveloped. Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen, p. 122. 66 Quoted in: Atwell, Cathedrals of the Movies, p. 2. 67 Fry’s dislike of the cinema comes from a rich pedigree of cinema-bashing. T. S. Eliot compared its rise to the death of indigenous Melanesians, who he claimed were ‘dying out principally for the reason that the “Civilisation” forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom. When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas … it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilised world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.’ http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/london-letters/london-letter-1922-12. html [accessed 27 August 2015]. 68 Eyles, Gaumont British Cinemas, p. 167. 64



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large-capacity screens, cinemas were either sold off or began to diversify the uses of their space. From the beginning of the 1960s, when the 1960 Gambling Act relaxed legislation around betting and leisure, the major cinema circuits took a serious interest in transforming their redundant cinema spaces into other leisure facilities. Auditoriums were converted into Bingo halls, pubs, restaurants, iceskating rinks, bowling alleys, or supermarkets. Often the guests of honour at the opening of the building were the film stars who were once projected on their disused screens.69 The Rank Company, owners of Gaumont Cinemas and Odeon, took particular interest in this, turning their cinemas into dance halls under the Majestic Ballroom name, and into Bingo halls eventually under the formerly independent Mecca Bingo banner. ABC, Granada and Essoldo soon developed their own cine-bingo outlets.70 The Pavilion Theatre at 58 Shepherds Bush Green was one such cine-bingo site.71 Sitting next to an earlier and much smaller cinema, Pyke’s Cinematograph Theatre at 57A Shepherds Bush Green, the two theatres, little and large, evolved and morphed with the times. The two sites adjacent to the former music hall, the BBC Concert Theatre (now a music venue) and the Shepherds Bush Empire, display all the hallmarks of change undergone to the cinema industry since the 1970s. Their facades bear the timeworn wear of conversion and neglect, having accommodated a variety of uninvited guests along the way, that included a variety of commercial name changes, Second World War bombings, Mecca Bingo, a Walkabout Australian themed pub, rumours of a redevelopment, a hotel, over a decade of dereliction and The Cinema and Theatre Association’s archivist, Clive Polden. Pyke’s Cinematograph Theatre was built in 1910, and the immense Pavilion Theatre followed thirteen years later in 1923. The Pavilion, designed by Frank T. Verity, was intended for Israel Davis’s circuit of cinemas and was equipped with 2,776 seats, 1,450 in the stalls, and 850 in the balcony with an auditorium designed in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Built to double as a theatre, the Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen, p. 118. For more on the rise of Bingo, particularly in its ‘golden era’, and the advent of Mecca Bingo see Carolyn Downs, ‘Mecca and the Birth of Commercial Bingo 1958–70: A Case Study’, Business History, 52 (2010), 1086–1106. For a brief illustrated history see Ian Grundy, ‘An Illustrated UK Bingo History’, http://playingbingo.co.uk/land-bingo/history/02-history-illustrated.php [accessed 22 August 2013]. 71 Today, The Rank Group’s interests consist entirely of gaming, gambling and leisure facilities, with their former dominance in the film production and exhibition industries having been eradicated and then commandeered by what was once a side interest, making use of their abandoned cinema spaces. See: The Rank Group, ‘Rank Group Plc – Home’, http://www.rank.com/ [accessed 27 August 2013]. 69 70

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Pavilion had four dressing rooms and a standard Compton 4 Manual/17 Rank Organ. Upon opening, Verity won the RIBA award for ‘Best London Façade’ for 1923.72 Closed in 1944 due to bomb damage, the interior was entirely rebuilt by Verity’s business partner who reconstructed it in a minimal post-war style with a reduced capacity and the cinema reopening as a Gaumont in 1955. In 1969, the Gaumont name at the Pavilion was replaced with another Rank subsidiary – Odeon. Rank had converted the Pavilion into a subdivided cine-bingo venue, with the balcony as an 800 capacity cinema and the enormous stalls area as a bingo club. In 1971, the Pavilion was renamed Odeon 1 and Pyke’s, also a Rank Cinema, was renamed Odeon 2 and given a new frontage. In 1974, the Pavilion became a Grade-II-listed building and nine years later in 1983, both Odeon 1 and Odeon 2 were closed down.73 The Pavilion continued to host Bingo in its stalls area, while the cinema was left to disrepair. Touted to developers in a series of stalled conversions, the Pavilion was eventually bought in 2003 and Hammersmith and Fulham council eventually approved plans for the 1923 RIBA-prize-winning structure to be converted into a hotel. And at the time of

Figure 4.4 

Eyles, Gaumont British Cinemas, p. 217. Matthew Lloyd, ‘Theatres in Shepherd’s Bush, London’, Arthur Lloyd, http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/ ShepherdsBushEmpire.htm [accessed 22 August 2013].

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writing, the conversion of the Shepherds Bush Pavilion is going ahead.74 Pyke’s, an Australian themed Walkabout Bar for seventeen years, was sold in 2014.

Unfinished afterlives II: Projecting projections in The Shepherds Bush Pavilion Little archive material remains of the various incarnations of the Pavilion. The Cinema Theatre Association (CTA) mainly holds photographs and news cuttings sent in by CTA members who live in and around the Shepherds Bush. Aside from these, the only material remains in the archive of the CTA is an anonymous A4 envelope of documents taken from the cinema in the late 1990s by the CTA archivist Clive Polden. Here, Polden explains how he came across the documents in an email: The CTA go on visits to areas of the country, giving members the chance to look around old cinemas either operating or long closed. There was such a trip to the Shepherd’s Bush area and we visited the other two former cinemas alongside the Pavilion and then sent off elsewhere looking at cinemas. The cinema had been closed for many years and it was very strange to walk up the long silent escalator which was thick with dust to enter the foyer, where there were some abandoned posters on the floor. … In a side room from the foyer was the bar area, and the bar was still there. I also rescued a Pepsi cup from there. Just a plain paper cup, but of the era it shut down. Behind the bar were some cupboards, nothing else in it except this envelope and slides. I showed them to others present, and we found it very interesting that such material had been created by Rank at that time, and a copy had ended up here, and was about the only thing left behind before it was closed down. It was thought highly likely that it was part of a presentation aimed at the very least at the management of the cinema, if not the day to day staff, and must have been at least around the time of closure, when many cinemas – even this recently modernised cinema – were shutting down.

He then qualifies his archival ‘repossession’ by stating that the CTA does not take things from old cinemas as a matter of course, and I cannot think of anything worth taking on any of the many other cinema visits Chris Underwood, ‘Shepherd’s Bush Pavilion Starts Next Month’, Shepherd’s Bush, 2012, http:// shepherds-bush.blogspot.com.es/2012/02/shepherds-bush-pavilion-starts-next.html [accessed 28 August 2013]; Adam Courtney, ‘End of an Era as Work Starts to Turn Shepherd’s Bush Pavilion into Hotel’, Fulham and Hammersmith Chronicle (London, 12 March 2012).

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I have attended. We knew even then that the area would be redeveloped one day, and so felt it best to liberate the items for the archive.75

The documents rescued from the Pavilion are eleven overhead projection slides from a single presentation, forming an incomplete sample of the much bigger text. As Polden notes, they were probably to be delivered by a senior representative from the Rank Company, who had been given the unenviable task of explaining why the cinema at the Pavilion had to close.76 The slides fall into two types. The first group are three slides that were originally meant to display a series of photographs of cinemas with explanatory captions, but have since had their images removed. The second are a series of maps, graphs and diagrams detailing the geographic and statistical decline of the Rank Company’s cinema holdings in the 1970s. The first group’s slides contain three pages of missing photographs, resulting in a series of captions suspended at various points around the smudged acetate sheets. The floating lines of capitalized text describe what the missing images once exhibited – recycled cinema spaces. One can only assume that the slides were once part of a photographic display created by the Rank Group, illustrating what their former cinemas were being turned into once they had converted, sold, or simply abandoned them. The slides, like the cinemas they represent, are ruins. First, in their own material deterioration, but also as a symbol – as the set of texts embody the physical decay caused by the industry’s economic plight. A page numbered ‘12’ has a caption declaring that the photo it no longer displays is a ‘Cinema Used as a Bingo Hall’. Plate 5 of the same page shows ‘Acton Odeon Closed in 1975 Now a Diy Superstore’. Empty image placement brackets are suspended alongside captions that now read as unintentional non-sequiturs, framing the vacant space on the plastic sheet like involuntary quotation marks. Page 10 has two empty plates, summarized in their entirety by one brief and wholly politically incorrect caption: ‘a cinema in Southall now owned and run by Asians’. On the final page, we are shown further blank spaces that apparently once displayed ‘garage at a former Chiswick cinema’ and ‘discount furniture warehouse formerly Southall Odeon’. The paradoxical clusters of floating text are at once cursory and unthinking, yet grimly systematic; they evoke a particularly nasal beadledom that narrates the remains of the slideshow. The fragments also Clive Polden, Email Correspondence, 18 August 2013. Mecca Bingo, however, in the stalls area of the Pavilion, was to continue well into the 1990s.

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Figure 4.5 

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Figure 4.6 

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display a careful linguistic depiction of each cinema. Non-Odeon cinemas are referred to simply as ‘Cinema’, while the brand name Odeon is used somewhat symbolically when it comes to their own theatres, embedding the company’s fortunes at the heart of a broader narrative of plight. It would have left no doubt in the minds of the despondent ushers, usherettes, projectionists and duty managers enduring this presentation, that the Shepherds Bush Pavilion was next on the list. The once bold and glamorous ambition in the acronymic origins of the Odeon name (Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation) had been forced to make way for unexplained ‘DIY superstore[s]’, ‘discount furniture warehouse[s]’, and the mysterious commercial enterprises of ‘Asians’. However, the full range of inscriptions are not just the text or exposed placeholders, but the visual journey of the slides themselves. The dirt, fingerprints, scuffs and smudged print illustrate a history of use and lifespan – what Craig Dworkin calls the ‘visual noise’ of blank film: the texture, performance and distribution of the document as visible as the text itself.77 As a consequence, the sheet acts as a pellucid textual connection in a sequence of projected abandonment: the sheets quite literally a projection of projections for an audience of projectionists. Fittingly, the last film shown at the Pavilion was The Twilight Zone. The bracketed spaces on the translucent pages provide another symbolic absence on the sheet. As a space marked for an image, the areas are meant to delineate another time space – images of the future and recent historical changes to the cinema – a future where newer commercial ventures render the business, but not architectural space of the Pavilion, obsolete. The brackets operate as a time within the other distinctly marked usage of the slides – yet importantly, have had their images removed, marking a kind of lost time. From this perspective, the slides present an inverted formulation of Proust, just as the ruins of Llano Del Rio did, to the rewritten text of its constitution. Superficially, there is a ‘discursive surround’ to a text without a centre, a series of annotations that have lost their images. But, upon closer inspection, this is a literal inversion of the unfinished project: As cinemas slowly disappeared from the high street, these pictures were removed from their placeholders, the blank space of the slides speaking to their former use. As a result, the mimetic nature of the shelved or abandoned cultural form comes into play with this set of documents, a repeating trope, as the form and Craig Dworkin, No Medium (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2013), p. 135.

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content of the discarded idea reflect and interact with its surroundings and formation, creating a genre of text where the work’s composition and authorship can be attributed as much to its circumstances of production as it can to its particular creator. The partiality of the text is typically symbolic of the hasty abandonment that led it to sit dormant for nearly twenty years. The brackets, once invisible edging for images, have become its main focus. The missing images evoke an invisible sense of a future that has been removed, creating an implied or missing text, analogous to Marcel’s much anticipated literary work in The Proust Screenplay, or the unfilmed feature itself that Pinter refers to in the introduction to the published edition. As a consequence, even in this presentation, the unfinished or abandoned project is anchored with an implied absent work – renegotiating the conditions for contextualizing, articulating and reading the remains of shelved ideas and discarded cultural forms, binding unfinished and abandoned work to their authors and historical moments. The second set of documents shows Rank’s statistical and geographic assessment of the scale and rapidity of the abandonment of the British cinema. A map illustrates the spread of decline across the UK, while graphs and charts display the moribund appeal of the cinema in the 1970s. It wouldn’t seem balanced to highlight missing or silent discourses in a text where so many pages are missing themselves, but from the remains of the sheets, the second grouping provides an insight into the internal discourses of a company central to the desertion and mismanagement of a national industry. One of the most striking impressions is that of all the pages left of the presentation; the sheets that remain are all exclusively negative, describing only the decline of the industry. There are no sheets offering a plan or a strategy; there is no alternative to this landscape of monochromatic deterioration. Charts displaying ‘urban hierarchies’ and statistical ‘paracmes’ are included. Perhaps the term ‘paracme’ is symptomatic of the authorship of the document. The word, now classified as ‘archaic’, means: A point or period at which the prime or highest vigour is past; (in early use) spec. the point when the crisis of a fever is past.78

The Rank Company appeared to use archaic language to understand what was fast becoming archaic business model. The displays and graphs expose a self-conscious language of defeat, a mapping of their industry’s decay, displayed to their employees in agonizing detail as they picked apart their own decline. ‘Paracme, N.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press), http://0-www.oed.com.catalogue. ulrls.lon.ac.uk/view/Entry/260597 [accessed 2 September 2013].

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Figure 4.7 

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Figure 4.8b 

The other graphs show a glimpse of Odeon’s explanation for the fall in cinema attendances. One sheet has a chart displaying the rise of colour television licenses and its correlation to the closure of cinemas – and in the process also confirming Stuart Hanson’s contemporary observations regarding the consistency of screen availability compared to cinema closures. The timespan of the graphs, specifically the graphs charting TV licenses and cinema closures along with the decline of leisure services, corresponds precisely to the change in the British film industry’s fortunes. From the tipping point in the late 1960s recognized by Barber, Shail and Higson, to the period of Joseph Losey’s unsuccessful phase campaigning for financial backing for Proust, the years of the screenplay’s composition to publication (1972–7) show the sharpest decline in cinema sites. As a consequence, the production timeframe of The Proust Screenplay becomes an accurate historical measurement. The screenplay’s lifespan transposes directly onto the material rejection that spread throughout the urban landscape, meaning that during the dissemination and rejection of the text, cinemas were changing, evolving, or sinking in dereliction. From this, a topography in motion emerges, where the circulation of the material text and the rapid abandonment of

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Figure 4.9 

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Figure 4.10 

the cinema work in accord: Proust scripts were sent out and returned with their comments to and from Pinter and Losey’s base in London, to their colleagues around the country and throughout the rest of the world, while a wave of ruination spread throughout Britain’s high streets. In a bookend to the period, June 1984 marked the summer of Britain’s lowest ever cinema attendances and the death of Joseph Losey.

Continuous performances in text and landscape Clive Polden’s overhead projector (OHP) displays speak to The Proust Screenplay. The very act of their discovery, their textual construction and the statistical admission of their own downfall narrates the cultural background to Pinter’s unfinished work. Both texts are conscious of their material discontinuation, the slides possessing a similarly unsettling sense of conjecture as Proust – the framed photographs absent from view, offering annotations to invisible images. To bring these texts together is to shed light on the moment where the discursive surrounds of different abandoned works overlap and reveal new readings of each other.

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From another perspective, the absences presented in this chapter foreground Rancière’s notion of the ‘gaps of cinema’ and while this quite literally presents several gaps in cinematic texts and spaces, they also demarcate theoretical openings within the wider field of film studies. These can be condensed in the way that ‘gaps and extensions make cinema overflow itself. These “gaps” are precisely what make it excessive in the sense of extending the questions and experiences it produces to other “non-cinematic” fields.’79 It is through this idea of ‘overflow’ or the culture’s ‘plurality’ that the two texts speak to each other.80 Expressed in a more abstract sense, the film-maker Chris Petit describes the narrative spaces of cinema as ‘rooms or locations’ where narrative rooms merge with physical space to become a fragmented continuum of memory and time: These rooms or locations subscribe to the network of associations that form in the movie-colonised collective unconscious. They are lucid and opaque at the same time, transparent and mysterious. … Rooms become containers of memory and film moments; they become a museum, in memory of cinema. … We are more in the world of Chris Marker’s La Jetée in which a man is sent back from the future to try and make sense of the past. Sent into rooms that are about time and erased memory, with cinema the bridge between.81

For Petit, ‘Cinema’ is the bridge between time and erased memory. It is a process in which the screenplay and the consumption of the final film in the theatre all serve the same purpose as the exposure of film’s transformational potential to an audience does. This diffuse totality of the cinema’s form is evident everywhere in the cinematic process – it is hard to imagine a scenario where the creators of a film would not reflect upon the possibility of the film being seen, and likewise the audience in a cinema not consider the components that constructed the film they are watching. Both groups are somewhat aware, or even sustained by the expectations of the other, despite rarely coming into contact, situated on the polar ends of a film’s creation and reception. Within this framework, the intriguing OHP sheets salvaged from an abandoned Odeon, present an industrial film text that forms part of the same process that both produced and excluded Pinter’s

Sudeep Dasgupta in the endnote of Rancière’s text. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Gaps of Cinema’, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, http://www.necsus-ejms.org/the-gaps-of-cinema-by-jacquesranciere/#_ednref1 [accessed 13 April 2015]. 80 ‘Questions for Jacques Rancière around His Book Les Écarts Du Cinéma: Interview Conducted with Susan Nascimento Duarte’, Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2 (2011), 197–8. 81 Chris Petit, ‘Cinema’s Afterlife’, Film Comment, June 2009, pp. 52–9.

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Figure 4.11 

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interpretation of Proust. These two works, therefore, are distinctive appendages of the same whole, in the belief that their textual similarities as the lost beginnings and the expired ends of the cinematic process are no coincidence. Within this broad view of both texts, a striking observation occurs when considering their mutation of one of these extremities – the life of the cinemas themselves – as it begins to provide a historical framework to understand the function of the shelved text and the afterlife of The Proust Screenplay. Engraved on the wall of Pyke’s Theatre is the cinema’s original slogan from 1910: ‘Cinematograph Theatre, Continuous Performances’ – a motto that prophetically depicts the fortunes of the two buildings for most of their existence. The Shepherds Bush Pavilion shifted from film exhibition, to bingo, to dereliction, to a hotel, with Pyke’s enduring a similar path of abandonment and change. This is a transformation that still runs through Britain’s high streets, where churches, pubs, restaurants and offices occupy the husks of former cinema theatres. Polden’s archaeological find in the ruins of the Pavilion, and the relevance of the resulting texts, could be attributed to the ‘fundamental ambiguity’ Andreas Huyssen assigns to the ruined structure, fortifying the temporal and conceptual slipperiness appointed to them by so many others before and after, Schönle, in particular, noting that the deteriorated structure provides ‘ruptures’ in seemingly coherent social orders. These discourses surrounding ruins and fragmented material culture provide spaces where history, ideology and the often destructive nature of urban and social forms occur simultaneously.82 Subsequently, the narratives within the Pavilion’s ruins show how commercial enterprise adopts, appropriates, or abandons these structures, leaving a distinct sense of change or morphology driven by the creative destruction of capital, as the carcasses of former industry are used to house newer enterprise.83 Essentially, tracing this parallel branch of decline provides a template of how to see the afterlife and role of The Proust Screenplay and possibly other unrealized and unfinished texts. Proust joins the two theatres in this process of morphology, with its gradual cycles of adaptation and renewal. While publicly abandoned as a polished script, in private, the work was given a tacit existence in Pinter’s letters, from

Andreas Huyssen, ‘Nostalgia for Ruins’, Grey Room, - (2006), 6–21; DeSilvey and Edensor, ‘Reckoning with Ruins’; Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity. 83 Mike Crang, ‘Urban Morphology and the Shaping of the Transmissable City’, City, 4 (2000), 303– 15; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Wiley, 1989), p. 17. 82



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personal interchanges with interested parties and academics, to the persuasion to publish the unfilmed script, to his unpublished letter in The Guardian. Then the text emerged once more in the public sphere, perpetuated in new forms, firstly as the basis for a BBC Radio adaptation and later as a stage version at the National Theatre in 2001. In this respect, the screenplay’s form proves to be closer to that of a play as opposed to a film after all its textual structure, lending itself to a formulation of the possible, rather than a text tied to an event that never happened. Here, Pinter’s ‘domestic epic’ receives new interpretations and a renewed cultural function, where former properties and characteristics integral to the qualities that defined the script as an unrealized project are reused and appropriated. Notably, Pinter’s technical, mise-en-scène and audio instructions to Losey in the original script became more than an unrequited dialogue, as they were converted to Pinter’s spoken narration in the screenplay’s radio adaptation.84 This effect according to The Pinter Review was ‘surprisingly assimilable, and made more so by Pinter’s voice. … [a]s messenger of its para-text (the film), it had an effect which Pinter intended: that of drawing attention to the occluded beauty of the potential audio-visual realisation.’85 The lack of published reviews of this two-hour long radio special on this occasion is down to fortune rather than its unfinished state, however, as the performance was broadcast on New Year’s Eve. Likewise, in the stage version, previous textual features that defined The Proust Screenplay as a ‘great unmade film’ were appointed to become theatrical devices, or edited out accordingly – the theatrical production showing a considerably pared down version of the text; the opening montage reduced to a few fleeting references, the instructional tone scaled down, leaving only the text and a patch of yellow wall remaining. These extensions of Pinter’s original adaptation create textual echoes, providing adaptations of adaptations. If the creative dialogue between original and the adaptation had been achieved in the first draft, these subsequent editions proved to no longer be in direct dialogue with the work of Proust, but with adapting itself, the author further adapting his own adaptation, and the text actively reproducing itself as a result. Conveniently sidestepping this complex authorial lineage, however, the front of the published play attributes the authorship to

