The Unmapped Country

by Ann Quin

  Praise for Ann Quin

  ‘Quin works over a small area with the finest of tools. Every page, every word gives evidence of her care and workmanship.’

  New York Times

  ‘Quin’s prose never falters.’

  Caitlin Youngquist, Paris Review

  ‘Vividly intense and almost palpably immediate.’

  Irish Times

  ‘The most naturally and delicately gifted novelist of her generation.’

  The Scotsman

  ‘Quin was a writer ahead of her time.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘One of Britain's most adventurous post-war writers. Psychologically dark and sexually daring, Quin's fearlessly innovative prose reads like nobody else.’

  Juliet Jacques

  ‘Quin understood she was on to something new and she took herself seriously, in the right way; she had a serious sense of her literary purpose.’

  Deborah Levy

  ‘Despite ongoing rumours of a B.S. Johnson revival, I feel our attention could be more usefully directed towards Ann Quin.’

  Stewart Home, in 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess

  First published in 2018 by And Other Stories

  Sheffield – London – New Haven

  www.andotherstories.org

  Copyright © Ann Quin, 2018

  Introduction copyright © Jennifer Hodgson, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. The right of Ann Quin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Some of the stories and fragments in this collection are previously unpublished and some have already been published. For fuller detail, see the Note on Sources at the end of the collection.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-911508-14-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-911508-15-1

  Editor: Jennifer Hodgson; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Edward Bettison.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book was supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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  Contents

  Introduction by Jennifer Hodgson

  Leaving School – XI

  Nude and Seascape

  A Double Room

  Every Cripple Has His Own Way of Walking

  B.B.’s Second Manifesto

  Untitled (Neh Man It’s Like This)

  Living in the Present (with Robert Sward)

  Tripticks

  Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails

  Eyes that Watch Behind the Wind

  Ghostworm

  Motherlogue

  The Unmapped Country

  One Day in the Life of a Writer

  A Note on Sources

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  ‌Introduction

  Ann Quin was a rare breed in British writing: radically experimental, working class and a woman. The author of four novels and a prolific writer of short stories and fragments (as well as memoir, poetry, and radio and television plays), she was born in Brighton in 1936 to what used to be called an unmarried mother. In ‘Leaving School – XI’, a piece of memoir-writing collected in this volume, she writes of her ‘sense of sin’ and ‘great lust to find out’, which took her to London, where she worked as a secretary by day and wrote her strange, singular novels by night—typewriter clattering away into the early hours. A newspaper profile from 1965 describes her ‘marvellously cluttered’ bed-sitting room in Notting Hill Gate: the walls are a pasted-up montage of torn pages from magazines and art postcards—painters, playwrights, French film stars. Shelves teem with paperbacks, there’s her typewriter, of course, and a collection of esoteric knick-knacks. It’s clear that her sights are set far beyond the hot-water bottle, gas ring and candlewick bedspread of this L-shaped room. Like other restless English writers before her, Quin embarked on a search for the spiritual antipodes of her homeland, which she depicts in her writing as buttoned-up, repressed and mildewed around the edges.

  Quin was part of a remarkable coterie of innovative writers that emerged in Britain during the 1960s, including BS Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Alan Burns, Robert Nye and others. Her stories and fragments are murky, voyeuristic and formally off-kilter, filled with sudden blazes of intensity, occult images and erotic artifice. Stylistically, they run the gamut from expressionist renditions that blur memory, perception and fantasy to Burroughsian cut/up and montage. Certain preoccupations, though, emerge again and again: mingled voices, tensions between thinking and feeling, dysfunctional families and transgenerational disquiet, febrile and free-flowing desires that are always in the end thwarted, conversations that seem to say nothing whatsoever but somehow reveal everything.

