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Bug Jack Barron

By Norman Spinrad

An introduction by Michael Moorcock

August, 1967. Milford, Pennsylvania. Damon Knight’s Gothic manse. (A ringer for the Pyscho house.) I’m attending a writers conference, my first and last writers’ workshop. I’m representing New Worlds and what will be called (never by us) the ‘New Wave’. Knight, who, as a paperback editor, has published several Ballard originals, as well as work by me, Disch and other ambitious writers of the day, is publishing many of the same writers in his Orbit anthology series. Judith Merrill, anthologist and critic, is our greatest publicist in the USA, championing Ballard in particular.

New Worlds is already publishing such outstanding US writers as Thomas M Disch, John Sladek, Pamela Zoline, Roger Zelazny, James Sallis and Kit Reed alongside UK writers like Brian Aldiss, BJ Bayley, DM Thomas, George MacBeth, JG Ballard and Langdon Jones. Soon we’ll see the first work of M John Harrison, Gene Wolfe and others. A great fusion of talent, the first real flowering of what we’ve been working for. We’re all very excited. Talking night after night with high verbals like Jim Sallis, Chip Delany, Harlan Ellison, Judith Merrill and Tom Disch saves a lot of money on speed but doesn’t necessarily improve your judgement. The days grow crazier. Spinrad and Ellison are in a brawl at the local diner. Ellison, who did his best with it, comes back cursing Spinrad for letting the gigantic trucker pummel him into the ground. Spinrad points out reasonably that Harlan picked the fight and he was ready to call help if it looked like Harlan was going to get killed. After all, Harlan handled himself well enough in his famous Pacific Dining Car parking lot fist fight with Frank Sinatra.

Ellison’s in his own Golden Age, riding high and boiling with attitude, turning out lippy eloquent hits like Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktock Man. He and the equally height-challenged Spinrad make natural comrades, full of the mouth that made Warner Brothers gangsters the only kind you ever wanted to be. Can’t keep it shut. Cagney and Tracey. Always in trouble. (Leigh Brackett once laughed when I suggested the snappy villain in her Elliott Gould Long Goodbye was based on her friend Harlan. It could easily have been, she said.) The stately, amiable Disch has completed his Camp Concentration as our best serial yet and I’m wondering how we’ll possibly equal it. Jerry Cornelius has been appearing in New Worlds for about two years. Ballard’s been publishing his ‘condensed novels’, beginning with The Assassination Weapon, for about a year. At New Worlds parties William Burroughs and Arthur C Clarke enjoy glasses of orange juice, politely disdaining all drugs, neither man too happy with this zesty new rock and roll which makes it hard to hear the other’s substantial drone. In London that strange cross-fertilisation between the new SF writers, beat and pulp literature, poetry, music, French cinema and pop art painting is becoming identified as some sort of rough and ready movement. Voices of common experience.

Spinrad’s brought bits of his new novel along to Milford. Previously he’s best known for a pulpish hard-boiled SF caper called The Men in the Jungle, which showed his promise. But the new novel seems light years ahead of anything else I’ve read of his. It’s called Bug Jack Barron and is about media manipulation of the public, about politics in the near future. A subject dear to my heart. And written in ambitious language, inspired by the same possibilities of expression demonstrated by Burroughs, who learned to take the jack-hammer thrust of pulp prose and turn it into a sophisticated literary method.

Where mainstream writers still struggle to reproduce the careful, unambitious sentences of Kingsley Amis, the Frenchified retrospective tone of Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet, the dull authority and over-familiar rhythms of the orthodox American novel of manners, or fall back utterly on pastiche, New Worlds writers have kicked all that aside and are finding and making instruments to do a job, rather than reproduce a riff.

That’s how it was in the summer of ’67.

Ballard, drawing on his own medical education, his work as a scientific journalist, his relish for the rhythms and resonances of techno-prose, had found one brilliant solution to the problems we talked about. We had just run another – Sladek’s classic Masterson and the Clerks. We had recently introduced the graphic work of MC Escher to the anglophone public. Aldiss had begun his Acid Head War stories (superior to their revised book versions), composer Langdon Jones had found his own approach which would culminate in his powerful cycle The Eye of the Lens and Barry Bayley, idiosyncratic as ever, was producing the extraordinary stories (Burroughsian geometries?) which would become The Knights of the Limits.