Robert Hanks, ‘Giving Proust the Pinter Treatment’, The Independent (London, 17 May 1997), http:// www.independent.co.uk/voices/giving-proust-the-pinter-treatment-1262063.html [accessed 21 October 2013]. 85 ‘The Proust Screenplay on BBC Radio’, in The Pinter Review Annual Essays 1995 and 1996 (Tampa: University of Tampa, 1997), pp. 186–8 (p. 187). 84

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Proust and the adaptation to Pinter and Trevis.86 Inside though, we see that the biographical note contains a belated reply to Pinter’s original introduction of 1978, the 2001 edition noting that this is no longer a speculative claim: He [Pinter] worked with Joseph Losey and Barbara Bray on the screenplay for À la recherche du temps perdu. The film was never made but the screenplay was published and performed on radio.87

Eventually, after radio and theatrical adaptations, the presence of Barry Joule conflated the public and private fates of the Proust project, his documentary unwittingly capturing Pinter’s final public moments with his Proustian year. The playwright stared suspiciously at some frenzied daubings on top of his text, purportedly by Francis Bacon. The screenplay that had only a few years earlier been renewed with radio and theatrical adaptations was now presented as vandalized remains of his past. To reprise a categorical distinction made at the beginning of this chapter, the ruin and the unfinished project provide interesting ontological opposites. This book is concerned with the remains of origins, not the remains of endings – yet both present a set of creative terminations, which, when taken into focus, allow a view of marginalized and often backgrounded cultural forms. The textual morphology we can see in the history of The Proust Screenplay was more visibly experienced by the material remains of 1970s’ picture-going; and its analysis follows this opposing ontology, which is underscored by the fact that they are also the beginnings and ends of the cinematic process, from creation to exhibition. Both sets of texts provide each other with inverted paradigms, as it seems that the unrealized work and its fluid qualities are based on the potentiality of the text, in its conjectural or blank space. These texts, like Proust, offer the genesis or unfulfilled emergence of an idea, the catalytic basis of something that can subsequently be reshaped or reformed. The ruin, in its diminishing framework, integrates or accommodates the forms of another in its timeworn shell.88 Despite the fact that both offer similar experiences of incomplete readings and, to some degree, negotiate or adopt new functions, they remain in very distinct historiographical categories. It is clear that the ruin is fetishized and adapted as the material or conceptual remains of the past Harold Pinter, Remembrance of Things Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. Front Cover. Pinter, Remembrance of Things Past, p. i. 88 See Kerstin Barndt, ‘Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures’, in Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity, pp. 270–93. 86 87



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Figure 4.12 

that reside in the contemporary. The unrealized, however, is adapted because it is the embryonic contemporary, rooted in the past. This sense of a lost contemporary originates from the abstract sensation that unfinished projects are in an eternal becoming, that betrays typical expectations of form, narrative and history. This critical state, that in the case of The Proust Screenplay, is legible at the surface level of the text. The work’s constant reference to its own negative literary space, or put more simply, the film that will arise from Pinter’s text, inadvertently articulates its creative and historical function to the reader. It displays the unfinished project’s work as a material and critical blueprint, silently constructing history while simultaneously absent from it.89

Nick Thurston’s summary of negative space from Blanchot and Mallarmé elucidates Blanchot’s original work. Nick Thurston, Reading the Remove of Literature (York: Information as Material, 2006), p. 166; Blanchot, The Space of Literature.

89

Figure 5.1 

5

The Frugal Charade: Ideas for Books in Literary Archives

The slush pile George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, written in 2008, comprises seven chapters, each dedicated to a different incomplete project. Steiner’s subjects range from chinoiserie, to Zionism, to a study of the lengths of school terms. His single-page foreword simply states: A book unwritten is more than a void. It accompanies the work one has done like an active shadow, both ironic and sorrowful. It is one of the lives we could have lived, one of the journeys we did not take. Philosophy teaches that negation can be determinant. It is more than a denial of a possibility. Privation has consequences we cannot foresee or gauge accurately. It is the unwritten book which might have made the difference.1

The foreword resurrects the popular image that an unfinished book is a spectral or ghostly apparition, or in Steiner’s words, ‘an active shadow’. While the quoted passage is meant in a metaphorical and provocative sense, it is unconvincing that Steiner’s abandoned work The Tongues of Eros – during which Steiner declares, ‘I have been privileged to speak and make love in four languages’ – haunts his published work in quite the fashion he describes.2 This aside, Steiner is actually making a similar claim for the influence of the unfinished work as this chapter, grounding his point in philosophical logic (negation’s ability to determine truth in logical propositions) and claiming that the function of a creative, structural absence plays a crucial silent role in shaping the outcome of completed work. Nonetheless, the descriptive terms Steiner uses in the passage demonstrate that the logic of negation doesn’t sit particularly easily with the more practical George Steiner, My Unwritten Books (London: Hachette UK, 2013), p. i. Steiner, My Unwritten Books, p. 84.

1 2

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realities of unfinished projects. According to Steiner, unwritten books can be described as ‘privation’ or ‘lives we could have lived’. He believes that an unwritten book’s effect is entirely metaphysical, and as if to confirm this, the front cover of the 2014 reprint of My Unwritten Books shows two bookends propping up an empty space, where Steiner’s incomplete volumes are supposed to sit. In other words, according to Steiner’s introduction, books are either written or unwritten; they either exist or they don’t. Very rarely in My Unwritten Books does Steiner point to any research notes he may have drawn up, or some opening passages he has sketched out. His unfinished projects exist in conjecture, overhanging his finished work. One possible reason for this is that Steiner refers to them as books, as bound published objects to be placed on a shelf and admired from his desk. Here, the literary marketplace provides a useful threshold of selection to identify either ‘written’ or ‘unwritten’ books, and this is at the heart of Steiner’s ‘shadow’ of privation. It is an assessment that overlooks the subject of this chapter: how one can interpret the fragmentary material remains of inchoate literature. Despite Steiner’s implicit assumption – that all seven of his ideas would have automatically been publishable as books – he is no stranger to the experience of having a significant amount of work rejected and going unpublished. Within the archives of publishers Allen & Unwin are decades of reader reports, where numbers of typed or handwritten sheets of A5 paper reporting on works of fiction, literary criticism, history, or topics of special interest are kept in messy batches in cardboard boxes. It was a strange coincidence then that one of the first pages pulled randomly from the top of one of these consignments, dated 12 December 1954, was a reader’s report for an academic book entitled The Decline of Tragedy by a ‘Mr. G. Steiner’. Here is an excerpt: I am afraid I cannot advise its publications as a book. … It is far too long and discursive and repetitive, and it is written with very little grace or distinction. Also the subject is against it. Who wants verbose analyses and discussion of bad tragedies? I could say more but I expect you have heard enough. What weather! Yours very sincerely, J.A.K. Thomson.

It is public knowledge that the first draft of what was to become The Death of Tragedy was rejected.3 But in My Unwritten Books, Steiner doesn’t seem to Maya Jaggi, ‘George and His Dragons’, The Guardian, 17 March 2001, section Books, http://www. theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/17/arts.highereducation [accessed 25 November 2014].

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appreciate that, for a long time, he carried his thesis around with him as an unpublished and unfulfilled work, tinkering and fiddling with it, eventually giving it a more dramatic name (Death does sound more dramatic than Decline). That is to say, Tragedy was Steiner’s first ‘unwritten book’; but the hundreds of typed pages and its origins as a bound thesis must have proved to be more tangible than a mere ‘shadow’. The style of the reader reports, especially from the time of Steiner’s submission to Allen & Unwin, feels particularly harsh. Their terse, caustic delivery is attributable to the secrecy of the genre. It is the most private form of criticism, and as a category of literature, it meshes contemporary critical opinion with the market forces it serves, being written in industrial abundance and on most occasions pointed towards the commercial merit of the work. Within the archives of reader reports, readers can be publishing professionals or authors themselves. For instance, an ‘Avant-Garde’ contemporary of B. S. Johnson (who will feature later in this chapter), Eva Figes, has her reports on mainstream fiction for Longman filed in the British Library, elucidating an entirely experimental writer’s thoughts on romance, popular history and thrillers. However, reports don’t just offer diversity in genre; they are written by publishers, editors, journalists, academics, fiction writers and sometimes non-literary professional specialists. And from the archives available to the public, it appears that during the latter half of the twentieth century, those writing English literature’s criticism in public were also writing a more candid version in private. A study of this relationship might demonstrate an interesting duality in literary history. For example, in the William Collins, Sons (now Harper Collins) archives, we can see Ernst Gombrich’s sardonic assessment of an Italian encyclopaedia of fictional characters, mooted for translation into English: I have looked at the two Mompiani volumes and I am afraid we spent quite an irreverently hilarious evening over them … Vol. VIII is even funnier. It lists personages of fiction, of mythology, of ‘comics’ and of the cinema in the most capricious way imaginable … I liked best the translation of ‘animal crackers’ [in an entry on the Marx Brothers] as ‘biscotti per animali’ … certainly the work has no standard whatever, and need not be seriously considered.

Alongside critical grandees like Ernst Gombrich and his wife Ilse Heller having a laugh at ‘comics’, the archives of reader reports show the mounds of humdrum summaries and appraisals written by professional readers spending their time engaged with often totally unpublishable work. The sheer quantity makes it hard to ask the questions that come to mind while scanning through each report (what kind

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of books couldn’t get published in the 1950s?) without having to engage with some seriously quantitative research that may be tangential to the point at hand. Instead, particular readers come to the fore, their reports offering a real taste of what it was like to undergo a professional reader’s eye. One enjoyable example is Jill Wadham, whose reports fill the Collins papers from the 1950s. Wadham is particularly acerbic in tone, destroying submissions in summaries that often only run to a couple of paragraphs. At points, Wadham’s commentaries seem a little unhinged as she chips away at the coalface of unpublishable texts. But her cutting reviews are not without humour. Wadham’s works from 1954 to 1955 include the following takedowns: Gossip and Old Graves by Jane Owen: This is a dreadful book – a pretentious account of life in Paris … the style is so appalling and meretricious and the characters … so pale and unstimulating.

Stone Hearts by Charlotte Morrow: This is a sickening book full of pretention and pseudo intellectualism. It is the ghastly story of a girl, Loire Eden, and her thoroughly boring relationships … I feel that it should be intoned very slowly with an oboe solo accompaniment. It is the worst possible example of Bloomsbury affectation.

Kingdom Come by R. W. A. Cook: This is no good at all. It is a boring, pedantic, pompous and unfunny book. It is all too trivial and silly for words.

Stony Lonesome by Scott Hart: Stony Lonesome is the most ghastly, awful book all about dreadful Americans, their hopes, hatred and sexual intercourse.4

It goes without saying that none of the books from these reviews have found a place in the British Library’s legal repository list,5 and they probably have Jill Wadham to thank for their literary ruination. However, I am sure Wadham would defend her assessment of each book, as the unrelenting severity of Wadham’s slush pile criticism is there for a purpose: to demonstrate to her editor just to what absurd extent these texts were unpublishable.6 However, Miscellaneous Articles by Commander A. H. Barton seemed more up Wadham’s street where she declares: ‘I enjoyed all of these…’ 5 For publication in Britain, at least, Stony Lonesome was published in the United States. 6 The reasons for rejecting texts and the selectivity of post-war British publishing houses are without doubt also related to a broader range of cultural (snobbish) reasons, however. For a more detailed study see: J. A. Sutherland, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 4



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However, from just a cursory survey of readers’ reports, the underbelly of the literary trade, it is plain to see that there is more to literary culture than the works that are presented to us in bookshops. And, with this in mind, this chapter attempts to explore this with an investigation into the vestiges of leftover or abandoned ideas in writers’ archives. It first must be said that these are not entirely the same thing. In fact, there have been studies identifying the differences between ‘unfinished’ and ‘incomplete’ texts – the former being a deliberate literary strategy and the latter a professional or more often than not, mortal, workplace hazard.7 I do not make these distinctions, not because they aren’t important, but because the circumstance of the text and the function of the unfinished remains are unaffected by these points, as when approached en masse in an archival collection, they naturally categorize themselves, in differing and often anecdotal ways. Instead, it is their function as unfinished beginnings that will be taken into focus here, exploring how these ideas set contiguous discourses and histories into relief. I have used two writers’ papers: Muriel Spark and B. S. Johnson. Both are sharp, economical writers who historically overlap and have left or donated publicly accessible archives. Within each collection, the aim is to unearth and explore the lives of their sketched out ideas, and for the form of the abandoned idea to be addressed in its various shapes, lengths and sizes. And so in this way, I have inverted both author’s sections, using Spark’s abandoned projects as a pathway to her notes and jottings, and B. S. Johnson’s expletive-ridden scraps of paper as a segue into his larger, inchoate plans, and works. In this sense, these sketches provide the most distilled formulation of the abandoned work, examining for the initial moments where the unfinished idea on the page is first inscribed – and then left unresolved. How can we critically locate or read a poetics of the abandoned text? This is an exploration for the traces of fragmented designs in archives, discussing the technical features of the negative text: the unfinished stories, the rejected proposals and the varied and erratic inscriptions sitting behind literary publication. What are the ways we can think about unfinished texts as operating within what Rajan called ‘an environment of indeterminacy’?8

Ballachandra Rajan wrote an extensive poetical analysis of this phenomenon in the 1980s: Ballachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 8 Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished, p. 3. 7

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Spark notes Muriel Spark’s semi-autobiographical novel Loitering with Intent (1981) sees young aspiring writer Fleur Talbot attempting to complete her first novel, Warrender Chase. To support herself, Fleur takes a job as a typist for The Autobiographical Association, a club consisting of ten wretched aristocrats trying to write about their lives, overseen by Fleur’s employer, the scheming Sir Quentin. Spark’s novel is ripe with the notion of unfinished and abandoned work. The Association holds all ten members’ unfinished manuscripts in Sir Quentin’s apartment, which Fleur edits and exaggerates, in order to generate a little interest in what are otherwise woefully written efforts. Then, at home, Fleur attempts to complete Warrender Chase, dipping into her experiences at The Autobiographical Association for inspiration, as her work for Sir Quentin and her fiction begin to chaotically entwine. In its unfinished form, Warrender Chase appears to affect Fleur in the sense reminiscent of Steiner’s remarks in the previous section, as Fleur confesses: ‘I had my unfinished novel personified almost as a secret companion and accomplice following me like a shadow wherever I went, whatever I did.’9 Again, the unfinished work appears as a shadow, although this time not hanging over the finished, but as an invisible presence amid the everyday life of its author. Yet, the incomplete work doesn’t only exist as a spectre for Spark, it changes form. Fleur later admitted: ‘I had a novel, my first, in larva’. Spark’s cunning description alludes to more than the reader could otherwise appreciate. While Warrander Chase becomes a disembodied stalker to Fleur, for Spark, Warrender really was ‘in larva’, as her papers reveal that Warrender Chase was more than a fiction – it was a work of autobiography buried deep inside the text.10 Eventually, Fleur finishes a draft of the novel, only for Sir Quentin to steal the manuscript and somehow block its publication. Warrender Chase is shelved, and Fleur Talbot must move on to her next book project. Strangely, this does not seem to dishearten the author too much, as Fleur’s idea of the uses of abandoned work had been elucidated earlier in the novel: I looked out an unpublished poem by which I set great store even though it had been rejected eight times, returning to roost in my own stamped and addressed

Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent (London: Hachette UK, 2013), p. 42. Etymologically, Larva finds its origins as both a grub and a ghost ‘Larva, N.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/105914 [accessed 22 December 2014].

9

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envelope among my punctual morning letters, over a period of a year. It was perhaps because of its outcast fate that I felt an attachment to it.11

Here we see unpublished, unseen work being reread and discussed, along with the author feeling a sense of attachment to its ‘outcast fate’. This gives us more insight into the novel and the narrator’s thoughts on unfulfilled work than we might at first realize. This might be because Warrender Chase wasn’t just the shelved novel of Fleur Talbot, Warrender Chase was also the first unpublished novel of Muriel Spark. In the words of Spark’s biographer, Martin Stannard, Spark used Loitering to transform ‘the narrative of her own tortured life during these years into one celebrating triumph over adversity, self-belief justified. … It was a cathartic act, another goodbye as she entered her seventh decade.’12 Stannard’s interest lies in the idea of Spark using the novel form to rewrite and revise an entire period of her life, whereas, for the purposes of this study, it is just as interesting to see Spark not rewrite, but reuse and repurpose unpublished work written thirty years before, in a process of auto-metafiction, using unfulfilled works as a resource. In this sense, the unfinished texts belonging to The Autobiographical Association provide a tacit recognition of the literary practice that went into making Loitering with Intent. Unfinished, unpublished and abandoned works appear elsewhere in Spark’s texts, often thanks to the ‘economy of her … disturbing metaphysical wit’.13 In Spark’s short story The Executioner, a writer dies and leaves his estate to be managed by his niece. An unfinished novel is left among his papers and the niece attempts to sit down and finish the story, only for the deceased author to communicate from beyond the grave through the manuscript papers, telling her to stop writing at once and hand over the manuscript to the local university archive. The story’s brief, matter-of-fact moral: that unfinished work may well be worth leaving unfinished, highlights Spark’s approach to unfulfilled texts; that indeed, they are haunting, shadowy creations, but also in a pragmatic sense, they are valuable textual resources for the author, and when you’re dead, they might just add a bit of posthumous cultural and financial capital to your archive. It is in this notion of Spark’s ‘economy’ of the metaphysical that we see her repeating the same literary strategy once more. Spark’s creative prudence Spark, Loitering with Intent. Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: The Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), p. 444. 13 Patricia Waugh in Muriel Spark: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, ed. by David Herman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 64. 11 12

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ensured that she had only abandoned a single novel in her whole literary career. In fact, she abandoned the same novel twice: first in 1975, and a second time in 1980. Unlike Warrender Chase, a complete but unpublished text, Spark’s only discarded incomplete work is a meticulously researched epic historical novel, entitled Watling Street, which, true to her textual frugality, finally reappeared in her 1996 novel Reality and Dreams. Reality and Dreams, according to Stannard, also holds strong overtones of autobiography. The novel focuses on a successful womanizing film-maker, Tom Richards, who has recently fallen out of a crane while on set for his latest film, and the novel follows a largely unsympathetic group of family members who rally around the also unsympathetic Tom during his recovery. Stannard’s parallels of Richards and Spark ring true, but it is the insertion of the abandoned Watling Street that provides an entryway into the further discarded jottings of Spark’s process – revealing a host of terse, abrupt and imaginative brainstorming. In the build-up to the inclusion of Watling Street in Reality and Dreams, we can see Spark play with metafictional references to the creative process throughout the novel, in a practice similar to her approach in Loitering. From the beginning of the text, Tom has a project in constant development, the title of which changes from chapter to chapter. What starts as a film called Hamburger Girl soon becomes A Near Miss, which in turn morphs into The Lump Sum, then (and I am sure humorously to Spark) Unfinished Business – before finally becoming Watling Street.14 The similarity between the fictionalized Watling Street and the bundle of notes in Spark’s papers that constitute the project is unsurprisingly analogous, but possibly not without some revisionist tweaks from the author(s).15 Perhaps Spark felt a greater duty to do her abandoned research justice than she did towards the completed but unpublished Warrender Chase. Watling Street was an historical novel set in Britain, and took its name from the Roman road that ran from Canterbury to St Albans. Probably the best way of describing the project is from the mouth of Spark’s protagonist Tom Richards: My new film … is set in Roman Britain towards the end of the occupation, around the fifth century A.D. I have this centurion, he really doesn’t want to Spark’s reference to her own unfinished business with Watling Street will have remained a private joke to herself and her circle, until her papers were made available to her biographers and the general public. 15 There are small differences, Stannard claims that the project is set in the third century AD in her research, while in Reality and Dreams, Spark changes this to the fifth. 14



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uproot himself, Britain has been his family’s home for over two centuries. His brother and cousins are mainly civil servants and might stay on. … He’s married with children, He has a servant, a Celt, a native of Britain. That’s what the story is going to be about, mainly.16

Classic Spark tropes run through the premise Watling Street, as described by Tom. The Celt has powers of foresight, and can see ‘the Field Of The Cloth Of Gold, the building of Versailles, the discovery of Florida’ among other things; while the narrative is also led by the centurion’s wife, who is ‘a strong hard woman. Fierce’.17 A visit to the archive of Spark’s work on Watling Street necessitates a trip into the uncatalogued sections of the Muriel Spark collection at the National Library of Scotland, to a shelf holding folder 11621/3. Nearly half of her collection remains unsorted, so the papers are, as Spark left them, in box files with Penelope Jardine’s and Spark’s own writing running down the spines. Inside, bundles of paper are held together with rubber bands or stuffed into plastic folders. While research notes and drafts run through different boxes, and also into other collections (many of Spark’s papers are in the United States), her Watling Street notes are often inside or among her notes for Reality and Dreams. The two works have been materially and fictionally conjoined, or rather, her finished project has cocooned her abandoned work, permanently trapping it ‘in larva’. This means that, to date, Spark’s only other major unfinished project also lies incubated within her published work. Spark’s main Watling Street box has a hardback copy of Reality and Dreams resting on top of the research notes, perhaps as a retrospective marker, or headstone, for her years of study. The research itself constitutes the bulk of the boxes. The depth of Spark’s enquiry into Roman Britain is extraordinarily academic in its forensic attention to detail: The box contains numerous maps, lengthy bibliographies of somber historical works, alongside pages and pages of photocopies from various antiquated encyclopaedias. Team Spark had been on the case for five years, mainly in the London Library, and the few boxes available in the archive seem to be just a glimpse into the depths of their efforts; the extent of which, especially for a novelist who ‘wrote minor novels deliberately’,18 seems too big, too unwieldy for a typically Spark novel. There were no lengthy Muriel Spark, Reality and Dreams (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 125. Spark, Reality and Dreams, p. 127. 18 Robert DeMaria Jr, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher, A Companion to British Literature, Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature, 1837–2000 (New York: Wiley, 2013), p. 381. 16 17

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Figure 5.2 

manuscripts in the boxes drawn out of the collection, other than chunks of text on stray bits of paper. One notably declares: In the writing of a novel one has to be the reader and the writer. The question of names. With a huge cast, one begins to wonder – who are these people? One looks back. This is wrong. The writer should be courteous.