  The stories collected in this volume span the course of Quin’s writing career. The earliest, ‘B.B.’s Second Manifesto’ and ‘Untitled’, were written around 1962, prior to the publication of her debut novel, the seaside noir, Berg (1964). They were ghosted on behalf of her then-lover, the New Zealand pop artist, Billy Apple, and reflect the art school’s abiding influence upon her. At the time, she worked as a secretary at the Royal College of Art, where she encountered the British pop art scene that was incubating there amongst artists like David Hockney, Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Patrick Caulfield and others. Pop’s phantasmic vision of Amerika, and its techniques of subverting the styles and iconography of the mass media, would come to preoccupy her later work, and especially the short stories ‘Living in the Present’ and ‘Tripticks’, the latter of which seeded her final published novel of the same name.

  Impressively, Quin parlayed the promise and warm reception of Berg into an extraordinary freewheeling existence, living, loving and writing her own picaresque. She wrote three more novels in the years that followed: Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). Perpetually broke, she lived hand to mouth off her publisher’s advances, the occasional Arts Council grant or university fellowship to fund extended trips to Ireland, Greece, the United States, the Bahamas and Mexico. In the press profiles of her that appeared at the time, one can almost detect the licking of journalists’ stiff upper lips when confronted by this ‘Miss Quin’, with her ‘shapely legs’ and candid reflections upon her peripatetic lifestyle, unconventional relationships and experiments with drugs. In the States, she immersed herself in the alternative living scene and found a sort of home-in-exile amongst the American post-Beat poets, forming relationships with two of them (Robert Creeley and Robert Sward) and driving across the mesa from New Mexico to attend the Berkeley Poetry Congress. In her writing, as in her life, Quin is often drawn to experiences of difference, extremity and disorientation. The stories ‘Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with his Fingernails’, ‘Eyes That Watch Behind the Wind’ and ‘Ghostworm’ place her protagonists in landscapes at once sensuous and brutal, confronting alienatingly unfamiliar cultures, or else tasked with the dangerous and delicious risks of transgressing social prohibitions. They seek, as she writes in ‘Ghostworm’, ‘EXPERIENCE in caps period’, to ‘live beyond’ the confines of the self. But equally, despite (because of?) her ambivalence towards home, Quin is peculiarly attuned to the grotesque details, to what she calls the ‘eggy mouthcorners’ of ordinary life. ‘A Double Room’ and ‘Every Cripple Has His Own Way of Walking’, especially, are redolent of greasy mackintoshes, milk skin, of
bare, swinging light bulbs, of chintz and clag.

  Increasingly, though, towards the end of her life, Quin found herself having wandered too far off the map. She died young, swimming out to sea near Brighton’s Palace Pier in 1973 when she was 37. She had been due, later that year, to take up a place on the University of East Anglia’s prestigious creative writing course. Suffering frequent and devastating bouts of mental illness, she spent periods in psychiatric institutions and underwent electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). Her final novel, ‘The Unmapped Country’, which remained unfinished at the time of her death, draws upon these experiences for its trenchant critique of mental health care. Elsewhere, her writing explores the risks and seductions of going over the edge; this final work is about the horrors of ‘going sane’.

  In ‘The Unmapped Country’, the protagonist Sandra criticises artists’ and writers’ ‘need for posterity’. ‘How much better,’ she decides, ‘to create like the Navajo Indians, beginning at sunrise in the desert, a sand painting that would be rubbed out by sundown.’ But although partial to the romance of ephemeral art, Quin clearly didn’t intend a similar fate for her own work. As a ‘cult’ author, her influence is difficult to point to with certainty—though China Miéville and Deborah Levy have recently paid homage to her. That said, there’s a kinship between Quin and some of the most audacious writing of the twentieth century and beyond.

  Her work bridges the world of modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Anna Kavan with what came after. She would have been quite at home amongst the women avant-gardists of the 1980s and 90s like Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. And there’s something distinctly Quin-like about the riskiness, the subversive joy in confronting the subterranean aspects of human experience present in many of the most interesting contemporary writers: Eimear McBride, Claire-Louise Bennett, Anakana Schofield, Sheila Heti, Levy herself, and others.

