Controversial – Ramblings on my bookshelves

Billy Chyldish, or Childish as it is spelt in my copy of his second novel from 1997 ‘Notebooks of a Naked Youth’, is ridiculously prolific with his Wikipedia page listing well over a hundred albums of music and almost a hundred books, including over seventy collections of poetry. He is also an artist win excess of a thousand works produced and a film maker, although he is not without controversy and this book does contain sexually explicit text which I’m not going to reprint here. The reason I’m reviewing it is not for its contents, although I have read it, but for the fascinating story of its existence. Chyldish or Childish was christened Steven John Hamper and has gone by various names including William Charlie Hamper, Bill Hamper, Bill Hamper-Childish, Guy Hamper, Jack Ketch, Gus Claudius and Danger Bill Henderson although I first came across him as the long time partner of British artist Tracy Emin in the 1980’s and his was the largest name (as Billy Childish) in her 1995 artwork ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995’.

The book was originally published as Selected Poems (Billy Childish) in presumably tiny numbers, as a fine hand bound edition by Tangerine Press of Tooting in November 2009, they normally produce between fifty and seventy five copies. This was followed the next month by a B format soft back limited edition of five hundred by art gallery and dealers L-13 of Clerkenwell in what was described as ‘The Penguin Classic Art’ edition, presented as a homage to Selected Poems of D.H. Lawrence (released in March 1950 as Penguin Poets D11).

Penguin Books took considerable umbrage at this production and obtained a court order to require destruction of the print run.

L-13 unsurprisingly decided to turn this into a performance art event, for quite a while they were the main source for art by Bristol graffiti artist Banksy amongst others. and this was too good an opportunity to miss. Of the five hundred copies most were burnt by Billy Childish at what guests were told was a launch event on 21st January 2010, which was well covered by the press including New Musical Express who had a reporter there. With 113 copies surviving but heavily amended, ‘artistically altered’, to get round the restrictions of the court order. This surviving version of the first paperback edition is stamped in red ink inside “This book is NOT authorised by Penguin and is NOT for RESALE” and stamped in red ink on the front cover ‘BAR APPROVED’ (British Art Resistance) with an image of Childish’s gallows monogram dated 2010; it is further stamped at the bottom right of the front cover with an edition number out of 113 and a ‘L-13 editions’ stamp on the rear cover, again in red ink; the covers were further deliberately aged and defaced.These were presumably given away along with various A4 colour copies of photographs of the book burning. with a limited edition A3 poster, headed:
Penguin Book Burning
Dumb Insolence
act 1
21-01-10
L-13

This brings us to the copy I have which is the third version and Childish continued his taunting of Penguin Books by basing the cover on a Penguin Crime cover with ‘Failure Books’ replacing ‘Penguin Books’ in the ogee at the top of the front and Childish’s gallows logo replacing the Penguin. This time just a hundred copies were printed and mine is number five making a grand total of about three hundred existing copies spread over three separate printings. As far as I know no other editions of this work exist.

It can be seen from the title page above that the poems are apparently chosen be W.E. Williams and he also ‘wrote’ the introduction. Sir William Emrys Williams was chief editor of Penguin Books from 1936 to 1965 and edited the Penguin Poetry series however he didn’t have any involvement with this book partly because he wouldn’t have wanted to have anything to do with it, but mainly because he had been dead for thirty three years by the time it came out.

Childish is dyslexic and the works included in the book are with uncorrected spellings, hence the subtitle. There are poems dealing with his violent father and the childhood sexual abuse he endured with a friend of his fathers along with various relationships over the years. But I’ll finish with a couple of examples of his work from this collection which don’t feature any of those themes which make his work so difficult to read, but somehow engaging, as he explores his life experiences both good and bad. So here is ‘with poems that sting like wasps’

i was in love
with truth
but
not love
with poems that sting like wasps
and
mad men in the sway of false gods

i have been stung
so i too will sting
and
so i stung myself
because truth without love
is the worst type of lying

but
all along
secretly
within this shell
i always loved love
and now i forgive all
and
see that even a wasp is nothing but
a little winged tiger