We do not know whether this is a chunk of fiction, text from another source, or Spark composing her thoughts on the project for correspondence – it is a found text. It is unlikely to be from a novel set in third-century Britain, however,



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so perhaps some speculation might be worthwhile here. Spark appears to be not just befuddled by a ‘huge cast’, but confounded by their identities. With a huge cast of characters, could Spark have been trying to break out of her intentionally ‘minor novels’? Could the ‘courtesy’ of the writer that Spark mentions relate to a sense of discipline required in writing an epic novel, or even some level of resistance to the breadth of the project presenting a tension between her usual economic prose and the sprawling expanse of the historical novel? What is interesting about this text is Spark’s discretionary and open writing practices. Whether or not this chunk of text was meant for correspondence, it is apparent that the author was self-narrating her process and producing concurrent texts alongside the central work of Watling Street. This parallel writing practice, directed away from research or prose directly intended for the novel, often proves to be more interesting than otherwise thought and complicates literary archives. Often disregarded, or only read when produced as a variation of what appears in the final text of a novel, this extramural writing reveals the births of multiple other ideas: fragmentary, momentary, ephemeral designs for literary works. There are masses of these unused jottings and abandoned fragments, often patched together and left unused. In fact, most of the Reality and Dreams boxes are filled with whole sheets of abandoned notes and jottings that are entirely irrelevant to her finished and unfinished work. Below I will show some examples, but firstly, in the piles of seemingly irrelevant notes bundled among Watling Street’s research, here are the ones that appeared in the novel: If you die, I’ll kill you Story The Lump Sum within a story (the film)

These typed micro-texts sit alone in the middle of the page. ‘If you die, I’ll kill you’ was eventually reworded to become an idea for one of Tom Richards’s films, eventually called ‘I’ll Kill You If You Die’. Likewise, The Lump Sum was one of Tom’s titles before Spark settled upon the self-referential Watling Street. This sense of progress, from inscription to typing, to revision, to insertion into a draft of the novel, is the kind of textual and conceptual progression and deviation that manuscript critics observe, as they offer a discernable teleology of revision and process. But, while texts of this kind are included in these notes, it is texts in the following quotations that prove more interesting, as they provide evidence of Spark’s abandoned textual practice. From the Reality and Dreams boxes, the texts below were an uncatalogued wad of typed up one-line notes that contain ideas,

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characters, premises and aphorisms all typed in the centre of a set of otherwise blank A5 pages. Here are a few examples:19

Girl talks to plant. Parents, who by the nature of things can’t win, were tolerant. Arrive to see aunt. Learn of family plot to cheat them (& her).

Mother Son & Daughter A new man The father a great bore. Their relief when the mother finally deserts husband for the interesting new man.

Letters and invitations. Plenty but from Top People. Too late.

Bring him a bunch of flowers (fancy name)

PLOT Theme ‘Mary (a sweet character) is taking legal action against someone who is accusing her of being associated with a spy-ring during the Seventies. The defence claims that she has given freedom to her biographer to say what she likes without interference.’

I have boxed off the quotations that appear on a single page to emphasize their distinction from each other.

19



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The Frugal Charade Novel Medical team Father and son.

The mother a singer. Where did she go? A scholarship? But was she murdered?

Expensive cosmetic creams: the racket.

A people’s art is a corrupt art? cave art

Redundant like a spare bedroom not in normal use.

people who are like branch lines. Little trains. One-way train-track. Wait for the other to pass (or have a collision)

The notes vary between fragments of dialogue, plot outlines, or simple images. Perhaps most rounded is the premise of The Frugal Charade – a novel featuring a father and son medical team. One imagines the father and son in the back of a speeding ambulance, bickering over the body of a patient in cardiac arrest. The title,

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one acknowledging frugality, almost anticipates the previous observations of Spark’s meagre word counts and salvaging of unfinished research. This form of writing is not specific to Spark’s research on Reality and Dreams, as within her catalogued collections are files such as Folder 14 of her archive, entitled ‘Random Ideas 1970s and 1980s’ – where Spark had amassed further writing, possibly not to use as a resource, but instead to preserve as nascent texts in their crude form. One key difference in this sub-collection, however, is their catalogued state. The texts retain their form – one or two typed lines on an otherwise blank page – but have their item numbers written on the back. The texts are left with a curatorial trace upon their fragmentariness, framing their enigmatic historical value in their non-use. From this folder, the following examples stand out. The stresses in the underlining are Spark’s:

Overheard in a restaurant: If three of them share a bed-sitter in Earls Court – which they do – they’re doing very nicely, thank you.

Here a sheet marked The Cultural Attaché contains a single line:

“you look as if you’ve had a late party”

Or in turn, a page without a title contains the following block of text:

Of course, how charming!; the ‘No, I’m afraid not, I am so very sorry, I’ll be away, in Munich, in London, I have to see my mother’; one ‘yes, I quite agree, these awful people with their arty dress…! the ‘yes, I know, these bloody bourgeoises with their bland mink coats’; the ‘Do come it will be simply charming, I look forward so much.’; the message to the secretary ‘Tell them I’m away writing a novel, Mrs S. regrets, will be delighted when she gets back’ And at table, at the parties, all the English gush; bubble, bubble, bubble. I laugh at the social anecdotes, I add my bit.



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Then there is the beginning of a story entitled The Side Effect consisting of two pages, the first stating:

In Stratford Lauskrouet on the days that he was miserable, thought that his misery would last forever

And the second, a developed version stating:

Stratford Lauskrouet, attorney, on the days when he was miserable, thought his misery would last forever. It was November and the snow had started to fall over tall Manhattan.

It is at this point that Marjorie Perloff ’s description of what it is like to examine some acutely inexplicable sections of Beckett can provide an analogous methodology to the reader’s situation: To read enigma texts like these is rather like being sent out on a snipe-hunt, that popular children’s game in which the players disperse in the dark, equipped with pillow cases, flashlights, sticks, and a set of rules, in search of birds they know are not to be caught. Not product as in the treasure hunt but process is the key.20

Perloff ’s observation is suggestive. Firstly, these are ‘enigma texts’ and therefore offer an indefinite and indefinitely complex malleability to their interpretation. Secondly, and crucially, these texts are entirely about process – in that they are the consequence of the authorial process, but also that they demand writing about. This leads to a broader moment of reflection held in Perloff ’s analysis – where she effectively claims that, in looking, one will be able to find answers in the production of one’s own text, rather than discover the oracular solution that lies behind The Side Effect or The Cultural Attaché. It might be the way we write about unfinished projects, as much as what they are directly signifying, that is most revealing. Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 208.

20

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Genetic defects: Between drafts and fragments What kind of texts are The Side Effect, The Frugal Charade, or Spark’s untitled dialogic writing? Are they notes, marginalia, or even poems? How does this collateral creativity fit into notions of process and literary production? How we can situate this kind of writing – in particular, ideas for texts that were never made, or Perloff ’s ‘enigma texts’ – as a subject of literary enquiry? To do this, I am going to counter both Steiner and Spark’s personal assertions that the ‘shadow’ of unfinished work overhangs their process, by arguing the opposite. Within literary studies, it is more common for attention to be paid on the textual telos of the creative process and the finished text – the emphasis on the final work eclipsing the various drafts, plans, trial runs and extraneous ideas that are inevitably created in the process. While the Spark excerpts above are unusual texts to discuss on their own, certain types of archival notes and sketchbooks are very popular. The published form of notebooks, diaries, or even unfinished works – think Pound’s notes and drafts, Benjamin’s Arcades, Tolstoy’s doodling, Coleridge’s notebooks, H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, or Sontag’s word-processed list-making – all share a similar textual form: a few lines floating around a page with a distinct impression of textual isolation and fragmentariness.21 However, what is particular here is the abandoned premise. These are largely narrative propositions from an author, or snatches of ideas that may appear in texts more obliquely – in dialogue, in images, or in description. Some may not be solely narrative in purpose, but nevertheless, it is writing that arrives in conjunction with the creation of a literary text. It is in this sense that it is important to hold on to some aspect of the telos of writing, in order to sustain an impression of the multiple directions of process and composition – that this telos can be iterated not just in a great succession of drafts and revisions, but also in spasmodic oneoff or singularly performative expression. This is partly what distinguishes the notes above from the published fragments of intellectual greats. Many published fragments (the Arcades or Coleridge’s notebooks, for instance) appear critically Lovecraft’s commonplace book is possibly the most similar to Spark’s quotations above, excerpts here: Bruce Sterling, ‘H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book’, WIRED, 4 July 2011, http://www.wired. com/2011/07/h-p-lovecrafts-commonplace-book/ [accessed 12 January 2015]; in Art, Literature | November 14th and 2014 1 Comment, ‘The Art of Leo Tolstoy: See His Drawings in the War & Peace Manuscript & Other Literary Texts’, Open Culture, http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/the-art-ofleo-tolstoy.html [accessed 17 November 2014]; Jeremy Schmidt and Jacquelyn Ardam, ‘On Excess: Susan Sontag’s Born-Digital Archive’, The Los Angeles Review of Books, http://lareviewofbooks.org/ essay/excess-susan-sontags-born-digital-archive/ [accessed 31 October 2014].

21



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canonized. Instead, attention is paid here to idea-making in its most fragile and nascent form, exploring notes as a space of writing, not just a disordered storage unit of things to put in novels, or the aphoristic jottings of great minds. Paul Valéry’s fragmented, broken notations in his Cahiers often concerned themselves with the process of making, which, as Robert Pickering notes, sought to see the arts as an ‘action – as creative act, development or performance – rather than as finished work’.22 It is this notion of the writing process as a fragmented act, rather than a continuous cause and effect production line of drafts, that really defines the Spark texts. Valéry was deeply concerned with the origins of textual production, and at various points in his Cahiers stressed the multiple starting points of literature, describing the writer as ‘the man who apprehends everything, or nothing, with an anxious sense of the possible, the useable’. He later identified a clear purpose for the unfinished surplus of creation which, in its state as a variation, can be reusable to its creator, ‘To press this defect, this disorder, this surprise, this reject, this trifle this asperity this coincidence, this slip … into the services of their opposites.’23 Within his reflections concerning process, Valéry notes the sense of luck, or fortune that comes with making initial notes or inscriptions for ideas: Exploiting the lucky stroke. The true writer abandons his proposed idea in favour of another that comes to him, while he’s seeking the words for what he wanted – the new idea suggested by the very words themselves. He feels that he has become more powerful, and even more profound, thanks to the unforeseen play of words – but whose value he recognises instantly – that is, its benefit to a reader: this is its worth.24

The ‘lucky stroke’ for Valéry was the inspiration of a new idea subsuming the old, establishing the notion that in any creative beginnings, a collection of origins must provide a footing so that a concurrent, shifting process of idea-making can grow. This unique perspective on the methodology of crafting text found Valéry many years later as one of the cornerstones of what came to be known as Genetic Criticism, the study of a literary work’s ‘coming to be’.25 It was in the early 1970s that Jean Bellemin-Noel’s notion of the ‘Avant Textes’, ‘the totality of the material written for any project that was first made public in a specific Paul Valéry, Cahiers = Notebooks, 5 vols. (Frankfurt am Main; Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), ii, pp. 15–16. Valéry, Cahiers = Notebooks, ii, p. 99. 24 Ibid, p. 98. 25 Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes, ed. by Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 6. 22 23

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form’, proved the first great methodological jump for Genetic Criticism, in the search of a science of the creative process.26 If we move forward to more recent critical work, Sally Bushell claims there is still something of a ‘denial of origins’ among contemporary literary criticism, which French genetic critics and their Anglophone compatriots try to address, attempting to provide a nuanced approach to textual composition, beyond the strictly editorial judgements of textual criticism.27 It appears that Genetic Criticism may be of use in classifying and describing Muriel Spark’s cast-offs. Its tools and methodologies feel as though they could be applied to her work The Lump Sum or The Frugal Charade. A genetic study of Spark’s abandoned work could periodize her process into different stages of composition, and look at her textual production across novels. It might show to what degree Watling Street differed in manuscript form to the rest of her work. So too might studies into her practices of revision in Warrender Chase and its relationship as unpublished and then published fiction, offering insights into the stylistics of self-editing to see how Spark’s prose makes thrifty use of unfinished work. Genetic Criticism could also cross-reference her published and unpublished projects, Sally Bushell claiming that the multiplicity of textual production or ‘roads not taken’ interest genetic critics as supporting data, as does the incomplete, which sets the complete text ‘in relief ’.28 The unfinished or abandoned work provides a sense of ‘meaningful variation’ into textual production, highlighting the contingency of composition, but also appealing to a more nuanced sense of process. Yet, within modern manuscript theory, the attitude towards the openended jotting or unfinished draft remains implicitly orientated towards finality. Genetic Criticism needs an endpoint and multiple antecedents in order to generate the momentum needed to identify a text’s ‘becoming’ and most of these Spark records exist in a single drafted state. It only appears useful as a way to set Spark’s work ‘in relief ’ with her published work, presenting these sketches as a digression from a central text, rather than the central object of study.29 Deppman, Ferrer and Groden, Genetic Criticism, p. 31; or, in its unarranged, uncatalogued form ‘Le Dossier’: Jonathan Smith, ‘Authors, Avant-Texte, Archives’ (presented at the Cataloguing Creativity Conference, British Library, 2013), http://glam-archives.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/JonSmith.pdf. 27 Sally Bushell, ‘Textual Process and the Denial of Origins’, Textual Cultures, 2 (2007), 100–17 (p. 107). 28 Di Biasi borrowed the terms from Debray-Genette’s Essais de critique genetiqu. Pierre-Marc De Biasi and Ingrid Wassenaar, ‘What Is a Literary Draft? Toward a Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation’, Yale French Studies (1996), 26 (p. 42). 29 Deppman, Ferrer and Groden, Genetic Criticism, p. 4. 26



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Hannah Sullivan’s note on the unfinished draft highlights both Genetic Criticism’s strengths and oversights: Texts that openly and purposefully advertise their status as drafts elude the difficulty of finishing. … ‘A Sketch’ is accordingly a kind of anti-work, produced without any of the constraints of completion and totality that the real artwork might demand.30

Perhaps a self-conscious draft from Spark’s archive would be the text with ‘PLOT’ typed above a premise. But does this mean it is a kind of anti-work? A phrase like ‘anti-work’ develops difficult terminological restrictions around these kinds of texts, as surely an artist is unaware of how far a ‘PLOT’ will lead?31 What are the boundaries of Sullivan’s ‘real artwork’? To return to Valéry briefly, we can see how he played with this line of thought, eventually rejecting it and identifying the origins of Sullivan’s impulse to create a theoretically useful, but rather troubling term like ‘anti-work’: One doesn’t create the works one wanted to create – one obeys someone quite different from oneself. Nor does one produce what one was most clearly made for producing. And yet critics call what is produced: You – and your work! – my works on the contrary, are those I have not accomplished and to which I have devoted the most thought in the greatest depth.32

Valéry highlights a dualistic weakness in Sullivan’s ‘work/anti-work’ dichotomy in a sense similar to the flaws of Steiner’s ‘written/unwritten’ definition in the introduction;33 essentially that to identify a notion of process in textual production, the types of text one makes cannot necessarily conform to the appropriation of authorship, intentionality, and importantly, the boundaries of what is defined by critics as a ‘work’. This is not to say that artists are the only ones capable of defining such terms, but taxonomies of literary production lack a flexibility to include the wide assortment of writings generated in the process of creating new texts. Valéry calls for an understanding that ‘work’ is ongoing, intuitive and accidental in nature, with some of the most crucial texts recognizable only to the author. Consequently, the realization that genetics can only partially aid the demands of this enquiry is useful in Hannah Sullivan, ‘Autobiography and the Problem of Finish’, Biography, 34 (2011), 298–325 (p. 314). 31 I have stolen this point off my supervisor, Dr. Joe Brooker. 32 Valéry, Cahiers = Notebooks, ii, p. 263. 33 Though Sullivan’s is a minor distinction in regard to the broader argument of her article cited here. 30

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its own form of logical negation. It confirms that, in fact, while created in concurrence to her novel, The Frugal Charade is by no means an off-cut or by-product, and is instead an autonomous, stable premise. Furthermore, it is worth positing that rather than being an unfinished premise, these kinds of texts actually might be complete. Is it possible that these capsule texts are the completion of the action of a thought, taken to its natural end? Rather than applying literary forms to the work and describing it as an unfinished premise, it is much easier to read it as the material remains of a thought experiment that has been completed and resolved. It seems appropriate that these sketches be thought of as completed movements, instead of imperfect plotlines and dialogue; Spark’s work suspended in the middle of the page like a crystallized act of unfinishing, expressing narrative incompletion with a confident and resolved motion.34 This would seem commonsensical when one considers that the notebook is a space of experimental writing and expression. Perhaps unfulfilled sketches in notebooks are not ‘anti- works’, but a space of anti-writing, a space to write out an oppositional text – to deviate in an essentially private and personal writing space. In this way, drafted premises aren’t works or sketches that are unfulfilled in their realization; it is a process of writing into the unknown – more like a process of actively incompleting an idea – as mentioned previously in this project, where the purpose is to merely make text, and not necessarily demarcate it into separate works. It could be construed, therefore, that these texts exist to render incompleteness – or to use an OED description for the word as a verb: ‘destroy the completeness’ of a thought, and to create with it, a material reminder – that conversely due to the finality of the action – it is complete.35 This sense of tension, of writing an idea out of one’s head that arrives in the form of an inchoate narrative sketch, yet is fully complete as an action of writing, and is reminiscent of the feeling of textual ‘resistance’ in literary fragments. There are other questions that Genetic Criticism seems yet to have approached. What of the drafts and genetics of non-fiction, or other kinds of writing, imaginative, or otherwise? Or writing from other periods or kinds of people? Why is it just the same group of mega modernists? Does this not perpetuate the canon and selectivity of archives? It also appears that within Genetic Criticism, a reflexivity of the social construction and limitations of archives seems absent from the debate. 35 In adjectival form, the definition of ‘incomplete’ is misleading – it states that an object is ‘not complete; not fully formed, made, or done; not whole, entire, or thorough; wanting some part; unfinished, imperfect, defective’. The same goes for ‘unfinished’, included in the definition for incomplete. Hence what may be classified as a genetic defect by some might in fact be the action of an oxymoronic process of incompletion. ‘Incomplete, v.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/93719 [accessed 12 January 2015]. 34



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Let’s consider ‘PLOT’ along these lines: PLOT Theme ‘Mary (a sweet character) is taking legal action against someone who is accusing her of being associated with a spy-ring during the Seventies. The defence claims that she has given freedom to her biographer to say what she likes without interference.’