That first time I met him, Spinrad had written what was far and away his best work to date and couldn’t believe that it wasn’t being enthusiastically celebrated, rather than rejected, by its commissioning publisher.

Several of us were familiar with this pattern. My own Final Programme dismayed the first editors to see it and took a couple of years to come out from an independent publisher, only to be censored in its US edition! Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition was pulped by its first US publisher, Aldiss’s Hand-Reared Boy was dumped by its publisher at proof stage while his regular publisher, Faber, firmly refused to publish Report on Probability A. Camp Concentration was also turned down by its commissioning publisher. We got condescending letters. Mervyn Peake’s original publisher refused to reprint the Gormenghast books because they insisted (following Amis’s dismissal of the sequence) there was no market and it took Penguin Books, Langdon Jones, Maeve Peake, Anthony Burgess and a few others to pressure them into republishing the classic we know.

Time after time we’d come upon that mixture of narrow snobbery and illiterate prejudice which continues to make the average corporate publisher a kind of goalie between writers and their public. While much of that work from the sixties might seem pretty ordinary today, New Worlds scarcely a featured story or serial which didn’t involved its author and publisher in some kind of trouble.

I went back to London with Spinrad’s manuscript and promptly succumbed to bed where I read it and was enchanted. He was using ambitious language, the language of the modern streets. The prose had a vigorous eloquence, a swaggering vulgarity, drawing on Burroughs, Brooklyn and Los Angeles for its inspiration as well as its metaphors. I was so keen on the book that I truncated Brian Aldiss’s serial (just about to appear in book form by then and needing no further support) and started doing the copy for the next issue’s cover. It seemed to me that we were about to make another quantum jump.

That same issue (178 December 67/January 68) carried one of Ballard’s earliest advertisements (Does The Angle Between Two Walls Have A Happy Ending), Aldiss’s acid streaming Auto-Ancestral Fracture, Sladek, acid about McLuhan, Emshwiller’s non-verbal account of his own movies. It had Disch’s cold heroin comedy Linda & Daniel & Spike and Giles Gordon’s The Line-up on the Shore. The critic and polemicist Christopher Finch contributed a piece on the state of British avant-garde art, discussing Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake, among others. There were articles on the future of fiction, illustrations by Paolozzi from his As Is When series. Pretty much a typical issue for the times.

GET SET FOR THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO YOU, says the shoutline for the opening of Spinrad’s serial. IT’S BUG JACK BARRON TIME. And off we went.

Straight into a lot of very time-consuming idiocy with WH Smith and Britain’s other monolithic distributor/retailer Menzies. In fact Menzies took the trouble to phone their rival and tip them off to the kind of dangerous filth they were selling. I soon discovered, to my surprise, since they were by then perfectly happy to sell and distribute soft porn, that we had been banned. We’d been banned in South Africa and elsewhere, but why here? They could be prosecuted, they said, for libel or obscenity or something and they couldn’t take any chances.

We went to see them.

Following the usual lunatic logic of these situations, the man representing the magazine arm of WH Smith was Mr Baron. He wasn’t much like Jack Barron. He favoured muddy brown clothing. He was very vague about what the law could do to them, but he was very certain that Bug Jack Barron was ‘deliberately disgusting’ and he wasn’t a man at one with himself when he contemplated (from the next issue by now awaiting distribution) Langdon Jones’s Eye of the Lens, in which a character has a discussion with Christ on the Cross. That, he declared, with certainty, was blasphemy and blasphemy was against the law.

And so, after some time down the establishment rabbit hole, I came up for air with the message that Smiths and Menzies were refusing to distribute us. Unless, they said, we cut our serial, Bug Jack Barron, forthwith. Part of New Worlds’ policy was that we only survived by selling through normal newsagents. We had no desire to become a ‘little magazine’. Our economics, though real world, were very fragile. There was never any question about cutting the serial, but it looked as if our chances of staying afloat were pretty small. Especially since our distributor was, without permission, already destroying the offending issues.