  In letters from the mid-sixties to her publisher, Marion Boyars of Calder and Boyars, whose list at the time comprised some of the most cosmopolitan and provocative writing of the period, Quin mentions ‘writing short stories at a fantastic rate’. It’s clear that she was energised by turning her hand to the form: ‘the short story medium is something new, exciting,’ she writes, comparing the ‘curved shape’ of the short story to the ‘spiral’ of the novel, enthusing about the ‘space for readers to explore’. Perhaps it’s no surprise that this fiction writer who called herself a poet, and whose work is so much concerned with moments, glances, shifting moods, scenes flickering in and out of view, should find herself comfortable here, in the closer, headier confines of short fiction. The stories collected here for the first time distil Quin at her wildest and often her most virtuosic. And collectively they demonstrate, in rare and unexpected ways, an imagination committed to pushing British fiction into weirder, dirtier and more anarchic places.

  JENNIFER HODGSON

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  The Unmapped Country

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  ‌Leaving School – XI

  Bound by perverse securities in a convent, RC Brighton for eight years. Taking that long to get over. The Holy Ghost. The Trinity. The Reverend Mother. I was not a Catholic. I was sent to a convent to be brought up ‘a lady’. To say gate and not giate—the Sussex accent I had picked up from the village school in my belly-rubbing days had to be eliminated by How Now Brown Cow, if I wanted to make my way in the world. According to Mother.

  Non-Catholics attended chapel every Friday. Joined in the morning prayers. Hymns. Marched in the Corpus Christi processions, dressed in white, knelt on hot tennis courts, but not allowed to throw petals. Listened to scripture lessons. Struggled up from desk at noon and mumbled the Angelus. At fourteen I wanted Heaven and Hell to be defined, never believing in Hell fire, nor that Heaven consisted of being completely content looking at an old man, white-haired, bearded, called God. Limbo always made more sense. Not being baptized, that was where my soul, uncleansed from Original Sin, would end up. I believed in that then.

  Enclosed by grey walls. Were they grey? Corridors. Women fettered from head to toe in black and white. Their white faces. Did they use rice powder for such an effect? Black habits whispering. Sound of bells. Rosaries. Holy pictures exchanged. Statues and candles. Sun caught in the chalice. Did they use real blood? Impact of wooden pews. The devil was close, hiding in the folds of black gowns. Cracks of playground. He grinned from the shadows between statues, and was secretly conjured up, after school, on the Downs. Christ was distant, wearing his crown of thorns, body bleeding. He had redeemed every one of us. Hail Mary Full of Grace looked so sorrowful I felt more pity for her. Christ after all had been made in the image of man, and men were to be distrusted. Life was but a preparation for the greater life hereafter. A ritualistic culture that gave me a conscience. A death wish and a sense of sin. Also a great lust to find out, experience what evil really was.

  Weekdays I sleepwalked through. Evenings spent in reading; half-heartedly doing homework, preferring to explore books discovered in the Public Library: Greek and Elizabethan dramatists. Dostoievsky (Crime and Punishment, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves made me aware of the possibilities in writing). Chekhov, Lawrence, Hardy, etc., rather than learning the coal fields. The Corn Law. Amo, amas, amat. ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ off by heart. Irregular verbs. More fascinated by the colour of Mademoiselle’s bloomers. The way her face shrivelled, changed from ash to the colour of her bloomers, than her attempts to manipulate my mouth into an uuuuuuuuu. More stimulated by the girl who had a crush on me, than hearing about the Poor Law. More worried about my stained gym slip growing up my limbs to meet my navy blue knickers, than chalk marks on the blackboard dealing with measurement, relationship of points, lines, angles, surfaces and solids. More curious by what the nuns wore in bed. If they were really bald. If they stripped completely for a bath, than split infinitives. More excited in getting into the Sixth Form, not only because the classroom windows overlooked the boys’ college, but on the whole sinful world that lay before me at the end of the year. That world at seventeen consisted mainly of the theatre, having spent every Saturday queuing up for a seat in the Gods at the Theatre Royal to witness a fantasy world that relieved my many desires, frustrations. I decided to go on the stage. I longed for rôles that would suit my varied moods, and for an immediate audience. I had been writing stories since the age of seven to entertain myself, and writing in comparison to acting seemed such a solitary occupation. I lived in a dream world and created dreams out of everyday situations until nothing ever seemed what it appeared to be. At fourteen I met my half brother for the first time and fell desperately in love with him; he died five years later and I saw myself as Antigone. At eighteen I went up to London to spend Saturdays with my father (he had left my mother when I was ten) and pretended he was my lover.