Why is this text an unfinished fragment? Firstly, the content of the story refers to a narrative structure and detail that remains to be written. It is a framework that sits embedded within an implied narrative. Yet, as an action, as a piece of writing, it is entirely finished. The exploratory and intuitive act of writing out the idea has passed, and it rests in the unrevised form that it was destined to take – no more substantial than a brief shopping list or a note to oneself. Moreover, the inchoate jotting defines itself as an act, imbuing itself with a sense of autonomy – it is not dependent on the wider teleological process in which it was created (in this case Spark’s novel Reality and Dreams). In the words of Dan Mellamphy: ‘Fragments are not part of other things. They are not part of wholes. They are resistant to this and this sense of resistance is part of their ontology.’ Spark’s story of Mary in the unnamed ‘PLOT’ exists in this state of resistance; it is both an unwritten plot and a piece of writing entitled ‘PLOT’. Hans-Jost Frey breaks open the question of the fragment accordingly: What makes the fragmentary – and generally the literary – text resistant to control is that not everything can be captured in relationships. What cannot be mastered in texts is what cannot be integrated, what cannot be absorbed by either a logical or rhetorical relation: what is unrelated.36

In the introduction of Frey’s book, Georgia Albert notes that the fragment ‘poses a problem for any literary scholarship or hermeneutics invested in virtuosity’,37 which, in this case, shows the problems that Spark’s notes pose for Genetic Criticism. Dan Mellamphy continues, remarking, The fragment as fragment (frangere), is, eternally, unfinished – it is never whole, nor (following this very logic) a part of any given whole. It becomes not any stable being, but the being of becoming … the fragment as fragment is abandon-meant.38 Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 33. Frey, Interruptions, p. xi. Dan Mellamphy, ‘Fragmentality (thinking the Fragment)’, Dalhousie French Studies, 45 (1998), 83–98 (pp. 92–7).

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Mellamphy’s quip almost explains away the practical application of critical work on fragments, detaching it entirely from a sense of writing or process. After all, while genetics may to some extent invest in virtuosity, its approach on intentionality aims to undermine a different kind of hero-worship, namely the ‘paradoxical sacralization and idealization of … The Text’.39 The critical insistence that the fragment exists purely as an unquestionable break from traditional cultural form equally could be enhanced by looking at the story of fragments – rather than reading their obscure and pointed shapes from just a surface reading. In conjunction, the two discourses touch upon different elements of Spark’s notes and produce a generative academic dialogue, inviting different structural and percussive interpretations for Spark’s scattered blocks of text. Genetic Theory is complimented by the theorization of the fragment – the fragment’s abstracted, staccato sense of a break posing an interesting exchange with genetics’ more fluid notion of process. Spark’s notes and the excerpts of Johnson’s work below offer a fine line that traverses both isolated fragments and the writing process. The texts are a meeting between splinters and scraps in one tradition and with drafts and method in another. One could use either critical lens to examine their work more closely, but instead, it may be preferable to show how each approach can shine a light on the text in cooperation. Therefore, the following section sees the unfinished project as an access point to read abandoned fragments not as the process of textual production but as an account of the author and perhaps even a particular moment in time. These remains provide a window into an encounter between creativity and lived experience – between the everyday and the art of experiment.

B. S. Johnson’s big ideas B. S. Johnson in conversation with his contemporary Alan Burns: JOHNSON: Muriel Spark when asked, ‘How do you write a novel?’ replied: ‘I write down the title, and underneath that I write “A Novel by Muriel Spark”. Then I put “Chapter One” and I start writing.’ BURNS: When she says that, she’s hiding from her questioner or from herself as a subconscious process she would prefer not to understand. JOHNSON: If that’s so she, like Beckett, should refuse to be interviewed.40 Deppman, Ferrer and Groden, Genetic Criticism, p. 5. The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods, ed. by Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), pp. 93–4.

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Johnson and Burns clearly found this comment from Spark disingenuous or evasive. Had Johnson seen The Frugal Charade, he might have changed his mind, as both authors’ archives contain similar forms of textual debris. Their key difference is that Johnson has swathes of unwritten projects, neatly filed away (Spark may have been more economical, but Johnson was more organized), and so his archive develops the subject of this chapter from the domain of Spark’s capsule narratives and scribbled notes, to much larger ideas, knitted together, creating larger project-based texts consisting of drafts, correspondence and fieldwork. There are clearer methods at work with B. S. Johnson than there are with Spark; the writer had strong and belatedly modernist principles that he was sure underpinned the function of the novel. Johnson knew what his method was and what his note-taking meant. He called them ‘Ah’ moments: BSJ: All my novels start from a moment – when I said ‘Ah! There is a novel! I can make a novel out of that!’ The process of writing is a confirmation of that moment of recognition, and so far that’s never been a moment unconfirmed. AB: Do you note down images or ideas? BSJ: Essentially they are pictures. AB: Something seen? Or remembered? Or dreamt? Or imagined? BSJ: All of this, though I don’t dream much. I may see something, or something comes into my mind that has passed the filter of memory, and thrust its way to the surface, for reasons I’ve never understood. That’s what Trawl is about. AB: There is down there, a mass of useless junk mixed up with things of value: how do you distinguish the good stuff from the bad? BSJ: Empirically, by whether I use it or not. There’s some wastage. At the end of each novel there’s always a pile of material, bits of paper not used, which goes back in the files, available for future novels. I don’t throw anything away. The house is overflowing with bits of paper.41

It is sometimes possible for Johnson’s work to be broken down into ‘Ahs’. Inadvertently, you can observe this quite literally in his novels. He inserted the word regularly into his work. In Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs he writes: ‘How to express it? Ah!’ before entering into a burst of descriptive text. 42 In a moment of The Unfortunates we also see Johnson savour a cheese and onion roll in a pub: ‘I enjoyed it, the crispness and the soft dough Burns and Sugnet, The Imagination on Trial, p. 87. B. S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 84.

41 42

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and clinging cheese. Ah’.43 In his papers at the British Library, Johnson’s ‘Ah’ moments find themselves everywhere, just as he describes. There are lots of these ‘bits of paper’ in the two files used in this section, often written on receipts or ripped corners of notepaper. Many of them are marked with headings like ‘Idea for Novel/Play’, usually followed by a single handwritten line, sketching out a premise of a man who has a job and goes mad, or a play about luck, where everything goes relentlessly right for once. They are not accommodated in the deliberate and splendid surroundings of Spark’s notes, typed up in the middle of a blank page of A4. Instead, the autographed quality of Johnson’s rushed scrawls on torn notepaper conveys the charismatic force and professional bitterness for which he has become posthumously famous. There is an aggression in the way these paper-thin premises are rushed out. Particular film ideas include a feature about a ‘man who does not want to do anything twice’ and ‘A telefilm about weather’. Other notes are bold statements: ‘The cinema is not real especially when it is being most realistic (documentary)’. Some are just images, or sequences of images: ‘Nude statue of lady with arrow in chalk pointed at her crotch’ or ‘film about cars – long held shots as close as possible – music – then say how ugly they are’. When reading these records, one notices almost immediately that, unlike Spark and even unlike Johnson’s clipped sentencing in his published work, these ideas seem almost fully formed. These could all be the first sentences of a play or a book, dashed off quickly to create the easily dismissible gloss of fiction (or ‘lying’)44 under which Johnson sheltered his confessional prose. They are paperthin, premises. These scraps of ‘Ah’ moments could almost be an entire novel’s worth of fiction for Johnson, were one to remove the ‘truths’ from his texts. Also entertaining are Johnson’s hand-drawn crossword puzzles consisting almost entirely of rude or dirty words. Of these, one of the most accomplished is a crossword that seamlessly interlocks ‘Fuck’, ‘Stench’, ‘Tit’, ‘Arseholes’, ‘Raw’, ‘Grind’, ‘Wank’, ‘Piss’, ‘Love’, ‘Sweat’, ‘Prat’ and finally ‘Bed’ into a wobbly biro grid. The questions to these answers, however, remain unwritten and therefore, unfinished. The handwriting of that particular crossword is hard to read, but it appears to have been completed ‘during boring Harrogate Festival, 1969’. It happens that the Harrogate Festival in 1969 featured William Burroughs, B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates (London: Pan Macmillan, 1969), p. 6 of booklet beginning ‘then he was doing research’. 44 Johnson was convinced that fiction was a ‘lie’ – ‘Fuck all this lying!’ B. S. Johnson, Albert Angelo (London: Pan Macmillan, 2013). 43



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Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Marcuse as guest speakers. Things may have been getting a little surreal or theoretical (all lies) for Johnson’s taste, suppressing a little too much of his beloved ‘truth’.45 The files under scrutiny in this section are Johnson’s unrealised book and television proposals. These comprise two folders in his papers, divided between television and film. They are half developed projects, abandoned in their working process, forming texts and ideas that consist of woven together ‘Ah’ moments. As a consequence, after perusing these files, his ‘Ah’ moments really become easier and easier to spot in his longer ideas; Johnson’s writings suddenly dissolving into thousands of paper fragments, his body of work revealing itself in the little bits of paper that comprise his archive. In Like a Fiery Elephant, Jonathan Coe notes that one of the ironies, or dishonesties, of literary biography is that it is impossible to tell what Johnson was doing when he was actually writing his novels. In other words, we have no idea who B. S. Johnson was when he was undertaking the one thing he was famous for.46 When Johnson was doing anything but completing a book, Coe was able to produce biography. If Johnson was getting drunk with another writer, composing an angry letter, or appearing on television: these are all moments where his life could be traced. As soon as he starts to write, however, Johnson disappears off the record. Yet, note-taking and incomplete ideas may, in an indirect sense, bridge this gap. Correspondence and note-taking are practices that take place in varied surroundings; they bring the process of writing outside of the writer’s study and into the everyday. As clarified in previous chapters, incomplete projects or rejected proposals reveal unique and personal trails of correspondence. In this way, the following exhibits a halfway point between these states, continuing the investigation into the process or act of incompleting as a way of reading texts and cultural history. Johnson’s files also have the hallmarks of a dual sense of professionalism, explicit in both the filing and the scope of his book and film ideas. His vocational background and commercial training as an accountant meant he was a meticulous keeper of records; so the files in his archive are ordered in

‘FESTIVALS GUIDE 1969’, The Spectator, 22 May 1969, Spectator Archive, http://archive.spectator. co.uk/article/23rd-may-1969/23/festivals-guide-1969 [accessed 26 January 2015]. 46 Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (London: Pan Macmillan, 2013), p. 194. 45

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a methodical and pleasantly accessible way.47 On top of this, Johnson’s desire to propel himself from office clerk to writer is demonstrated in the variety of texts on display in the files: his ideas range from plays, to novels, to screenplays, to children’s dramatics. Subsequently, it is as much an archive of any jobbing professional writer living in London in the 1960s as it is an archive of a ‘one man avant-garde’; most letters to BBC editors and commissioners conclude with ‘can I come in and talk about these and other ideas?’ This means that as much as these files present a panorama of literary abandonment, they also offer an indirect record of Johnson’s social ascension, or attempted ascension, to the position of a full-time writer.48 Grouped together, Johnson’s various ideas for different formats are naturally quite funny. In particular, his list of programme ideas is reminiscent of a wellknown scene from I’m Alan Partridge, when BBC executive Tony Hayers tells Alan that he won’t recommission his chat show, but he’d still be prepared to listen to Alan’s ideas for future programmes, at which point Alan seizes the opportunity to furiously pitch several ideas in one sitting. Programmes including Arm Wrestling with Chas n’ Dave, Youth Hosteling with Chris Eubank, Inner-City Sumo and, most famously, Monkey Tennis are hastily flung at the executive.49 Johnson’s own programme ideas seem at home among these – turning his ‘Ah’ moments into ‘Aha!’ moments. Johnson’s pitches include Fifty-Minute Teleplay with Sports Background, Frankie Howard as Oscar Wilde, Film Vehicle for Cassius Clay, or Kami-Kaze Ninety, a television drama which opens with a terrorist attack on Crufts Dog Show. These programme ideas are a commercial departure from Johnson’s preferred literary territory, as conformity is forced upon the writer as he attempts to reach out to a broader TV audience. Interestingly, although Johnson declared that his description as an ‘experimental’ author was ‘a synonym for unsuccessful’, it seems from these files that his true failings as a writer were in his capacity as a conventional dramatist (See Film Vehicle for Cassius Clay as an example). Aside from this, there are interesting and possibly valuable texts in the files. Some are thinly veiled homages to Beckett (Squash Court Play), and others seem like genuinely missed opportunities (Parade, or the ‘English book’). The following are summaries of his abandoned work, featuring excerpts from some of the highpoints.50 This is also noted by Philip Tew in the preface to B. S. Johnson, Well Done God!: Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson, ed. by Philip Tew, Julia Jordan and Jonathan Coe (London: Picador, 2013). 48 This was not really ever possible, however. Like a Fiery Elephant shows that Johnson’s financial struggles meant he was applying for administrative work well into the late 1960s, during the time of many of these proposals. 49 Steve Coogan and others, Alan Partridge: Every Ruddy Word (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 238. 50 The following are extracts from: London, British Library, B.S. Johnson Archive, Add MS 89001 47



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Proposed film treatment of Travelling People (27.4.1964) Johnson’s treatment is a typed, stapled and hole punched presentation of a possible film adaptation to his first novel Travelling People (1963). It describes how the protagonist, Henry Henry, a student in London, gets a job in a debauched nouveau-riche country club in Wales, before he is unceremoniously fired by the boss and has an unsuccessful affair with his co-worker, Kim. Johnson scribbles out the final line of his digested read: “BUT to quote Simon Raven in the Observer, “simple to lay bare the bones of Mr. Johnson’s novel is to lose the succulent flesh which he covers them” Johnson finishes the treatment noting that the film could be done cheaply with minimal cast and locations – keeping an audience engrossed with the plot’s ‘humour and sex interest’. And that the book demands no ‘re-writing, merely rethinking’.

Film Vehicle For Cassius Clay (1966) Johnson’s next file is a brief three-page film treatment to star the boxer Cassius Clay. Confusingly, Cassius Clay had very publicly renamed himself Muhammad Ali over two years prior to Johnson’s film treatment (he had been known as Muhammad Ali since March, 1964, to be exact).51 However, Johnson, undeterred by this fact, continues with ‘Cassius Clay’s’ film vehicle. Johnson begins his story describing a young, physically powerful, black farm labourer with the name of Cassius Clay, who rises up the ranks of boxing’s elite, thanks to his raw talent and some wheeler-dealing from his shrewd white promoter, Hanson. Clay soon becomes the symbol of America’s turbulent racial politics, marrying a white woman and becoming an empowered black heavyweight world champion. Then, Clay leaves his wife and children, sacks Hanson and begins to fight for an organisation that ‘puts his money to use in the struggle to better the lot of the Negro’. Then, in the last paragraph of the treatment, it turns out that, thanks to an undercover psychological examination arranged by his former promoter-cumgangster manager, Hanson, Clay has been having an incestuous relationship with his sister, Miranda. After his incest is revealed to the psychologist, Clay rushes to see his sister, whom he kills ‘quickly, sadly, with his own hands, and then kills himself ’. Clay is subsequently martyred by the media and turned into a folk-hero.

Thomas Hauser, ‘Muhammad Ali (American Boxer)’, Encyclopædia Britannica: Encyclopædia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/15252/Muhammad-Ali [accessed 6 October 2014].

51

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Proposal for Omnibus: The Masons That Built Chartres Cathedral (15.5.1972) Stapled together are four documents: a brief a note to Mike Wooller at the BBC, and two drafts of an Omnibus proposal: one typed and one autographed. This was one of four ideas Johnson had sent into to Mike Wooller, the letter accompanying asks, predictably, ‘can I come in and talk about these and other ideas?’ Johnson had already completed two programmes for BBC 2 before, The Smithsons On Housing and one on the buildings of Bath. The proposal outlines a very straightforward programme that would detail how the masons of Chartres made the cathedral, their building techniques, and a new historical interpretation that would tie into recent research on the subject. Some autographed notes accompany it.

National Service Play (1973) This bundle is some lined notepaper, marked ‘National Service Play’. The play opens with a song. Apparently, Johnson himself would step out of a line of soldiers and introduce the play (the opening dialogue is spoken by ‘me’) Autograph notes follow of ideas for song titles including ‘Only 484 more days to go’.

Flann O’Brien Idea (1971) This bundle opens with two letters exchanged with Colin Mears, Editor of BBC’s Review. Johnson writes to ask if Mears would resurrect a programme on Flann O’Brien, which had been commissioned and then cancelled six months later by the show’s former editor. Johnson’s letter ends with the classic ‘Could I come in and have a chat about two other ideas I have?’ Johnson also felt strongly that he’d ‘hit on a new way of doing poetry on television’. The files don’t include the actual proposal; instead we just have the hand scrawled notes that would have provided the draft to the proposal. The papers finish with Johnson noting, ‘the object of the film is to make people want to read OB.’



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Squash Court Play Fifty-Minute Idea (undated) This is a brief outline of a teleplay. Two men, both poorly dressed: one 30, the other 60; drifters, layabouts, they are both totally out of place in such a setting and act very strangely. Various events happen. Some squash players turn up and confront them, wanting to play squash. The drifters continue with their business. The film ends with a superimposition of the drifters as they were in the first scene, with shots of squash players playing over the top.

Kami-Kaze Ninety (Working Title) (1972) A series of terrorist attacks on Crufts Dog Show, The Temperance League and a Territorial Army Hut leave the London Metropolitan Police with no leads to catch the bomber. Then, some people are injured in the next attack. A very old man is captured in the process of laying a bomb, and, just before he dies, he gives away key information about his criminal enterprise and his co-operators. At the man’s old peoples home, the warden has persuaded the residents to form a kamikaze club. Here, Johnson notes that, ‘the warden is a nutter.’ Only those confident of their own imminent death join the group, and become suicide bombers at the Warden’s bidding. The warden is captured just before his most ambitious plot – multiple targets hit by multiple old people – is pulled off.

IDEA: Fifty-Minute Teleplay with Sports Background (1972) Johnson opens the treatment declaring: ‘As a sports reporter on the Observer one of the things that interested me was that sportsmen could have been just as successful in a sport other than the one they were playing.’ The plot details how a middle ranking professional tennis player, 22, is sickened at the ‘class ambivalence’ of tennis. He changes sport to football, where he becomes just as successful ‘but at his peak is badly injured: as he lies there, his career perhaps ended, images of tennis (and its comparative lack of injury) pass through his head.’

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Frankie Howerd as Oscar Wilde (c. 1972) The project would be a studio dramatisation of Oscar Wilde’s ‘wit, charm, personality: it might be at a dinner party or some other occasion’ The approach would be: ‘Very Free’, referring to the idea of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ … Johnson remarking of Howerd: ‘If he could be persuaded to play high camp (as opposed to his usual low camp) then it could come off marvellously; and Howerd has played more serious stuff in his time, like Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic a few years ago.’

More Times than Hot Dinners (c. 1972) This is a fragment of a television drama outline about a girl going on a car journey with three men. The plot is as follows: The girl is ‘bashful, tense’. The men are joking around. They park in a field and she poses for near-nude photographs. They return to the car. The girl now chatty, the men ashamed, the situations have been reversed. In the autographed draft, ‘something happens’ is then excised in the typed proposal.

Proposal for Omnibus: AE Houseman This is a proposal for a documentary on the poetry of AE Housman, expounded through the landscape of the Welsh Marches. This may be Johnson’s radical idea to change poetry on the screen. The programme would be interspersed with talking heads assessing and remembering the work and personality of Housman.

Parade: Drama Idea (c. 1972) Parade is a dramatic premise for a parade of shops. A married woman of about 30 visits each shop on a single trip. Johnson phrases this as a ‘war’, inasmuch that the woman taxes the shop’s staff emotionally, demanding conversation, while



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the shopkeepers try to sell as much as possible in the process; creating a kind of commercial war of attrition. Johnson finishes on this note: ‘The theme to be explored concerns the nature of buying and selling; the corruption (in the widest sense) affecting us all in having, of necessity, to sell something of ourselves; the nature of relationships with greed as a main elements on one side, and necessity to eat (in many sense) on the other; the unbalance caused, the waste.’

Living Together (Working Title) (co-written with Alan Burns) Living Together details a community of adults living together on a cooperative farm in the countryside. A series of characters ranging from 16-40 forms an exiled family unit, each character spanning class and social divides. The file’s correspondence mentions an idea for a programme called Dear John, which isn’t in the file.