Then, for some reason, the press came to our support in a big way. The publicity forced Smiths to reconsider their strategy, if nothing else. The subject matter and general thrust of Bug Jack Barron and the fact that Smiths were hugely unpopular with journalists at that time, meant that we got a great deal of publicity, most of which was sympathetic. Some wasn’t. The right-wing press loathed the very notion of the Arts Council (who had given us a small grant) and were only too happy to leap on one of these ‘state-funded’ publications. The Daily Express phoned me at home to ask if I’d let my kids read such filth and I replied that they were showing no interest so far but I’d be very grateful if they’d read anything.

A Question was asked about us in the House of Commons. Why was the government funding this foulness? To her credit that principled old socialist battleship Jenny Lynn, then Minister for the Arts, got up and defended us. But I don’t think she thought much of the language, either. She’d checked with Lord Goodman, then Chairman of the Arts Council, who’d said it was all right, he’d looked on our masthead and we had Eduardo Paolozzi as our aeronautics advisor.

We were getting more respectable. A few years earlier, during an argument over William Burroughs’s novels (the famous Ugh! correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement), Edith Sitwell had accused me of trying to nail her nose to a lavatory seat. An image which has never left me.

The News of the World report caused a football team in Manchester to go into a newsagents and buy eleven copies. Probably to their intense disappointment. Oddly, for a publication frequently described as pornographic by the press, we just didn’t seem to turn the punters on. This caused a lot of head-scratching at West End Central. As so often happened with the underground papers like IT and Frendz, the authorities were only used to dealing with commercial pornographers with whom they usually had some sort of understanding, not people who published from aggressive idealistic motives, intending to say in public what was said and done in private.

More recently God’s Cop Anderton’s jolly bobbies had a very similar problem in Manchester with the irrepressible David Britton, author of Lord Horror, whom they had to prosecute and jail by various back door methods, scarcely realising that his sojourns in Strangeways and other prisons were meat and drink to him. They fuelled him up. They made him go after them all the harder. The average coppers know how to give a nod and a wink to a sleazy porn dealer and keep everything in balance (often getting a bit of free filth from the merchant in return) but idealism defeats them. They have no language for dealing with it. It makes coppers, magistrates and judges deeply irritable. As a result it turns them a bit vindictive. Self-righteous and profoundly unimaginative, they recognise in those satires only their own dark bigotry, their hatred of creative popular intellectualism, and are as happy as any know-nothing thug to turn on it with clubs and guns and burn the evidence of its existence. Those jackboots are only a shade or two away from our faces at any given time . . .

Tired of the familiar hypocrisies and the empty moralising of the middle-class, bored with the sententious orthodoxy of the official Left, suspicious of the motives of big business, especially the arms trade, hearing the first intimations of a very noisy uncontrollable cyberspace, a virtual universe of spin and image manipulation, understanding how popular media can become a sinister instrument of public brainwashing, how easily the culture of consumerism buys and sells our representatives, thirty years before these notions started to drift into the consciousness of the chattering classes, Spinrad put his finger on the pulse of his times. Which, as it turns out, aren’t so very different from these times.

Spinrad’s future may seem to be part of our past, but his message is if anything more important than the message of 1984 and a lot more relevant to us than 2001. Alternative future or alternate past? Does it matter? The message is what drives Bug Jack Barron. Its observations are what fuel its anger, its impatient dynamic, while the language of the real world is what inspires its edgy, funny, streetwise idiom. Spinrad was riding high on the times, high on his own language, high on the buzz he followed from New York, to Los Angeles, to London and to Paris (where he eventually settled). One of the most politically engaged writers of his generation, he can no more write a non-political book than Ballard could write a space opera.

For thirty years Spinrad has been a prophet only intermittently honoured in the anglophone world. Now at last, with one of his most passionate and entertaining pieces of polemic back in print, you can see why they love him in the country that welcomed so many of his great predecessors, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Hammett and William Burroughs amongst them, long before they were recognised at home.

Bugged?

Time to Bug Jack Barron . . . •

The Edge's Michael Moorcock pages

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