  I passed the GCE in one subject: English language. I failed in literature. Half the paper was based on The Tempest, which we had done for an end-of-term production, I had played Caliban; I filled the exam paper with Caliban’s speeches, and philosophized on his good and evil aspects. So at sweet seventeen and never been… I passed through the Gates of Eden. Threw away my uniform, thick lisle stockings, wore makeup every day, bought high heels, nylons, and joined a Rep. Company as an ASM. Pocket money spent on the train fares. I worked from 8:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Collected props from sceptical antique dealers. Scrubbed the stage, where I recited Shakespeare, if no one was around. Sewed costumes. Made tea, coffee. Shifted scenery. Knocked on dressing room doors, and stood back in envy, awe, as the cast transformed themselves. And attempted to laugh at the camp jokes I didn’t understand. During lunch breaks I ate sandwiches, made up poems, in a church nearby. Six weeks spent hanging between what I had anticipated, and clinging to what had been known within the convent walls.

  I had a row with the stage manager. I think it was over the hem of a costume I had sewn crooked (only ever having done embroidery). I was asked to leave. I left in tears. Back to the world of books, and efforts to have
some kind of social life with ‘people of my own age’. I joined the Young Conservatives’ Association, and sat in the Grand Hotel on a Saturday night, dressed in long white, next to a similar wallflower friend, longing for a Paul Jones, and when that came, my partner would be shorter, fatter, breathe down my neck and step on my toes. I sold my soul to the devil for a Heathcliff, and to be rich and famous. I wrote inspired poems in the middle of the night, mainly religious and surrealistic. I won a poetry prize. The devil had obviously accepted my offer. When I arrived to collect the prize, a 10s. book token, I was greeted by half a dozen very old dears, some in wheelchairs, who clapped enthusiastically after I read my sonnet, called ‘The Lost Seagull’—about gulls being damned souls.

  Still interested in going on the stage, I tried getting into RADA. I learned two pieces for the audition. I expected a stage, even a platform, instead a smallish room, brightly lit; ten or twelve people faced me. I began, froze, asked to start again, but was struck dumb, and rushed out, silently screaming down Gower Street. I would be a writer. A poet. Where what I had to express, say, would be my own interpretation, my own vision and be accepted by an unseen audience.

  I took a secretarial course, and only my determination that it would be a means towards bread and butter, kept me at this for a year. Armed with shorthand and typewriting certificates I went to a secretarial agency in London, and got a job in a newspaper office, a small concern, but in Fleet Street. I got up at 6 a.m. to catch the train, and would be back at 8 p.m. thoroughly exhausted. A nightmare that was extended by the editor hanging himself in a cupboard, who left a note beside the whisky bottle to the effect he had contemplated suicide for forty years. Soon after, thankfully, I had appendicitis. Not very keen on getting another job I prolonged convalescence, and took a part-time course in painting. I had noticed a Heathcliff walking along the seafront, who was obviously an art student. The devil was apparently still acknowledging me. I fell in love, and that world merged with what I had seen at the theatre, what I had read, until nothing, no one else existed. I wrote more poems, less religious, started a journal, and wrote beautiful love letters.