Followed by ‘a big soft dog of a poet’

im no hard man
im a big soft dog of a poet
desperate for people to like me
a damaged broken dog of a poet
a half-man pierced by arrows

more sensitive than a sschoolgirl
more prone to upsets
alive with vengeneces
more dangerous than a wounded wolf
telling tails on self and others then whining for mercy

an angry chimp of a poet
rageing thru the jungle
hanging upside down
thirsty for monkey brains

a living thieving rat of a poet
who hates poetry
who will not be a poet for you
for your mother your lover or anyone

a lovable kitten of a poet
tigerish and selfish
whose verses are as harmless as milk

an ant of a poet
acid-mouthed and creeping
the type of charlatan who will deny
hes wearing a hat whilst wearing a hat

Following the controversy around the patchy rewriting of the James Bond novels announced last month, see here, and this coming so soon after the furore concerning a similar ‘sensitivity driven rewrite’ of the Roald Dahl stories; which resulted in Penguin Books announcing they would issue the original texts in parallel so that people could chose which version they wished, I decided to have a look to see what the fuss was about. I was never a fan of Dahl as a child but I did buy two or three Bond books whilst at school and they have languished unread on my shelves for almost fifty years as it rapidly became clear that I wasn’t a fan of these either. So it is Ian Fleming that I am going to have a look at as at least I have examples. My Pan paperback of You Only Live Twice is the fifth printing from 1974 which I bought new. The book was first published in 1964.

Almost the entire book is set in Japan and straight away I hit some stereotypes of Japanese women as submissive and largely there to be decorative or as sexual playthings but these initial impressions were offset near the end of this book with the introduction of Kissy Suzuki who is definitely not submissive, or just there to be decorative, and whilst she does end up in bed with Bond it is largely at her initiative not his. There are other stereotypes presented regarding Japanese men, the high work ethic, obedience to their superiors and pertinent to the plot of the book the high suicide rate. Now I don’t know what the suicide rate was in the early 1960’s when this book was written but according to World Population Review the suicide rate is still a significant concern to the Japanese government and suicide is the leading cause of death in men between the ages of 20-44 and women between the ages of 15-34.

My main problem with the book however is that for what I expected to be an action adventure tale there is surprising little of either. That is probably due to Bond’s mission in the book which is not as a 00 agent but rather in a more diplomatic role given him as an attempt to get him back to work after the murder of his wife, of just one day, at the end of the previous novel ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. At the start of this novel Bond is a wreck, unable to concentrate on his job, drinking far too much and convinced that he is about to be fired but has no idea what he would do next. His boss ‘M’ is indeed thinking Bond is washed up but is persuaded to give him this final job to see if it can shake him back into usefulness. This means that the plot is largely Bond and Tiger Tanaka, a senior member of the Japanese secret service, having endless meetings usually involving the consumption of lots of sake whilst Bond tries to negotiate British access to a high level source of intelligence from Moscow. It is only when it becomes clear that Britain has nothing of suitable significance to offer that the main story is revealed and that is not until page 109 of what in this edition is a 190 page book and even then Bond doesn’t really do anything until page 141 when he starts to swim over to the castle and by page 171 we are reading Bond’s obituary in The Times.

But I am getting ahead of myself, Tiger comes up with a job that would do as payment and that is to eliminate Dr. Guntram Shatterhand who has established a politically embarrassing ‘Garden of Death’ filled with poisonous plants and deadly animals which has become a major draw for suicide attempts. The Japanese cannot move against him as he has presented the garden as a major resource area for biologists so has gained much honour in Japan for his apparent generosity but the sheer number of bodies returned from the grounds is worrying to the government. When Bond is shown a photo of Shatterhand he recognises that he is in reality Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Bond’s major enemy and the person who killed his wife so he is very keen to finally exact revenge however he can. I’m not about to spoil any potential readers enjoyment of the little action that takes place but suffice to say that the obituary is somewhat premature, after all Fleming wrote two more Bond books after this one.

But getting back to the language used, which was after all the reason I read this again after so many decades. Yes there are outdated stereotypes in the book, but it is a product of its time. I didn’t see anything grossly offensive in the text although a Japanese reader may find more than I spotted. ‘Sensitivity Readers’ are almost by definition overly sensitive in looking for terminology to justify their position and are determined to heap modern norms on a book which is after all almost sixty years old and which simply betrays the attitudes of its period. Quite what they would make of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or other classics I dread to think, let’s just hope they never pick up a copy.