Santa Cruz Article (1961) This file is mainly made up of small expense receipts for research conducted on an article for The Observer on the Santa Cruz, a galleon that sank in the Armada, in Tremadoc Bay. Johnson mentions this in his programme Fat Man on a Beach as an early professional failure, as he was unsuccessful in gathering information for the article.

Poems by Paul Theroux for Extra Verse (1966) An unpublished book of a set of unpublished Paul Theroux plays. A selection that is ‘personal and arbitrary’ should confirm Theroux’s burgeoning reputation (he was just 24 at the time of Johnson’s writing); Theroux’s poetry already being ‘formed, matured, achieved: and his poems stay in the mind like friends after guests have gone’.

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Drama for Junior Schools (c. Mid Sixties) Bound booklet outlining a pedagogical method to teach drama in junior schools. Two comedic plays of fairy stories are included, written by Johnson.

Collins ‘English’ Book (1969) The bundle opens with a letter from Johnson to his Publisher, Phillip Ziegler, declaring that he had: ‘given long and extremely careful thought … regarding the English Book, and have most reluctantly decided to abandon the project.’ The English Book was supposed to be a selection of chapters about English Towns, formally presented as a guidebook, but actually containing experiential and geographic reflection from Johnson while he travelled around them. However, Ziegler’s carefully worded reply iterates that he had misgivings that an audience would be ‘misled by your presentation into thinking that the material is going to be above their heads.’

The Londoner’s London (1973) The Londoners’ London is a fragmentary proposal to Allison and Busby for a volume of essays about London districts, written by writers either from or associated with the area. Johnson declares each essay shall ‘not consist of accounts of the history and objects of a district, but the experiences of the writer in relation to them and to the everyday business of staying alive and trying to be happy in that place.’ Foot-long strips of heavy paper have lists of ‘villages’ (Greenwich, Dulwich, Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith, Mortlake, Hampstead, Neasden, Finsbury/ Clerkenwell) with names scribbled next to them, ‘Spike Milligan – Finchley?’

Trawl tales Within Johnson’s folders, comedy, drama, correspondence, notes, observations, mundane administrative forms and even peanut wrappers are all arranged together. Snippets of half-baked fiction rub shoulders with fragments of clipped



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lyrical prose and good humour. In these rejected proposals, there are traces of Johnson’s well-known rage and self-aggrandizement, but more often than not, the high spirits of experimentation are in full force. We can see invention and play at work, as each proposal or project is taken to its limit, before an unforeseen chain of events destroys its realization. Reading these files, we can laugh at and with B. S. Johnson. As a collection, the projects read in a montage: at one moment Johnson is dressed as a soldier, starring in his National Service Play; then, pages later, Johnson is speaking to camera in front of Chartres Cathedral for Omnibus; later, Johnson is behind the camera, directing Frankie Howerd as Oscar Wilde, the Victorian sequel to the success of Up Pompeii! (It does seem quite plausible that Howerd’s Pompeii follow-up might have been something called Isn’t He Wilde? instead of the disastrous Whoops Baghdad made in 1973.) While sifting through these papers, particular forms of texts appear in regularity – notably receipts. Johnson filed tens upon tens of receipts in the folders. They are reminders of the fieldwork Johnson conducted, and of how engaged the writer was with architecture and the built environment, visiting the places he wanted to write about. While Johnson is concerned with architecture and place in many of his abandoned projects, there are a few directly about the subject that are worth noting. They include ‘The Masons that built Chartres Cathedral’, Parade, the proposal for an AE Housman Omnibus episode, The English Book and The Londoner’s London. To briefly categorize them, Parade and the Chartres proposal concern structures as key components to the films: Parade a row of shops, and the Chartres programme a straightforward exposition of the construction of the cathedral. The Housman proposal, The English Book’ and The Londoner’s London, like Fat Man on a Beach or The Unfortunates, are concerned more abstractly with space. In particular, The Londoner’s London and The English Book are the richest of these. Uncannily, despite the London book having only two typed pages and some notes (far less material than other projects in the folders), it feels like one of the most developed proposals. Johnson opens the project with the premise of the book on the first typed page: London is too vast for any one person to know; no one writer could write a book about London in the way that (say) Joyce could write a book about Dublin. But twenty-five twenty writers could make a fine book about London, each writing about living his own particular district, village or territory. That’s what the Londoner’s London is … for anyone thinking of coming to live in London, the book will act as a kind of urban catalogue to give him help in choosing which part of London might suit … No one can really know all London; but this book will come closer to it than any other available.

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The second typed page discusses the market, form and length of the book. Most interestingly, Johnson declares each essay shall ‘not consist of accounts of the history and objects of a district, but the experiences of the writer in relation to them and to the everyday business of staying alive and trying to be happy in that place.’ Foot-long strips of heavy blotting paper have lists of ‘villages’ to focus on: ‘Greenwich, Dulwich, Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith, Mortlake, Hampstead, Neasden, Finsbury/Clerkenwell’, followed by autographed and then typed pages matching names and locations: Henry Cooper on the East End, Spike Milligan – Finchley, M Drabble – Hampstead, Gordon Williams – Soho, Burroughs – St James, Lord Snowden – Wapping, H.Wilson – D St, Robin Chapman Betjamen – City, Macbeth – Richmond, Maureen Duffy – South London, Antonia Fraser – Notting Hill, Patrick Ketley – Wimbledon, me – Islington, Sylvester Stein – Regents Park Camden Town

Johnson, of course, appointed himself Islington, but the rest seem like an impulsive, if totally random list of writers – some inserted for popularity, others for literary merit. Henry Cooper and Harold Wilson (a Yorkshireman) were to write chapters on the East End and Downing Street, respectively, while Maureen Duffy is chosen to describe all of ‘South London’. On the face of it, this may look like a hodgepodge of writers and places that might need some greater thought, but simultaneously, we can see Johnson mapping post-war culture, memory and place at a time when it was only starting to emerge in other disciplines.52 Johnson’s English Book is the second major spatial project in the folders, and confirms Johnson as a thwarted literary geographer. It appears that had any of these entered the completed Johnson canon, his literary legacy may have been as much about landscape as it is about experiment and autobiography. But rather than mysteriously expiring, as the London papers appear to, The English Book was actively initiated and then scrapped by Johnson’s editor, Phillip Ziegler, in 1969.53 The ‘English’ file consists of fourteen typed pages detailing a trip to Bournemouth. Alongside this, it also holds receipts and notes from his trip, as well as correspondence between Ziegler and Johnson, where the project is soon Laurence Phillips notes that Johnson’s interest chimes with the post-war reengagement with London’s space and architecture. It is contemporaneous with Ruth Glass’ phrase (a now contested term) of ‘gentrification’. Perhaps Johnson’s London book would have been the first gentrifying text of its kind. Philip Tew and Glyn White, Re-Reading B.S. Johnson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 177. 53 Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant, p. 289. 52



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disbanded. There are only two letters of note, Ziegler’s mostly negative feedback on Johnson’s Bournemouth piece, and Johnson’s curt reply. The fourteen pages included in the file detail Johnson’s observations of the elderly visitors to the coastal resort, punctuated with Johnson’s usual self-reflection and memory. Framed, misleadingly, as a ‘guidebook’ of sorts, the text failed to win over Ziegler, as he saw little in Johnson’s writing that conformed to the function of either guidebook or travelogue. In his reply, Ziegler notes that as a supposedly accessible book about England, Johnson’s prose might initially seem off-putting. An audience would be ‘misled by your presentation into thinking that the material is going to be above their heads’. Johnson scribbles chatty marginalia in the margins of Ziegler’s rejection letter, creating a kind of call-and-response to Ziegler’s criticisms. Ziegler outlines three complaints with the book. Firstly, Ziegler declares that there wasn’t enough preamble or actual information about the place for the prospective visitor: ‘two or three paragraphs of general introduction to each town would ease the reader’s way’. Ziegler suggests that mentioning ‘where Bournemouth is, how to get there, how big it is and what sort of things go on there’ might be a start, while Johnson responds underneath: editor’s – clerk’s job. Ziegler’s second criticism was to keep the book ‘personal, idiosyncratic … but equally I don’t think the author ought to obtrude too much’. Johnson should keep personal flashbacks ‘to a minimum and only used when you feel they are relevant’. Johnson replies: exactly what I have done. The letter ends with Ziegler commending Johnson that he could ‘visualize’ different places very well in an episodic fashion, but that the effect of a series of snap-shots will give them an uneasy sensation of ‘don’t know what the chap’s getting at’. In a novel it is legitimate to expect them to work it out for themselves. … but in a book of this kind I think they can fairly ask to be told rather more about where they are, and have the material arranged in a more sequential and slightly less impressionistic manner.

Johnson replies simply: ‘It is a sequence – what’s wrong with impressionism?’ Johnson wrote two handwritten drafts in response to Ziegler. In the first, he answers the three main criticisms line by line, and the second is just a handwritten draft of the typed version. The first letter offers characteristic Johnsonian indignation, where the flashbacks ‘were essential’, and he didn’t understand how the material could be arranged ‘any more sequentially’, finally concluding: ‘what leads you to believe impressionism is unacceptable?’ For reference, here is one

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of Johnson’s ‘impressionistic’ reflections while standing on Bournemouth pier, in draft form as it appears in the archive: I have never seen anything caught from a pier: except my father hooking out crab after small crab at Southend stamping on them and kicking them back for taking bait not meant for them, the only time I ever remember our fishing … perhaps that is why, perhaps some bizarre retribution has come into effect, from father to son, from him to me, I shall have to wait what I do with my son…

The text was later released under the auspices of ‘What Did You Say The Name Of This Place Was?’ in Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?54 The section above differs slightly from the printed version, where ‘our fishing’ is turned into ‘him fishing’, and the lined out section in the abandoned manuscript was cut, possibly even from the original draft sent to Ziegler.55 Ziegler’s comments, while fairly rational, seem unappreciative of the project’s similarity to the work of other contemporary writers also concerned with space and the built environment. For example, Ian Nairn, while less immediately personal, was no less impressionistic or emotional in his reflections on place. It may well have been writers like Nairn that inspired Ziegler to suggest Johnson could produce a book on landscape. As a point of comparison, this description of Rye Lane in Peckham in Nairn’s London (published in 1966, the same year as Trawl, three years prior to Johnson’s work on The English Book) produces a likeness in his exploration of surroundings: A shoe shop advertises ‘if it’s new we’ve got it’. And I was once in the Hope public house when a stallholder ordered a vodka and tonic, because it was the fashion. His mates stood around and chanted the Volga Boat Song, because all fashions are a bit of a giggle. That’s the sort of place it is [Rye Lane]; and if this mixture is the Londoner’s reaction to the high- and lowbrow pressures we are offered as a standard of living, then we’re going to be all right.56

Their similarity in approach is worth noting. The idea that subjective recall can reproduce the conditions for assessing the spirit, or nature of space, is almost exclusive to these two British writers in their time. For either author, depicting the atmosphere of a pub or describing the involuntary remembrance It is likely that Johnson’s Chartres cathedral proposal stems from the same research as his story Mean Point of Impact in the same collection. 55 Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? p. 53. 56 Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 198. 54



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of past experience were just as potent tools to capture space as any architectural terminology. In another parallel, Johnson’s London book claimed to be a unique ‘urban catalogue’ of the city, an assertion that could quite easily have been made for Nairn’s London, yet the lack of reference to Nairn’s Penguin bestseller shows little appreciation for this fact.57 But, Johnson’s failure to mention Nairn in the file’s scant correspondence doesn’t mean that he was unaware of Nairn’s work. What the collection demonstrates is Johnson’s latent potential to have become a prominent literary and architectural voice, just as likely to have been featured on a constellation between Betjeman and Nairn, rather than the more purely literary company he is classically seen as being ‘outside’ of. Beyond the potential of each idea, or Johnson’s history as an unfulfilled urbanist or landscape writer, is a complex textual reading of the works within the context of each other – a reading arising out of their uncanny fragmentariness and unreliable textual structures as an assemblage of works. There is a lyrical or poetical quality to the writing of abandonment, which again is reminiscent of one of Valéry’s many claims in Cahiers that ‘to create a poem is itself a poem’.58 And one of the most striking features of Johnson’s drafts and abandoned works is its formal similarities with that of his published prose. Stylistically, the selection of works left in these papers appears similar to his micro ‘Ah’ moments, but with more flesh on the bone. These longer texts provide glimpses into scenarios, and with their extension from the simplicity of an ‘ah’ moment, build a broken, staccato rhythm, almost a poetic structure of the unfinished. Chunks of text provide fragmented, unfinished collages of situations. Here is a list of settings for Johnson’s Teleplay with a Sports Background: Situations: Tennis clubs, dressing rooms, the older officials (who tend to hate young players) shown in control in everything but actually hitting a ball; the middle class atmosphere; the pt. girl players; and so on, which will be a great contrast to: the stadium of (say) a second-division London football club; team spirit and slight jealousies; transfer talk; the hangers-on; away matches; relationship with directors.

The list is obviously unfinished, trailing off with an ellipses, implying simultaneously that the remaining situations are obvious and implicit, but Despite their similarities, it would have been unlikely that Johnson and Nairn would have agreed with each other on architectural matters. One of Johnson’s most famous TV productions was a profile of Alice and Peter Smithson: B. S. Johnson, ‘Smithsons on Housing’, Smithsons on Housing (BBC 2, 1970). 58 Valéry: Valéry, Cahiers = Notebooks, ii, p. 475. 57

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also that in the act of going unsaid, there is opportunity for further work or interpretation, which forms a fragment of a complete film treatment like Spark’s work – resisting yet inviting closure. A paragraph of resounding ambiguity, it forms a successive list of beginnings. A similar fleshier ‘Ah’ fragment comes from The English Book file where Johnson observes a man on a train on his way back to London, although this text doesn’t have any of the indeterminacy of the fragment. It is worth displaying here in contrast to what could be considered as a kind of unfinished poetics. It is the complete ‘Ah’ moment: Eyes of man opposite adjust to speed as he tries to read station name – odd effect, just watching his eyes. Same man was reading Penthouse with delicate connoisseurship – finally rolls it up into a penis-shape (enlarged) and tucks it away into an inside pocket neatly – perhaps it is a truncheon pocket, it fits so neatly, is he a policeman?

This text is also in the spirit of Spark’s notes: it is a completed text buried within the files of an abandoned project. The fragment contains the observant pacing of a train passenger’s thought process and captures an unfinished idea in a complete moment of inscription. However, there are other sections in his papers that contain the fragmentary poetics of unfinished-ness in different ways. Here in his description from his proposal for Parade, Johnson is trying to grasp the conflict inherent within the commercial transaction – a topic explored more obviously in his last novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry: The theme to be explored concerns the nature of buying and selling; the corruption (in the widest sense) affecting us all in having, of necessity, to sell something of ourselves; the nature of relationships with greed as a main element on one side, and necessity to eat (in many sense) on the other; the unbalance caused, the waste.

The sentence is composed of two semicolons and an abrupt full stop, and evokes more of the rough practice of list-making than actual prose, trapped between the depiction of, and indication towards, Johnson’s intentions, meaning that this section of the treatment goes unfinished in a particular way. The points implied are hastily written, splintered signposts to an idea we will never see that show Johnson attempting to shape an invisible object, namely the violence of commercial interactions, but expressed with all the violent ontology of the unfinished fragment.



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It is this similarity between Johnson’s unrealized, drafted writing and his polished prose that provides his abandoned projects with a distinct quality. His rhythmic list-making and self-conscious thought processes are all readable in his published fiction – so what are the differences between his abandoned and his completed writings? This question could find an answer in the blank space of the text. Unlike the traditional blank space of published prose or poetry that typically symbolizes a sense of literary negation,59 the blank space surrounding Johnson’s unfinished work is one of implication and potentiality – an inversion of a direct literary reading – where the blank space tells the story of the project. Implied in the white spaces of abandoned works, such as Johnson’s Parade sketch or his Situations list for the sports drama, is the lived experience of creating text, capturing a writer mid-process, between the moments that Jonathan Coe notes literary biography can be traced and that which it cannot, which is when Johnson is sitting at his desk getting on with his work. The text’s absences are filled with lived experience, making the blank space to some degree a biographical textual interruption, whether the reason for a sentence trailing off with ellipses is that Johnson himself did not know how to continue with a particular text, or a domestic break during his writing hours, or even Ziegler actively intervening and stopping a project in a letter or phone call. It is within these omissions of abandoned writing projects that the silent impression of literary autobiography makes itself known. Furthermore, there is a strong sense that what these Johnson files expose is a truly experimental literature, forming a kind of fragmented life-writing, uncovering the textual anxieties and foibles that were experienced in order to create what became known publicly as ‘experimental’ writing. It would seem that the central difference between Johnson’s published stream of consciousness in sections like ‘Disintegration’ in Albert Angelo, and the stream of consciousness notes and scribbling that make up a number of these texts, is the absence of Johnson’s commanding narrator, who has been replaced by a looser sense of prescribed experimentation – perhaps playfulness. As a consequence, the uniqueness of these texts lies in their free interpretation – Johnson having no control over their readings or the forms in which they are to be read. The author is denied his usual domineering influence, as the texts are elusive to both author and reader. Abandoned works like Parade or The English Book sanction the reader some much-needed agency, and so the typical feeling one gets when reading him that Johnson is hovering over your shoulder, watching you read his As discussed in Mallarmé’s white space or Blanchot in the introduction.

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novel, vanishes. Drafts in this way offer a sense of a raw action or movement. It is reminiscent of the seemingly honest transcription of Spark’s account overheard in a restaurant, mixed with the fleeting, imaginative sketchiness of The Frugal Charade. But which is the charade? Which is an honest record and which is a fiction? It is the nascent, unfinished nature of the text that allows this point of departure, as it collapses from narrative depiction into a form that describes a moment as much as it does an idea. Johnson never liked the experimental label he was given by critics. Experiments, according to Johnson, were external labels applied by academic interferers, and had nothing to do with the blacked-out pages of Travelling People or loose booklets in the box of The Unfortunates: I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful: that is, it has been the best way I could find of solving particular writing problems.60

It is worth examining the work that remains ‘quietly hidden away’; and if we read into his statement, Johnson admits that much unfinished work is work that cannot be solved, which in some ways supports the point above – that the text wriggles free of the writer and is left for the reader to determine. However, thinking about Johnson and his fragmented, unfinished texts helps us think about him from a greater distance. One of the key assets from the Johnson archive is that it confronts the selectivity of Johnson’s own life-writing, even if it means revealing the unsolvable problems he wanted to hush up. With the abandonment of a work in progress, the poetics of the resulting archival fragment find Johnson at his best, displaying his writing and humour, while tracing the alternative story of a working-class author in the 1960s. Reading his papers, we see lived experience and prose coupled with unexpected poignancy – Johnson’s letter to Ziegler regarding the abandonment of The English Book, simply stating: ‘I am very sad that I am not now going to write the book, since I am convinced it would have contained some of my best work’. The confession echoes Pinter’s admission that his Proust year was ‘the best working year of my life’. Both projects, like Spark’s Watling Street, much to the interested public’s obliviousness, appeared in print or were performed much later, having mutated into other forms. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? p. 19.

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In this fashion, Johnson’s abandoned works also help us understand Johnson beyond the self-drawn caricatures of fervent modernist or buffoonish failure. Superficially self-assured of his own artistic function, yet ultimately unable to explain the reasons for his principled departure from realism, other than wild accusations of fiction’s propensity to ‘lie’, Johnson presents a man who is deliberately wrong, who is determined to explain away his own trauma, to ‘get them [his novels] out of my head’. His archive contributes to an understanding of Johnson beyond the controlling parameters of his own works, and instead takes a bird’s-eye view of the writer, reading B. S. Johnson at a distance. In essence, his abandoned ideas, the films, the television programmes, the radio plays and the guidebooks make for a textual companion to the final shot of Fat Man on a Beach. The scene was the last time Johnson was captured on film, and shows Johnson wading into the sea fully clothed, the camera zooming further and further out, until Johnson becomes a speck set against the Welsh landscape.

Rejectamenta The preface to a collection of scholarly essays entitled Re-Reading B. S. Johnson opens with an anecdote about academics. In one of B. S. Johnson’s notebooks in the early 1970s, Jonathan Coe found that the writer had been attempting to sketch out some ideas for a new trilogy of novels, both inspired and troubled by the recent death of his mother (the books are titled, incredibly, The Matrix Trilogy). In the margin of his attempt to tackle this set of cumbersome and ultimately unfinishable ideas, Johnson predicts a worst-case scenario for the work: that ‘some academic cunt will produce a study on it’.61 It is hard for the scholar not to take this slightly personally. Yet it is clear that even Johnson can see the value in looking at the remains of his efforts – although this may be partly through his self-aggrandizement. Just from this anecdote, unfinished projects tell us a lot: there is a sense of anguish embedded in The Matrix Trilogy. Johnson lashes out in the text, and at any future reader of it. The work’s unfinished quality allows Johnson to betray the fictionality of his work in a way that he can’t in published text, and make a comment, as the manuscript becomes a diary. Johnson used to refer a lot to ‘Rejectamenta’, the debris that resides at the Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant, p. 366; Tew and White, Re-Reading B. S. Johnson.

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bottom of the sea, or in Johnson’s case, the depths of his subconscious. In this chapter, rejectamenta could be framed as the material examined here: the texts of varying shapes and sizes that authors leave behind as they write onwards. Although it would be wrong to call this ‘waste’, Johnson is clear when he says there is textual ‘wastage’ once he has finished or unfinished any project: ‘At the end of each novel there’s always a pile of material, bits of paper not used, which goes back in the files, available for future novels. I don’t throw anything away.’ If not waste, what is authorial rejectamenta, the unused, but unfinished and unresolved texts of this kind? From a selection of Muriel Spark’s textual excesses and B. S. Johnson’s brainstorming, we might be able to determine this: both caches of material demonstrate routes to the value in revealing and interpreting abandoned works in progress, which, if examined closely, might find new ways of reading the remains of authors’ papers and other unfinished literary works. First, Spark allowed us to move away from the notion that writers write towards a single work, and then Johnson’s archive offered a newer kind of life-writing beyond the control of his fiction. Spark’s fragments exist somewhere between narrative and the action of writing, as brief, unresolved premises while also acting as performative clues or traces of the spread of the writing process. Accordingly, they function in both states, to be read against other texts, and as a route to speculate on the author’s textual production. One assumes Spark was at her desk typing out these fragments, solidifying fleeting thoughts into discrete papers to index and file, so the transition from The Frugal Charade to the assortment of handwritten fieldwork and correspondence in the Johnson archive adds a sense of time and space, allowing fragments to interlace as more sprawling texts produced at the scene of writing. Both writers wrote formal, typed notes, like unaddressed letters to themselves, containing ideas that they never completed. In spite of this, there are major differences between the two writers’ archives. Spark’s texts were ideas that reached a fragmented finality, whereas external forces were often responsible for extinguishing Johnson’s efforts. This presents an opposition between the two, where Spark presents autonomous units of text and a reader compelled by a desire to make the incoherent coherent; while the Johnson texts, albeit containing fragments of this kind, in their broader form allow the reader some agency in a deviation away from Johnson’s published work. In short, they are seemingly separate kinds



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of unfinished fragments – deliberate (Spark) and accidental (Johnson). Yet, Hans-Jost Frey warns against this kind of divide: To force a fragment into either of these two categories [accidental or intentional] is to ignore precisely what is essential to it: the undecidable question as to whether the actual occurrence of its breaking off … can be recuperated into a system of meaning. Being ‘neither whole nor a part,’ the fragment ‘cannot be understood from the perspective of the whole’, which means that it is not certain it can be understood at all.62

According to Frey, this is an inaccurate distinction. The works’ commonality is their potential for a critical and cultural rupture. We are already aware of this idea from previous chapters (in a cultural-historical sense as discussed in Town Fictions), where the moments of the project’s ‘break’ from realization, its jagged unfinished edges, can be used to puncture the accepted critical norms of textual production or the cultural function of unfinished work. But it feels slightly misleading to conclude on the ‘radical potential’ – or as Frey calls it ‘violence’ – of the unfinished text. Perhaps Frey is being deliberately hyperbolic in his exposition of the fragment. Of course, fragments disrupt the literary marketplace’s need for narrative resolution, unambiguity, and closure while suspending and tormenting our desire for textual coherency. Indeterminacy is a well-charted topic in the arts. One is reminded of Frank Kermode’s ‘tick-tock’ analogy – this ostensibly being a study of tock-less ticks. Yet, Kermode almost immediately caveats his clockwork imagery with the claim that at the time of writing (1967), it was common to come across ‘tock-tick’ narratives – and to assume that a ‘beginning-end’ structure was still a norm in English literature was a little naive.63 Furthermore, the indeterminate nature of the works in this chapter, textually, spatially and historically can only be radical in their natural archival habitat. Plucked from their context and published in a book, these texts become abnormalities and alienated from their purpose. To explain this from another perspective: How would these diverse and disruptive texts be published without falling into either category of the publication of a virtuoso’s notebook, Frey, Interruptions, pp. ix–x. Kermode noting: ‘Later I shall be asking whether, when tick-tock seems altogether too easily fictional, we do not produce plots containing a good deal of tock-tick; such a plot is that of Ulysses’ Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 45.

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or marketed as an intriguing unfinished work, surrounded by mystery and mortality? Ways of presenting these texts that avoid canonization or fetishization seem near impossible. This consequently invalidates their impact outside of the archive. Instead, one can conclude that the actual lasting effect these works bring is that abandoned writing can be just as fascinating to record and document because of its disruptive potential, enabling greater critical reflection upon the author, and the author’s completed works serving the unfinished – instead of the other way round. These abandoned projects should be treated perhaps as an ironic commentary, as a foray into fancifulness and dissemblance. Here we should return to Marjorie Perloff ’s Beckett snipe-hunt, which reminds us that the critical reader must reconcile with the knowledge that they are ‘in search of birds they know are not to be caught. Not product as in the treasure hunt but process is the key.’64

Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, p. 208.

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On the subject of note-taking, literary sketches and unfinished texts, it is worth returning to Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey’s failed Proust adaptation. During the summer of 1972, while Pinter was busy writing his script for what would become The Proust Screenplay, his director, Joseph Losey, was president of the judging committee at the Cannes Film Festival. Throughout the judging process, there was some keen manoeuvring taking place behind the scenes of the panel. Losey was doing everything in his power to block Elia Kazan’s film The Visitors (1972) from receiving the Grand Prix. This was to serve as direct revenge for Kazan’s appearance under subpoena at the House of Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Losey had preemptively fled to Britain rather than appear at the committee, while Kazan had testified under oath and named eight former colleagues from his time with the socialist acting troupe, Group Theatre. Losey’s hatred of Kazan was no secret to the French film industry; it is said that at the French premiere of The Servant in 1963, upon hearing Kazan was in the audience, Losey had stormed out of the cinema, hauling Dirk Bogarde with him in the process. His judging notes of The Visitors seem to encapsulate this relationship with his former collaborator and colleague. According to Losey, The Visitors was, ‘a dirty, disgusting, meretricious film by a near master of everything but himself ’.1 Losey argued ferociously with the rest of the judges for Kazan’s exclusion from the Grand Prix’s shortlist, and unsurprisingly, The Visitors left Cannes without accolades. It must have come as a shock to Losey that immediately after the Proust script was completed, Pinter signed up to work with Elia Kazan for his next film project. The assignment was an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s posthumous unfinished novel The Last Tycoon – Pinter moving from unfinishing a finished David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 218.

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work, to finishing an unfinished text. Kazan’s film was released in 1976 to mixed reviews, despite an ensemble cast that included Robert De Niro, Robert Mitchum, Jack Nicholson, Jeanne Moreau, Tony Curtis, Donald Pleasence and Anjelica Huston. Pinter, Kazan and the film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, had done their very best to reanimate Fitzgerald’s work, but despite their efforts, they produced a film devoid of atmosphere or dramatic tension. Cineaste described the work as ‘embalmed’.2 Up to this point, it has not been in this project’s remit to study posthumously unfinished projects by canonized authors. But, Pinter’s notes – made soon after his efforts on Proust – illustrate some broader reflections on the practice of reading, and then pragmatically working with, an unfinished text. In his archive, Pinter included his early notes on Fitzgerald’s novel in a letter to Sam Spiegel in January 1974, commenting that ‘the novel, despite its fragmentary nature, gives one a feeling of a strong potential’. Later describing in the letter: Because the novel was un-finished, one is apt to read Thalberg’s characteristics into the hero. The fact that the novel is considered an unfinished masterpiece, also complicates its adaptation for the screen. How one finishes in the movie version will be closely scrutinised as well as criticized. I think that besides this fairly important factor, one owes it to Fitzgerald to try to stay within the limits he indicated, which I believe to be a romantic love story about a complex and meaningful man.

Pinter acknowledges a few details about The Last Tycoon that are consistent with this project. Firstly, he recognizes that the open-ended nature of the work underscores the relations it has to the writing process and research behind the novel. In other words, strong overtones of the historical moment of the work’s creation arise from a reading of The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s time as a contracted studio writer and his protagonist Monroe Stahr’s likeness to studio executive, Irving Thalberg, are ineffably embedded in the script. Additionally, an acknowledgement of the problematic textuality of the novel: its relative canonization as a work of Fitzgerald, and a respect to the intentions of its completion, all indicate a sentiment from Pinter to ‘owe’ it to Fitzgerald to reassemble the text and not insert original material. It appears in his letter to Spiegel that Pinter was never going to consider ‘finishing’ the unfinished novel, intending instead to present its fragmented contents to the audience as a diffuse epilogue, rather than firm conclusion. Barbara Quart and Leonard Quart, ‘Review: The Last Tycoon’, Cineaste, 7.4 (1976), 45–6 (p. 45).

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Perhaps the most revealing note of The Last Tycoon collection is on a torn scrap of paper clipped to the edge of a handwritten first draft of the script. It says:

END – movieola – at pace – and starting and stopping – allowing sections of films to be repeated – then quickening – finally broken film –

This last incidental fragment is interesting not just because it is the origin of Pinter’s idea for the film’s ending. It is interesting because Pinter visualizes that the end to an unfinished work could be represented with the effects of a ‘movieola’. What Pinter means here is a Moviola, a brand name for a flatbed film-editing machine. The Moviola was one of the first pieces of hardware that allowed an editor to view the footage they were cutting in real time, where a reel of celluloid is spooled between two spinning plates, and a strip of film is exposed to a reflective prism that projects the film’s image onto a small viewing screen. The film is allowed to move forward and backward at varying speeds on the screen, as if playing with the fast-forward and rewind buttons on a remote control. Editing desks like these were also the devices that editors used to synchronize the film’s images with a magnetic strip of recorded sound, as well as produce a coherent edited cut of the project. Essentially, it was the very first place that a film’s creative and technical components could be integrated to resemble a finished film. For Pinter, the Moviola was a site of the creative process and a meeting place of the material and metaphorical. Perhaps the closest object a film-maker has to a writer’s desk, the flatbed editor is a place where images, sound and narrative can, quite literally, spool and unspool in just a few moments. Subsequently, where published editions of The Last Tycoon print Fitzgerald’s notes and plans in the place of an ending to the novel, Pinter’s intention was to mirror this sense of the artistic process, replacing notepaper for celluloid. But, there is more to Pinter’s note than his desire for the film to end on a self-referential focus on the creative process. The scrap of paper completes the story of The Proust Screenplay – as the two adaptations, Proust and Tycoon, feed into one another, almost interlocking. On a close reading, Pinter’s instructions for moments of ‘repetition’ with ‘fast cuts’ are homologous to Pinter’s montage sequences in Proust. Furthermore, Tycoon’s final sequence features its alienated

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protagonist, the Hollywood executive Monroe Stahr (De Niro), re-enacting moments of the film alone without the supporting cast – independent of the narrative – employing the ‘extra-temporal’ characteristics of Pinter’s Proust. This is followed by footage of Stahr walking through an empty movie lot, an obvious relation to Proust’s ‘montage of empty interiors’. The convergence of Pinter’s Monroe and Marcel in the final 3 minutes of Kazan’s film provides another manifestation of the oblique reproductions and duplications of the unfinished into the finished – prompted by the curious symmetry of directorial partnerships and unfinished work. There may be no greater reason that the texts resemble each other than the fact that they were written in close succession, but it is tempting to view the final sequence of Tycoon as Pinter subtly bringing Marcel to the screen, pasting the two texts together as an editor splices together strips of celluloid on a Moviola. Whether consciously or not, in bringing Fitzgerald’s work to an end, Pinter had managed to enact an unfinished work of his own – or give life to a character thought never to be realized on screen. As Monroe Stahr walks through a deserted movie lot, he stands at the threshold of an empty warehouse, the dark space ahead representing his uncertain future with the studio, or even his premature death (Irving Thalberg died at thirty-seven). Initially, this appears to be a nod to the work of Fitzgerald and the void that anchors every unfinished work. But this is more than just an association, as Pinter employs the same devices in the final scenes of Tycoon as he does through various points of his Proust script. Much of the ending of Kazan’s film could be directed by Pinter’s instructions for Proust. In Tycoon we see De Niro re-enact a previous scene from the film unaccompanied, his attention directed to the audience as he stares down the lens of the camera, the scene a mixture of familiar dialogue and silence. The final page of Proust sees a similar displaced return to an earlier scene in the film, followed by an array of eleven different shots interlaying familiar interior scenes with the sound of the bell from Combray, then with silence. Read comparatively, this final image of De Niro in Tycoon directly summons Marcel.3 The darkness of the backdrop to this closing shot of De Niro is therefore reminiscent not just of the absence of the end to Fitzgerald’s novel, but to Pinter’s lost work, where, Marcel – so rounded in the Proust script – is set against the negation of what Pinter described to Losey as ‘their great unmade film’. In particular, scene 443 of Proust, which sees Marcel standing alone when ‘all the sounds in the room die’, Harold Pinter, The Proust Screenplay (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 165.

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Figure 6.1 

On unfinishing Pinter’s note on The Last Tycoon coincides with the aims of this project, and neatly compounds the various elements of unfinished work that it has been investigating. His comments on Fitzgerald’s novel touch upon the dialogical form of the unfinished, initially between Pinter’s response to the unfinished work, and then the ensuing relationship between the final film and Fitzgerald’s writing process. To understand this dialogue further, this study has attempted to gather together the contextual and archival materials that unfinished projects generate, investigating the material remains and figures behind each work, in order to demonstrate their value in the face of a critical history of suspicion and selectivity. As a result, the rubric of ‘the unfinished’ or ‘abandoned’ work has touched upon and overlapped with different theories of literature, film and cultural history. This stems from the unfinished work’s abundant philosophic potential as a visible trace of cultural negation, drawn from the nature of the unfinished work’s absence of a realized ‘text’. Moreover, the interpretation and mapping of these works has arrived at strange and unexpected moments, sometimes finding very commonplace reasons for the abandonment of work that does not always comply with critical or academic language (Figure 6.1). But this is not just a consideration of the material remains of negation. It is an exploration of the abstract and fertile force that is found in the everyday

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creation of ideas that are started but not completed. It demonstrates that the unfinished project can play a more active part in and offer new perspectives on history and criticism. It is a rubric that helps us pick at the boundaries of various critical rationales that underpin the definitions of cultural form. In order to develop this approach, a process of reclaiming non-literary texts has taken place as a response to the critical neglect of unfinished work. The book actively engages with archival study’s relationship to contemporary archaeology, by enfranchising obscured texts, or ‘mattering’ works, to highlight a strain of coincidental and concurrent social and creative activity, conceptualized as the collateral cultures of unfinished work.4 On an even simpler level, this project has demonstrated how criticism and cultural history can be challenged by the everyday occurrence of a rejection letter, or someone simply walking away from their desk and abandoning their efforts. Yet, to fully come to terms with the impact of abandoned work, the inherent absence at the heart of the form defies direct engagement. So, it is worth considering the unfinished work’s imprint alongside an image from Timothy Walsh: As with the wax impression that can inform us about the features of a lost signet ring, we know of ‘the missing matter’ only through the impression it leaves on the visible and detectable segment of reality: the known continually implicates the unknown, just as the conspicuous perpetually leads us towards the recondite.5

In this study, the relationship between the conspicuous and the recondite arrived at its starkest in the search through archival collections, where the traces of intention in unfinished and abandoned work were found in written and unwritten texts. Correspondingly, it should be noted that while this project’s essential critical focus is upon the relationship between the remains of interruption in everyday life, literature and the archive. The archive, therefore, is the principal location where everyday practices can be read to problematize ideas around cultural form. To articulate this from another perspective: this project’s critical ambitions were only made possible by the scarcity of theoretical work in this field: work that highlights the weakness of literary studies’ grasp of cultural production, the function of archives and the fragmented and capricious ways cultural texts are completed and incompleted. Buchli et al. describe the process of ‘mattering’ as an act of ‘creative materialization’. Buchli, Lucas, and Cox, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, p. 174. Timothy Walsh, The Dark Matter of Words: Absence, Unknowing, and Emptiness in Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), p. 4.

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In each of the journeys of this study, an unfinished text or abandoned project has disrupted various discipline-specific critical concepts encased within a broadly literary enquiry. As a form that points, short of proof, towards a creative end, it destabilizes textual categorization. Where are the remains of Llano Del Rio really held? Is The Proust Screenplay a coherent text or a cinematic fragment? Is A. E. T. Mathews’s Underways an urban plan or a fictional polemic? What can we make of Muriel Spark’s sketches if they weren’t directly contributing to a novel? Would Frankie Howerd really have made a good Oscar Wilde? The consequence of this method has been a systematic unravelling of the normative concepts that define the discourses of each topic; and each time a new archival text has been brought into focus, a new set of taxonomic concerns have emerged. It was the process of searching for Llano Del Rio that enabled a critically reflective position towards archives and the recording of abandoned work. Within these historically contingent and arbitrary spaces, the unfinishing and desertion of Llano saw the research process depart from a conventional archive and look further afield, to the site of Llano in the Antelope Valley. This was repeated elsewhere, from a journey to visit Spark’s uncatalogued and unsorted notes in the basement of the National Library of Scotland, to sifting through the rich and unpredictable collections of the CTA. This collection was, when I visited it, housed in a trading estate adjoining the River Lea in Walthamstow and staffed entirely by dedicated volunteers. The Llano study confirmed that an investigation into unfinished work demands a reflection of the form itself: from the official to the unofficial archive, from materialist to abstracted readings. The upshot of this saw the unfinished work epitomize what it means for archives to be porous and haphazard cultural spaces, but equally pose a problem to those who want to expand the notion of the archive to unofficial collections and other assemblages of material culture. With Llano’s collections at the Huntington and its problematic relationship to the colony’s enthusiasts around California, why appropriate what is otherwise a term of exclusion? Tracing Llano’s unrealized spaces foregrounds the significance of archival arrangement, or the act of collecting as a practice, not dissimilar to the social and communal practice of Llano residents and their relationship to the future of the settlement. It was following the collecting and collectors rather than the collection that led the study to Paul Greenstein’s teeming stash of Llano materials, as opposed to the systematic but largely empty folders in the Huntington’s records.

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From the taxonomic issues of what constitutes an archive and the location of unfinished projects, to the nature of the texts themselves, the space of archives became more symbolic when encountered in abandoned urban plans. Parts of the chapter’s attention fell upon the abandonment of planning as practice, and the manifold ways that one can textualize the unrealized image of urban planning and the built environment. In approaching the texts for this chapter as works that could easily be worthy of literary and cultural studies, there was no contemporary critical discourse or tradition in which to plug Mathews’s Underways or the GLC’s Tomorrow’s London. The unfinished work in urban space, therefore, falls outside of two quite distinct cultures of urban studies and literary geography. This both highlights their needless distance from each other and demonstrates that neither discipline possess all the tools to give a rounded response to the relationship between the production of urban imagery and the city itself; its role within cultural and economic production, and the subsequent associative, textual and cultural qualities they emanate. This appears especially necessary when one considers the practical abundance of the abandoned plan in comparison to the narrowness of what literary geographers choose to highlight as significant representational texts of urban space. The value of this categorical reassessment would be of benefit to cultural history, the potential historical profit of tracing the abandoned city revealing anxieties, imaginative work and decision-making that usually goes unrecorded. This benefit arises not only because the unfinished project presents a window into former architectural and planning cultures, but because it actively fructifies the built environment of today, offering an alternative and refreshed insight into the contemporary moment as much as it does to the decision-making of the past. The literary works have ranged from notes jotted down in restaurants and literary festivals, to brief narrative sketches, to book proposals, to a fragment of a sci-fi musical, to a fully formed script that was never filmed and was instead adapted for radio and theatre. The apparent puerile absurdity of Pynchon’s Minstrel Island seemed to confound its critics. Its half-drawn, often hastily written scenes caused a Pynchon scholar to declare it ‘Dadaist juvenilia’ in an email exchange. But is Minstrel Island anything other than a historical record of an early attempt from Pynchon to write literature? Does it merit the same close study as Gravity’s Rainbow? Minstrel Island’s lack of critical attention suggests not – but this might not be just because the musical is awfully conceived. Instead it demonstrates that it sits in purgatory, neither an identified ‘work’ of Pynchon nor a document extensive enough to contribute to the author’s biography in any



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significant fashion. This uncertainty, or as Rajan describes, this ‘environment of indeterminacy’, has found repeated iterations throughout the course of the project.6 As the narrative scaffold to a film that was never brought to life, The Proust Screenplay’s cultural function and textual identity repeatedly brought into question the ontology of the unproduced script – plunging Pinter’s technical direction to Joseph Losey into ambiguity. It underscored the critical fragility surrounding the ‘phantom adaptation’, the proposed, half-written, or unfilmed works that constitute so much of the economic production of cinema, which defy the static and well-defined textual subjects of academia. Existing notions that point towards a more fluid concept of industry, creative production and textual records, such as the concept of a text’s ‘discursive surround’, offer a more generative framework to consider the abandoned work – as the discursive edges to an absent space are all one has to trace what are often momentary or ephemeral blueprints. A variety of splintered, thumbnail sketches were covered after the unfilmed Pinter adaptation of the previous chapter. Chapter 4 found that Muriel Spark’s brief narrative notations could satisfactorily be considered neither evidence for a ‘Genetic’, manuscript-orientated, conception of authorship nor a literary fragment. Some texts offered a simultaneous sense of being both a fully formed (perhaps even complete) idea, but written in capsulated shorthand. They also felt like completed movements, as gestural actions that fulfilled fleeting thoughts as Spark wrote her novels. Despite this sense of completion or fulfilment, the fragments of text were repeatedly undermined by their location among Spark’s notes for her work, which undoubtedly points towards the accumulative practices of revision favoured by the genetic critics. One particularly interesting quality of Spark’s archive was the sense of the unfinished work as a form of autobiography, where Spark appeared to write her major unfinished novels into her published work. This is reflected in her archive: her research notes for her abandoned historical novel, Watling Street, are kept among the drafts for her 1992 book, Reality and Dreams, in which the protagonist describes Spark’s abandoned novel as the basis for a fantastic film set in lateantiquity, incidentally also called Watling Street. Within the archival collection, perhaps her background research on Roman history therefore becomes a kind of prop, the work of her novel’s hero and not her own, displacing the frustration Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished, p. 3.

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of years of wasted research upon a fictional character. Alternatively, Spark might simply have been economical with her efforts, a trait that spread to B. S. Johnson’s papers. Here a sense of autobiography continued, read through Johnson’s TV and book proposals, which at its most poignant provided a sense of diaristic life-writing – a space between autobiography and creative text. Perhaps his unfinished projects such as Kami-kaze Ninety or Frankie Howerd As Oscar Wilde are the only textual form that bridges the distinction between the accessible parts of Johnson’s life (his own discursive surround) and the inability of literary biographers to access the moment and experience of Johnson’s (or any author’s) writing practices. In the case of both Johnson and Spark, their unfinished projects revealed texts that escaped the command of their usually succinct and controlled storytelling, permitting the reader a certain degree of agency not usually afforded by the two authors. It was reminiscent of Ellison’s quotation from the introduction, that unfinished work gives the reader the power to ‘impose his own imagination upon the material with too little control from the author’.7 In other words, as unstable and speculative texts, unfinished projects renege on their relationship to the writer, and in its place, offer an imaginative participatory opportunity to their reader. These diverse observations reflect unfinished work’s refusal to conform to prescribed frameworks of textual interpretation.8 The conjectural form of the unfinished is uncontainable, fractious and a natural opponent to established perceptions of literary genre. In the persistent absence of a final work, it pushes its readers to observe its networks and material traces of extra-textual information, frozen in a state of becoming. Calling attention to these critical issues at the heart of this form also reprises the relationship between unfinished texts and ruins. In this dialogue, the unfinished work features as an adaptive, prospective form, offsetting the ruin’s retrospective and disintegrative aesthetic. While the ruin interrupts the contemporary moment with the structures of a decayed past, the remains of an unfinished work often disappear from view, melding into their environment or withdrawing to archival folders and boxes, Ellison, Juneteenth, p. 363. For instance, existing multidisciplinary claims about cultural form often follow the kind of logic described here by the architectural critic, Robert Harbison: ‘In no other art could one claim that there were two forms of architectures, plans on paper and structures in stone and brick, The nearest anyone has come in the arts is to claim that Rubens, Constable or Picasso is more himself in rough sketches than in finished compositions, which is rooted in the Romantic idea that an artist’s ideas are best when freshest, or most primitive, as infants or sketches.’ This project has attempted to systematically disprove this statement, attempting to delineate problems within established cultural forms, and new categories of text in their place. See: Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable, p. 161.

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their presence known to few but the creator. The unfinished work is a productive rather than disruptive form, which, contrary to the ruin’s intrusion, is a malleable and multiplicative space to revisit and reread. The interpretation of unfinished work is also a particular kind of creative act, commensurate to Christopher Woodward’s assessment that ‘a ruin is a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator’.9 This has demonstrated, however, that while demanding a creativity to read, the unfinished work enjoys an independently productive quality, often materializing the beginning of new works – a kind of cultural labour that contrasts with the ruin’s largely post-industrial or postfunctional status. This is one of the many consequences of abandoning work, and one of the characteristics that render it a creative act. To reiterate a theme from the introduction and appropriate a phrase from philosophy, this analysis has highlighted a sense of the labour of the negative, chiefly the nature of its work and the social metabolism for abandoned endeavour, to the extent that it can be read and traced through archival records. In this way, the pathways of unfinished work allow one to sketch out the social and economic structures that benefit from such embryonic, anticipatory ideas: as an unfinished work is at once a source of inspiration (see the textual influence and evolution of The Proust Screenplay or the cultural legacy of Llano Del Rio) while also a resource to transplant elsewhere (see Spark’s unfinished novels or ‘The Hook Book’). When the discourse is set in relief against the ruins of other works, as shown in the gallery of the Shepherds Bush Pavilion OHP slides, a constructive and beneficial negotiation between the two forms emerges. Any attempt to identify a poetics of unfinished work must confront the boundless sense of potential that radiates from an idea that might have been, or still might be, realized. The default approach is to stress the tragedy of unfinishing, and this is often related to the selectivity of scholarship given to unfinished work, as not all unfinished works are connected to the death of the creator. What of the work abandoned as part of our everyday lives? What of work abandoned by those who do not enjoy the attention of critical audiences? Therefore, as a resistance to the lament over a selection of privileged texts, the idea of production is at the heart of this project’s poetics of unfinished work. Another motif commonly read across the chosen texts is the mimesis of the unfinished. These reflective or reproductive impressions of abandoned works have manifested themselves in a variety of ways. There is an obvious historical Woodward, In Ruins, p. 169.

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dimension found in the political and economic factors that impact the texts in this study. For instance, The Underways or many of B. S. Johnson’s television proposals were indications of a much larger economic or cultural retrenchment, which in its wake obliterated the completion of many smaller projects. But, beyond the historic context for a text’s abandonment, there are textual and interpretive reproductions at work. The absence of a central object of study, or any discernible conclusion leads to a mirroring or feedback loop from the author to the archive – often to interesting effect. This is a kind of material mimesis, where one is faced with the imprint of an intention in the absence of a realized work, and so it becomes possible to read unfinished work across a variety of related texts – as unfinished readings produce more unfinished readings. Examples of this were seen in Pinter’s adaptations of his own abandoned work, or the unrequited relationship between an incomplete Llano archive and the incomplete site of its ruins. Put simply, a sense of a ‘meta-unfinishing’ emerges and reproduces itself across all the work’s related documentation and ephemera. Perhaps more complex than Woodward’s ‘dialogue with the imagination’, these reproductive qualities of unfinished work are grounded in the dialectical tensions between the codified and the uncodified or the planned and the abstract, as the echoes of privation spread out with the purview of the researcher. This is something that Budick and Iser note is an inherent feature of negation, where the negative is a source of ‘undetermined proliferation, negativity speaks for something that is arguably as real as anything else we know even if it can be located only by carving out a void within what is being said’. This undetermined proliferation or spread of negation has been noted in a variety of different texts, and can be found in the tension between the material and the imaginary – where unfinished texts break off into conjecture. In literary theory, this relation finds an echo in Derrida’s notion of ‘doubling’ in his negative theology: the latent duality or ‘tacit dimension’ in written or spoken language finding itself quite a literal application in the case of the unfinished project.10 This final reflection is specific to this study and was an experience that recurred throughout much of the time spent sitting in reading rooms, archive Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. xi; Indeed, further parallels to works of theory exist. Consider Merleau-Ponty’s working notes towards a book he left unfinished entitled The Visible and The Invisible, which offers an analysis of the ontological distinctions between these categories; through in a text that is itself invisible: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lefort, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

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stacks and the collections of enthusiasts. It demonstrates that writing about unfinished texts reveals as much about the immediate physical and material surround of the interpreter as it does the work itself, the moment of the author and reader overlaying each other; something that Marjorie Perloff encourages during her ‘snipe-hunts’ through Beckett’s enigma texts. Perloff stresses the importance of one’s own process in the face of a literary or cultural practice that may be unknown to the reader. This approach makes sense for contemporary researchers who are faced with a cultural landscape that appears to be becoming not only more fragmented, but potentially inestimable in scope when the access to correspondence and plans beyond paper archives are taken into consideration. This means that improvised and spontaneous approaches to remains are more necessary than ever to refresh the critical perspectives upon the field’s proliferation. It is quite likely that the debris left by abandoned work can only be explained with more writing – more unfinished writing about finishing, and more finished writing about unfinishing – which, to quote Enrique Vilas-Matas, in the future, might contribute towards a new kind of literature: Only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the writing of the future appear. But what will this literature be like? Not so long ago a work colleague, somewhat maliciously, put this question to me. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If I knew, I’d write it myself.’11

Enrique Vilas-Matas, Bartleby & Co. (London; New York: Random House, 2011), p. 3.

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Index abandoned projects/works  7. see also unfinished projects/works archive, space  33 challenges  48 Johnson’s  195 mundanity, quotidian  14 parameters and definitions  1617 unfinished forms of  20, 105 abandoned utopias  335 abandonment  29 The English Book  196 function and change  21 panorama of literary  182 in plain sight  1114 Abercrombie, Patrick  77 Accident (Losey)  112 Adorno, Theodor  24 aesthetics  21 Albert, Georgia  177 Alexander, Anthony  97 n.42 Ali, Muhammad  183 Amis, Martin  109 Anderson, Lindsay  135 Ansell-Pearson, Keith  10 n.24 Antelope Valley  33, 36, 44, 48, 51, 5960, 62 n.70, 207 anti-work  1756 Apartment Living (Romero)  110 Archigram  76 archives  2833 constant duality  30 fetishisation  31 ‘fonds’  49, 49 n.54, 65 interpreting  32 n.21 Llano Del Rio  4755 ‘official and unofficial archives’  50, 54, 62, 66, 207 management  301 materiality  31 materialization  32 Ardam, Jacquelyn  172 n.21 The Art of Wandering (Machen)  4

Atwell, David  137 n.62, 138 n.66 Austin, Alice Constance  457 Bacon, Francis  18, 1245, 126 n.35, 154 MoMA quotation  126, 126 n.36 Triptych 1991  126 Bacon, Julie  30 n.14 ‘Bacon Death’ (Paterson)  5 n.9 ‘Badass’  17 Ballard, J. G.  77 Concrete and Steel  86 Concrete Island  88 Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise  77 Barber, Sian  134 n.55 Barker, Felix  8, 8 n.16 Barndt, Kerstin  155 n.88 Barthes, Roland  8 n.14 Barton, A. H.  160 n.4 Baxter, Jeannette  88 n.32 Beaumont, Matthew  73 n.10 Beckett, Andy  131 n.46 Beckett, Samuel  114 Bellemin-Noel, Jean  173 Benjamin, Walter  8 n.14, 21, 21 n.44, 119, 119 n.22, 119 n.23 Arcades  172 Berenice hidden  105 inextricable  106 multiplicities  106 network of wires  106 Bergson, Henri  10 n.24 Berman, Russell A.  24, 24 n.2 Bernstein, Leonard  114 Biasi, Di  174 n.28 Billington, Michael  113 n.7, 126 n.38, 133, 133 n.49 Biskind, Peter  134 n.53 Blanchot, Maurice  1011 Blanchot-esque moment  12 The Space of Literature  11 n.25

242 Index Bogarde, Dirk  201 Bolshevik Revolution  42 Boorman, John  135 ‘booster’ realtors  25 Boulez, Pierre  114 Bouvard and Pécuchet (Flaubert)  15 Boyer, Charles  122 Boym, Svetlana  19 n.39 Bradbury, Ray  87, 87 n.29 Brater, Enoch  113 Braudel, Fernand  131 Brautigan, Richard The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966  5, 5 n.9 Brautigan Library  5 n.10 Bray, Barbara  114, 154 Bread & Hyacinths (Rolfe, Lennon & Greenstein)  623 Bronte, Charlotte  3 Brunner, John  91 n.33 Buchanan, Colin  86 n.27 Buchli, Victor  132 n.48 Budick, Sanford  212 n.10 Bueren, Thad M. Van  42 n.37, 47 n.47 Burns, Alan  1789, 178 n.40, 179 n.41 Burroughs, William  180 Burton, Antoinette M.  30, 30 n.15, 47 n.45 Bushell, Sally  174, 174 n.27 Butler, Octavia  58, 64 California Llano Del Rio (see Llano Del Rio) structuration  27 Calvino, Italo  105, 106 n.54 The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (McHale)  17, 17 n.38 ‘Capital (Marx)’  3 Castle, Barbara  85 Caute, David  201 n.1 Cecchi, Susan  114 central control television system  82 Centre for the Study of Industrial Innovation (CSII)  14 fortunes of  14 Innovation Centre On the Shelf  14 On the Shelf: A Survey of Research and Development Projects Abandoned for Non Technical Reasons  14, 14 n.32, 16

Chandler, Raymond  25 Chang, Heesok  165 n.18 Charley, Jonathan  88 n.31 cine-bingo  13840 Cinema Theatre Association (CTA)  140 Claeys, Gregory  345, 35 n.25 Clay, Cassius. see Ali, Muhammad Clayton, Jack  135 Clément, René  114 Clifton, A. R.  37 n.31 Coates, Stephen  4 n.2 Coe, Jonathan  182 n.47, 195, 197 Like a Fiery Elephant  181, 181 n.46, 182 n.48, 190 n.53, 197 n.61 Cohen, Margaret  30 n.14 Coleman, Alice  94 n.40 Collins, William  159 Colombino, Laura  86 n.25 communitarianism  60 Conan-Doyle, Arthur  15 n.34 Connor, Steven  32 n.21 Coogan, Steve  182 n.49 Cook, R. W. A.  160 Cook, Terry  30, 30 n.16, 30 n.17, 50 n.54 fonds  49, 49 n.54 vital duality of archive  64 Cooke, Leonard  45, 47 Cooper, Henry  190 Cox, Margaret  132 n.48 Crang, Mike  152 n.83 Creative Evolution (Bergson)  10, 10 n.24, 19 creative materialization  206 n.4 Cresswell, Tim  62 n.73, 64 n.75 ‘The Culinary Dostoevsky’ (Fallon)  5 n.9 Cullen, Gordon  76 The Cultural Attaché  1701 cultural manifestation of modernity  24 Cumbernauld  98, 101, 101 n.47 Cunningham, David  104 n.53 Cunningham, Eugene  58, 64 Curtis, Tony  202 Dalsgaard, Inger H.  17 n.38 Darrow, Clarence  36, 36 n.30 Dart, Gregory  73 n.10 Dasgupta, Sudeep  151 n.79 Data Generator  15

Index Davis, Israel  139 Davis, John  76 n.15 Davis, Mike  64 City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles  34, 34 n.24 degree of sentimentalism  34 The View from Futures Past  34 120 Days of Sodom (Sade)  3 De Niro, Robert  202, 204, 205 Dear, M. J.  25 n.3 Deese, R. S.  35, 35 n.26 DeLyser, Dydia  62 DeMaria , Robert, Jr  165 n.18 Deppman, Jed  173 n.25, 174 n.26, 174 n.29, 178 n.39 Derrida, Jacques Archive Fever  31, 31 n.19 doubling  212 Plato’s Pharmacy  28 DeSilvey, Caitlin  19 n.39, 56, 56 n.62, 132 n.47 Development Hell  109 dialectics of happiness  119 Dillon, Brian  19 n.39 disillusion  118 dolphinarium  923, 93 n.36 Dorment, Richard  125 n.34 Drood, Edwin  8 drop wall conversion  137 Duffy, Maureen  190 Dunlop, Lane  4 n.5 The Dutch Manual (Ridener)  31 Dworkin, Craig  142, 144 n.77 Dyer, Geoff  5, 5 n.7 Earp, Wyatt  58 Eaton, Ruth  4 n.2 Edensor, Tim  19 n.39, 132 n.47 Edwards, Sarah  88 n.31 Edwin Drood (Dickens)  3 Eggleston, C. V.  38 hucksterism  40 Eichhorn, Kate  30 n.14 Eisenstein  3 Ellison, Ralph  9 Ely, Sam  4 n.3 environment of indeterminacy  209 Evelyn, John  76 n.16, 103 Eyles, Allen  137 n.64, 138 n.68, 139 n.72

243

failure  434, 54 n.61 oppositional tools  43 Fallon, James  5 n.9 The Family of Man (Hepworth)  3 Fante, John  61 n.68 Fellowship Farm  33 Ferrer, Daniel  173 n.25, 174 n.26, 174 n.29, 178 n.39 Figes, Eva  159 Findlay, J. N.  10 n.23 Fine, David M.  25, 25 n.5 Finsburg, Geoffrey  79 Fiske, Bill  989 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  201 The Last Tycoon  127, 2013, 205 Fogelson, Robert M.  25 n.3 Foster-Wallace, David  89 The Four Last Things (More)  3 Foushee, Danielle  87 n.30 fragments  172, 177, 178, 194, 199 Frey, Hans-Jost  177, 177 n.36, 177 n.37, 199, 199 n.62 Friedkin, William  122 Friedricks, William B.  49 n.53 Fritzsche, Peter  106, 106 n.55 The Frugal Charade  169, 172, 174, 176, 179, 196, 198 Fry, Maxwell  138, 138 n.67 Fuller, Buckminster  76 Gale, Steven H.  127, 127 n.39 Gambling Act  138 gaps of cinema  149, 151 Genetic Criticism  1735, 176 n.34, 177 Genetic Theory  178 George Air Force Base  61 Gibbs, Rodney  16, 17 n.37 Gibraltar  80 The Go-Between (Losey)  112 Gold, John R.  76 n.14, 97 The Practice of Modernism  85 n.23, 86 Goldman, William  109, 109 n.1 Development Hell  109 Goldwyn, Sam, Jr  133, 136 Gombrich, Ernst  159 Goss, Anthony  69 n.1 Gossip and Old Graves (Owen)  160 Graham, Dan  4 n.3

244 Index Greater London Council (GLC)  756 monorails  858 ring road plans  83 schemes  84 Tomorrow’s London  91 Greater London Development Plans (GLDP)  88 Primary Road Network  92 Greenstein, Paul  37 n.31, 51, 624, 207 Groden, Michael  173 n.25, 174 n.26, 174 n.29, 178 n.39 ‘Growing Flowers By Candlelight in Hotel Rooms’ (Adams)  5 n.9 Grundy, Ian  139 n.70 Guggenheim, Peggy  122 Gussow, Mel  113 Hagman, Donald G.  93 Halberstam, Judith  43 n.38 Hall, Peter  122 Great Planning Disasters  801 Hancock, Tony  3 Hancock Down Under (Hancock)  3 Hanks, Robert  153 n.84 Hanna, Hugh S.  37 n.31 Hanson, Stuart  136 n.60, 136 n.61, 137 n.63, 137 n.65, 138 n.69, 146 Harbison, Robert  13 n.31, 210 n.8 Hardy, Thomas  5 Harper, Sue  134n 55, 135, 135 n.58 Harriman, Job  36, 37, 41, 52, 54, 60 death  42 incorporation of Llano  49 Mescal Water Company  38 one-man autocracy  40 political activism  36 The Western Comrade  38 Harris, Lynn  4 n.3 Harrogate Festival  180 Hart, Scott  160, 160 n.5 Harvey, David  152 n.83 Hauberk, Charles  24 Hauser, Thomas  183 n.51 Havers, C. G.  78 Hayden, Dolores  37 n.31 coherent environment  46 Seven American Utopias  38 n.32, 40 n.36, 44 n.41, 46 n.44

Hayers, Tony  182 Hayles, Katherine  87 n.30 Heath, Edward  75, 80, 82 Hegel, G. W. F.  10 n.23 Helena Modjeska’s Colony  33 Hell, Julia  19 n.39, 19 n.40, 155 n.88 Helzner, Albert  6 n.10 Hepworth, Barbara  3 Herman, David  163 n.13 Herman, Luc  17 n.38 Higson, Andrew  134 n.54 Hillman, Ellis  76 n.16 Hine, Robert  33 n.23, 512, 51 n.58, 52 n.59 California’s Utopian Colonies  35 n.27, 51 pilot communities  35 Hise, Greg  25 n.3 Hitchcock, Alfred  3 Hoffman, Abe  37 n.31, 38 n.33, 40 n.35 Hook, The Planning of a New Town  97102 Horkheimer, Max  24 Housman, AE  186 Houston, Beverle  113, 113 n.6 Howard, Ebenezer  45, 54 Howe, Susan  13, 13 n.29, 13 n.30 Howerd, Frankie  207 Hunt, Myron  57 Huntington, Collis Potter  49 Huntington, Henry E.  49, 57 Huston, Anjelica  202 Huxley, Aldous  35 n.29, 5960, 59 n.67 After Many a Summer  23, 23 n.1, 28 n.10, 31 n.20, 49 California of eternal youth  25 Huyssen, Andreas  73, 73 n.11, 152, 152 n.82 embodied material fact  73 Hyde, Ralph  8 I Was Born (Perec)  3 IBMers  16 Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment (Eaton)  4 n.2 I’m Alan Partridge  182 impossible certainty  21 impressionism  1912

Index incompletion  176, 176 n.35 indeterminacy  199, 209 Inner-City Sumo (Partridge)  182 Innovation Centre On the Shelf (Kenward)  14, 14 n.33 Invisible Cities (Calvino)  105, 106 n.54 Iser, Wolfgang  212 n.10 Isherwood, Christopher  61 n.68 Jaggi, Maya  158 n.3 Janko, May  6 n.10 Jellicoe, Geoffrey  6970, 69 n.2, 70 n.3, 76 Johnson, B. S.  159, 161, 180 n.44 ‘Ah’ moments  17980, 194 Albert Angelo  195 Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs  179, 179 n.42, 192 n.55, 196 n.60 Christie Malry’s Own DoubleEntry  194 Collins ‘English’ Book  188, 190 crossword puzzles  180 Dear John  187 drama in junior schools  188 dual sense of professionalism  181 Fifty-Minute Teleplay with Sports Background  182, 185, 193 Film Vehicle for Cassius Clay  182, 183 Flann O’Brien Idea  184 Frankie Howerd as Oscar Wilde  182, 186, 210 Kami-Kaze Ninety  182, 185, 210 literary territory  182 Living Together  187 The Londoners’ London  188, 189 More Times than Hot Dinners  186 National Service Play  184, 189 Omnibus proposal  184, 186 Parade  1867, 189 poems by Paul Theroux for extra verse  187 programme ideas  182 Rejectamenta  197200 Santa Cruz article  187 Squash Court Play  185 Trawl tales  18897 treatment of Travelling People  183

245

The Unfortunates  179, 180 n.43, 196 unrealised book and television proposals  181 Jones, Joseph E.  13 n.27 Jordan, Julia  182 n.47 Joule, Barry  1245, 154 Juneteenth (Ellison)  9, 9 n.19, 9 n.20 Justice, S. M.  5 n.9 Jutzi, Alan  63 n.74 juxtaposition  126 Kachka, Boris  17 n.38 Kafka, Franz  3, 77 n.18 Kagan, Paul  35 n.29, 48, 59 n.67 New World Utopias  256, 25 n.6, 26 n.7, 35 n.28, 37 n.31 utopian communities  26 Kargon, Robert Hugh  86 n.26 Kaufmann, Stanley  118, 118 n.20 Kazan, Elia  201 Keith, John  76, 103 Kennedy, Maeve  124 n.30 Kenward, Michael  14 n.33 Kermode, Frank  199, 199 n.63 sense of an ending  8, 8 n.13 Kinder, Marsha  113, 113 n.6 Kinderman, William  12, 13 n.27 inchoate draft  13 Kingdom Come (Cook)  160 Kinmonth, Margy  124 n.32, 125 Klinger, Barbara  129 n.43 discursive surround  129 panoramic view of context  129 Kolkman, Michael  10 n.24 Krajewski, Markus  32 n.21 Krapp, Peter  32 n.21 Kubrick, Stanley  123 Napoleon  3 Lake, Stuart N.  58 Laminated Jar  15, 15 n.34 Lantz, Robert  134, 134 n.52, 136 Larkham, Peter J.  76 n.14 Latour, Bruno  71, 71 n.6 Aramis, or, the Love of Technology  71, 71 n.6, 72 n.7, 73, 75 n.13, 76 Lawlor, Leonard  19 n.41 Lawrence, D. H.  5

246 Index Lawson, Mark  119 n.24 ‘Leather Clothes and the History of Man’ (Justice)  5 n.9 Lefebvre, Henri  3, 3 n.1 Lefort, Claude  212 n.10 Lehan, Richard  74, 74 n.12 Lemmon, Nigey  51 Lennon, Nigey  37 n.31 Leonard, Valentine Moulard  19 n.41 Levy, Mark R.  136 n.59 Lewis, Beverly  52 n.60 Like a Fiery Elephant (Coe)  181, 181 n.46, 182 n.48, 190 n.53, 197 n.61 Lilley, Keith D.  76 n.14 Ling, Arthur  69, 71 Town Fiction  94, 105 literary criticism: approach  201 literary geography  73, 87, 208 Llano Del Rio  33, 207 anecdotal mechanism  34 archiving Llano  4855 birth of  38 The Brush Gang  40 compendium of data  35 constitution of  55 ghosting Huntington  569 Harriman  367 as holistic experiment  35 imagination of socialism  42 industrial and recreational branches  40 internal political struggles  55 invisible debris  647 Llano Hotel  22, 3940 Ozymandias  5964 relationship to utopia  35 ruins  60, 65, 66 as spot of destiny  44 unrealized Llano  448 as utopian colony  34 The Welfare League  40 Llano Viewbook  48 n.52, 63 Lloyd, Matthew  140 n.73 Londinium Redivivum (Evelyn)  76, 76 n.16 London London Underlines  104 sewage system  3 subterranean plan for  758

London as It Might Have Been (Hyde & Barker)  8, 8 n.17 London Gothic  86 Losey, Gavrik  113 n.7 Losey, Joseph  112, 114, 120, 122, 154, 201, 209 Accident  112 death of  149 The Go-Between  112 Lovecraft, H. P.  172 commonplace book  172, 172 n.21 Lucas, Gavin  132 n.48 Luckhurst, Roger  86 n.24 Ludwig (Visconti)  114 Machen, Arthur The Art of Wandering  4 The London Adventure  4, 5, 5 n.6 Maze Story  5 Madge, John  97 n.41 Maitland, Robert  88 Mamet, David  119 n.24 Marcuse, Herbert  181 Marker, Chris  151 Martin, John  3 Mathews, A. E. T.  75, 78, 99 counter-intuitive planning model  83 notion of ‘guided order’  86 petty restrictions  82 tunnel plan  79 underground plan  79, 81 Underways  68, 207, 208 wasteful system of law enforcement  82 The Matrix Trilogy  197 McAlpine, Alistair  102 n.48 McClung, Alexander  25 Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles  25 n.4 rim of a void, sense  56 unrealized spaces  27 McCorkle, Gentry Purviance  42 McHale, Brian  17 n.38 McLuhan, Marshall  181 Mellamphy, Dan  1778, 177 n.38 Mellon, Knox  51 Merewether, Charles  30 n.14 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  212 n.10 Meyer, Stephanie  3

Index Midnight Sun (Meyer)  3 Millsap, Walter  51 Minstrel Island (Pynchon)  16, 16 n.36, 17, 18, 208 The Missing Pieces (Lefebvre)  3, 3 n.1 Mitchum, Robert  202 Molella, Arthur P.  86 n.26 Money (Amis)  110, 110 n.2 Monkey Tennis (Partridge)  182 Monorails in London  90 ‘carcass state’ of innovation  91 Ortolano’s notion  89 suspended monobeam system  90 More, Thomas  3 Moreau, Jeanne  202 Moretti, Franco  103, 103 n.49 Morley, Paul  5, 5 n.8 Morrow, Charlotte  160 Motopia  69 construction of  70 Motopia: A Study in the Evolution of Urban Landscape (Jellicoe)  69, 69 n.2, 71, 100 Murray, Joanne  88 n.31 ‘My Trike’ (Chuck)  5 n.9 Nairn, Ian  192, 193 n.57 Nairn’s London  1923, 192 n.56 negation  910 negative capability  21 Nelmes, Jill  127, 127 n.41, 128 ‘neo-luddite’ movement  17 New Towns Act of 1946  97 Newland, Paul  113 n.7 Newllano  42 map of  524 Nicholson, Jack  202 Nickum, James R.  44, 44 n.42 “non-cinematic” fields  151 Nora, Pierre  29 Nothing (Morley)  5, 5 n.8 Number 13 (Hitchcock)  3 Oberdeck, Kathryn J.  46, 47 n.45, 48, 48 n.50 Obispo, Dr  23 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich  4, 4 n.4 nostalgic and melancholic reflection  8

247

Odeon overhead projector slide  143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149 On the Shelf: A Survey of Research and Development Projects Abandoned for Non-Technical Reasons  2, 14 Onassis, Jackie  123 opening montage  119 original conception  21 Ortolano, Guy  85, 85 n.22 O’Sullivan, Feargus  104 n.51 Otis, Harrison Gray  36, 36 n.30 Out of Sheer Rage (Dyer)  5, 5 n.7 Owen, Jane  160 Ozymandias  5964 Ozymandius (Shelley)  63 Painter, George  123 The Pale King (Foster-Wallace)  89 Paroissien, David  8 n.16 Paterson, Marsha  5 n.9 pedestrian platform  100 ‘Penny Gaff ’ spaces  137 People of the Black Mountains (Williams)  3 Perloff, Marjorie  171, 171 n.20, 200, 200 n.64 enigma texts  172 snipe-hunts  213 Petit, Chris  151, 151 n.81 phantom adaptation  209 pharmakon  28 Phillips, Laurence  190 n.52 philosophical negativity  21 Pickering, Robert  173 Pickett, George  54 Pinter, Harold  18, 112, 201 domestic epic  137, 153 Moviola  203 The Proust Screenplay (see The Proust Screenplay (Pinter)) Pinteresque  112, 112 n.3, 119 n.24 Pisgah Grande  33 Pleasence, Donald  202 Plesske, Nora  77, 77 n.19 Pliny the Elder  21, 21 n.43 Plummer, Desmond  99 Polden, Clive  139, 141, 141 n.75, 149 Ponge, Francis  4, 4 n.5

248 Index Pordage, Jeremy  234, 278, 31 as archivist  27 Hauberk Papers  28 posthumous works  7 n.12 Prendergast, Christopher  123 Propter, Bill  23, 49 region’s fiction  25 Proust, Marcel À la recherche du temps perdu  112, 113 n.7, 121 Le Temps Retrouvé  114 Remembrance of Things Past  115 unfinishable genre  130 The Proust Screenplay (Pinter)  116 n.12, 116 n.14, 117 n.17, 118 n.19, 118 n.21, 120 n.25, 121 n.27, 128 n.42, 130 n.45, 201, 203 abandoned  11415 in context of British Cinema in 1970s  1336 cultural function and textual identity  209 in drafts and marginalia  11517 high street ruins  1368 interminable texts  12730 intermission  1303 performances in text and landscape  149, 1515 production timeframe  147 reading  11722 unfinished afterlives  1226 psychology of expectation  26 Pudney, John  77 n.17 Pyke’s Cinematograph Theatre  139 Pynchon, Thomas  16 Quart, Barbara  202 n.2 Quart, Leonard  202 n.2 The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam)  43 n.38, 43 n.39 Rajan, Ballachandra  7, 161 n.7, 161 n.8 environment of indeterminacy  209 The Form of the Unfinished  209 n.6 Rancière, Jacques  151 n.79, 151 n.80 Re-Reading B. S. Johnson (Tew and White)  197, 197 n.61 record-creating processes  50 n.54

Reisz, Karel  135 Richards, Tom  164 The Lump Sum  167 Richardson, Tony  135 Ricoeur, Paul  28, 28 n.12, 29 n.13 Ridener, John  31 n.18 The Rings of Saturn (Sebald)  19 Ringways project  80 Rippy, Marguerite H.  4 n.2 Roberts, John  9 dynamic element of truth  9 The Necessity of Errors  9 n.21, 9 n.22 Robertson, Sue  82 n.21, 86 Roger, Richard  87 n.27 Rolfe, Lionel  37 n.31, 51 Roma Symphony (Bizet)  3 Romero, George A. Dawn of the Dead  11011 Night of The Living Dead  110 The Ruins of Modernity (Hell & Schönle)  19, 155 n.88 ruins  1820, 267, 334, 42, 44, 47, 51, 56, 604, 132, 1368, 152, 210, 21112 Rutherford, Adam  87 n.30 Sale, Kirkpatrick  1617 San Bernadino  33 San Francisco Public Library system  5 n.10 Sandage, Scott archival collections  12 Born Losers: A History of Failure in America  12, 12 n.26 Scenes Unseen (Waldman)  3, 3 n.1 Schlesinger, John  135 Schmidt , Jeremy  172 n.21 Schmuland, Arlene  58 n.64 Schockman, H. Eric  25 n.3 Schönle, Andreas  19 n.39, 19 n.40, 155 n.88 Schwarz, Carla A.  6 n.10 Sebald, W. G.  19 Senna, Ayrton  126 sense bombarding  133 The Servant (Losey)  11213 Shail, Robert  135, 135 n.56, 135 n.57 Sharr, Adam  71 n.5, 103 n.50

Index shattering achievement  122 shelving probability  1418 The Shepherds Bush Pavilion  150 archival repossession  141 bomb-damaged  108 bracketed spaces  144 CTA  1401 non-Odeon cinemas  142 paracmes  145, 146 n.78 timespan of graphs  147 The Twilight Zone  144 urban hierarchies  145 Sibelius, Jean  3 Simon, Cheryl  30 n.14 Sky, Alison  4 n.2 slush pile  15761 Smith, Jonathan  174 n.26 Smith, Justin T.  134 n.55, 135, 135 n.58 Smith, Roberta  4 n.2 Soap (Ponge)  4, 4 n.5 Social History  65 Sodome et Gomorrhe  114 Soja, Edward W.  47 n.46 Sontag, Susan  172 n.21 Sorkin, Michael  27, 27 n.9 Spark, Muriel  18, 161 abandoned projects  161 abandoned textual practice  167 chunks of text  1667 economy  163 The Executioner  163 fragmented finality  198 The Frugal Charade  169, 172, 196, 198 genetic defects  1728 Hamburger Girl  164 huge cast  167 Loitering with Intent  1623, 162 n.9, 163 n.11 notes  16271 PLOT  175, 177 Reality and Dreams  164, 164 n.15, 165, 165 n.16, 165 n.17, 170, 209 The Side Effect  171, 172 uncatalogued boxes  166 Warrender Chase  1623 Watling Street  1645, 164 n.14, 196, 209

249

Spiegel, Sam  202 Spieker, Sven  30 n.14 Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (Howe)  13, 13 n.29, 13 n.30 St. Thomas Aquinas  3 Stamp, Terence  122 Stand On Zanzibar (Brunner)  91 n.33 Stannard, Martin  163, 163 n.12 Starr, Kevin  25 n.3, 26 n.8 Steedman, Carolyn  32 archive  32 boundless limitless space  32 Dust: The Archive and Cultural History  32, 32 n.22, 48, 57 Steiner, George The Decline of Tragedy  158 implicit assumption  158 logic of negation  157 My Unwritten Books  1578, 157 n.1, 157 n.2 ‘privation’  158 The Tongues of Eros  157 Steinman, Les  5 n.9 Stéphane, Nicole  114, 122 Sterling, Bruce  172 n.21 Stetter, Alex  4 n.2 Stevens, Matt  59 n.65 Stone, Michelle  4 n.2 Stone Hearts (Morrow)  160 Stony Lonesome (Hart)  160, 160 n.5 Stoyte, Joe  23, 28, 49 The Strange World of Barry Who? (Kinmonth)  124, 124 n.32 Sugnet, Charles  178 n.40, 179 n.41 Sullivan, Hannah  175, 175 n.30 Summa Theologiae (St. Thomas Aquinas)  3 super curator trend  4 Sutherland, J. A.  160 n.6 Symphony No. 8 (Sibelius)  3 Talbot, Fleur  1623 Tatlin’s Tower  3 Teeling-Smith, George  14, 15, 15 n.35 Tew, Philip  182 n.47, 190 n.52 textual criticism  174 textual multiplicity  105

250 Index textualization Lehan’s notion  106 town fictions  1026 urban space  74 Thacker, Andrew  73, 73 n.9 literary geography  73 Thalberg, Irving  202 Thatcher, Margaret  93 Thomas, Dylan  3 Thornton, Stephen  71 n.5, 103 n.50 Thurston, Nick  155 n.89 Tiedemann, Rolf  8 n.14 Tomaiuolo, Saverio  13 n.28 natural multidisciplinarity  13 Tomorrow’s London  91 n.33, 95 controlled taxis  96 criticisms of GLDP inquiry  92 in The Daily Telegraph  93 dolphinarium  923, 93 n.36 faith in modernism  93 ‘futuristic’ transport  94 ‘howling’ opposition  92 Traffic in Towns (Buchanan)  86 n.27, 100, 102 Trench, Richard  76 n.16 Trevis, Di  115 Triggernometry (Cunningham)  58 Tristram Shandy (Sterne)  3 Truffaut, François  114 Fahrenheit 451  87, 87 n.28, 105 Tunnel Motorways: City Centres  78 Turner, Jenny  8 n.18 Twilight (Meyer)  3 Underways (Mathews)  68, 78, 83, 84 in archive  7881 catacombs of confusion  815 to Crossrail  103 monorails  858 multidisciplinary spatial discourse  78 plan map  107 UNDERWAY Environment  81 Underwood, Chris  140 n.74 Unfinished Novels (Bronte)  3 unfinished projects/works  4, 6, 11 absence of realized text  205 ‘as a counterpoint to ruination’  20, 55, 160 benefit  208

fundamental ambiguity  152 ‘as invisible debris’  647 Johnson’s television proposals  212 labour of the negative  211 Llano study  207 ‘mattering’ works  206, 206 n.4 meta-unfinishing  212 ‘morpohology and cultural form’  1011, 65, 91, 104, 131, 145, 178, 206 oneiric space  77 phantom adaptation  209 pluritemporality  132 Pynchon, work  208 reclaiming non-literary texts  206 ruin’s intrusion  211 taxonomic issues  208 textual interpretation  21011 in written and unwritten texts  206 ‘unfinishing’  9, 10, 33, 176, 201, 20513 unrealized projects  20 spaces and storage of  27 urban catalogue  193 urban modernity  76 urban space, textualization  74 utopianism  23, 35 utopias, abandoned  335 Valéry, Paul  1011 Cahiers  173, 173 n.22, 173 n.23, 175 n.32, 193, 193 n.58 Genetic Criticism  173 lucky stroke  173 sense of luck  173 Vaughan, Michael  10 n.24 Veeser, Harold  20 n.42 Verity, Frank T.  139 View of Delft (Vermeer)  119, 121 Vilas-Matas, Enrique  213, 213 n.11 Viney, William  19 n.39 Visconti, Luchino  114 The Visitors (Kazan)  201 Vivos Underground Catastrophe Center  61, 61 n.69 Wadham, Jill  160 slush pile criticism  160 Waldman, Harry  3, 3 n.1

Index Wallen, James Ramsey  6, 6 n.11, 8 n.15 tragic rhetoric of failure  8 Walsh, Timothy  206, 206 n.5 Warwick, Alexandra  104 n.53 Wassenaar, Ingrid  174 n.28 waste  1821 discarded material culture  19 Watkin’s Folly  3 Watling Street (Spark)  18, 164, 164 n.14, 167, 196, 209 Waugh, Patricia  163 n.13 Weiner, Tim  134 n.51 Welles, Orson Don Quixote  3 It’s All True  3 West Green House  102, 102 n.48 The Western Comrade  38, 39, 41, 43 Westway’s construction  86 White, Glyn  190 n.52 White, Jerry  76 n.15 Williams, Raymond  3 Williams, Richard J.  76 n.14 Wilson, Harold  701, 190

251

Winterbottom, Lord  79 Wood, James  9 n.20 Wood, Michael  130 n.44 Woodward, Christopher  19 n.39, 211, 211 n.9 Yagi, Naoko Derrida’s notion of Written Improvisation  117 Pinter the Adapter  116, 116 n.11, 116 n.13, 117 n.15 Youth Hosteling with Chris Eubank (Partridge)  182 ‘Your Clothes are Dead’ (Steinman)  5 n.9 Zacher, Samantha  165 n.18 Zalta, Edward N.  19 n.41 Zeidberg, David  59 Ziegler, Phillip  1901, 195 abandonment of The English Book  196 criticisms  191 Zionism  157

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