I could do with a dozen pep pills, a hundred dozen Barrie pecks and pulls at the moment – instead I will wind myself off, into my narrow virginal bed and hope to dream nice dreams of us lying in long long grass or lying in deep soft white sand, naked, under a huge – no not that – well why not THE SUN? and crushing corn between our inseparable lips?
THE FINAL EXCHANGE of letters in Ann Quin’s thin RCA staff file is between her and the college’s principal, Robin Darwin. It was almost exactly two years after she’d finished working there. The first letter, dated 1 November 1964, is from Quin to Darwin, asking him if he’d write a letter of support for her application for a Harkness Fellowship. In it, she mentions that Berg has recently been published by Calder; that it has also been sold to Gallimard in Paris and Mondidori in Milan; and that Scribner’s in the US is interested too. She also mentioned that she’d already finished another novel.
The timeframe was tight; she apparently needed to submit her application by 12 November. In arguing her case, Quin wrote that ‘I do feel some active acquaintance with writers such as John Hawkes (with whom I have now some contact); Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and such people as James Schevil [sic] at the Writers’ Workshop, San Francisco and Thom Gunn.’ She also provided a copy of her proposal with the letter. Her ‘literal plans’, she wrote, were to visit New York briefly; travel in the Southwest (‘Taos where Lawrence stayed – i.e. a place so actively used by an English writer I much admire’); and spend time in San Francisco.
It was clear she’d started to tap into America’s more experimental writing circles. What she didn’t mention to Darwin was that she had already been in an intimate relationship with the poet Robert Creeley, who was based in Placitas, New Mexico, with his wife Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and that this was likely as much a motivation to visit the Southwest as the Lawrence connection. John Calder had bought the rights to Creeley’s novel The Island, and published it in 1964 – the year he published Quin’s Berg. Quin met Creeley in London, and the pair had an affair. Creeley then became one of her referees for the Harkness. According to his biographer Ekbert Faas, he also began negotiating on her behalf to get her the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship at the University of New Mexico.
Darwin turned Quin’s request down in a polite note dated 3 November, stating that he was supporting other candidates from the college instead. Quin then turned to another prominent writer with whom she’d recently had a complicated affair: a man more than forty years her senior, the British novelist Henry Williamson. The pair had met on 13 February 1964 at The Queens Elm, where Williamson had been stood up by another woman. He nonetheless met ‘an Irish girl there [Quin had some Irish heritage], 27 years, who had written a book accepted by Calder, BERG, by Ann Quin’. He took her for dinner at the Renaissance Club, and by the end of the evening declared to an acquaintance that he was in love with her.
He attended the publisher’s party for Berg on 20 June, where he noted the Bowlings – Frank and Paddy – among the other guests. But Williamson’s diaries make for sad reading about their torrid affair: enormous arguments; the disapproval of his family; his own inability to cope with Quin’s unpredictability (‘while with A.Q. one is always as it were alerted for any moment crisis de nerfs in her, major or minor … but the SHOUT … devastated me. It is this shout in her that is manic, & devastates me’); and pathos-laden accounts of clumsy sexual encounters, culminating in Williamson accusing Quin of giving him a venereal disease. This caused her a great deal of understandable distress, given it later emerged he didn’t have one at all.
Their relationship is clearly the inspiration for Quin’s story ‘A Double Room’, the details of which mirror Williamson’s diary entries. In it, a young woman has an affair with a much older man. ‘On her single bed they had gone so far. Fully clothed.’ The pair head off on the train from London for a weekend in a seaside town; on the train, she has a paperback copy of an autobiographical novel (Williamson’s major literary achievement was his fifteen-volume autobiographical novel A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight). When they arrive, they find a hotel. As they move through the town, the young woman feels the eyes of its inhabitants on them, snickering at their age difference. He struggles with impotence; she’s driven mad by his snoring. The next couple of days unfold with a brutal awkwardness, until they finally part ways back in London.
Like the characters in her story, Quin and Williamson drifted apart. But on 11 November he received a letter from her asking him to recommend her for the Harkness. He initially refused, using the excuse that he hadn’t known her for the required minimum of two years. But by 30 November he’d changed his mind. This was after the submission date Quin had mentioned to Darwin, which suggests that she resorted to asking Williamson only after Darwin had rejected her request.
The letters of recommendation from the two established writers with whom she’d had relationships in 1964 worked. Quin received the Harkness Fellowship for most promising Commonwealth writer under thirty, and the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship. She travelled to the US in 1965. She hated New York, and arrived in Placitas, according to Faas, around 20 May, and stayed with the Creeleys for about a week. While there, Creeley read around seventy pages of Three, and was impressed: a book about a couple who become obsessed with the memory of a much younger woman who had briefly lived with them. When Three was published in 1966, it was dedicated ‘For Bobbie and Bob’.
Another consequence of Quin’s relationship with Williamson was that through him she met Brocard Sewell, a Carmelite friar based in Kent, friend to British writers and publisher of the literary journal the Aylesford Review. After first visiting his priory in April 1964, Quin maintained a correspondence with Sewell until her death in 1973. Their letters map the period during which all four of her novels were published, and during which she traversed America and Europe, living on almost nothing: meagre royalties, occasional advances from her publishers, and the odd arts grant or award.
In 1982, in his book Like Black Swans: Some People and Themes, Sewell offered his recollections of Quin, quoting extensively from her letters. ‘I seek stillness,’ she wrote to him, a few days after her first visit,
as that is the vital reservoir needed for creating, and only by living on my own am I able to achieve that – it is possible that I have not learned to really give, and basically fear a permanent relationship having in my childhood never known family life as such…. I am glad (though apprehensive!) that you have a copy of Berg – the best part of which, at the moment anyway, for me seems the cover! The rest is dead. The book was a necessary struggle to free myself from inhibiting constrictions …
By this stage Quin was already well advanced on her second novel, Three. Quin wrote to Sewell in mid-1964 about it. ‘I don’t know about the book I’m on at the moment’, he quotes her as writing,
as being in another vein, expressing more truly myself. I think it will take many years before I strip off the layers of ‘spectres’ in my own nightmarish way. In the present work I am still dealing with three people, this time a girl who lives with a couple. The relationships between three has always fascinated me, being I suppose partly because I have never known the family unit, and partly the influence of the Roman Catholic convent I spent my childhood in (the trinity etc.). In reality I have often found myself at my best, a kind of security when with two other people, most of my friends are couples, and I suppose automatically I play the role of the child. Does all this sound too Freudian for words?!
For Apple and Hockney too, it was clear by 1964 that America was where their future successes lay. Apple had had his Gallery One show, and his films had been screened at the ICA. He’d also won a D&AD design award in 1963 for his ‘A Union, Jack!’ poster for the 1962 ‘Young Commonwealth Artists’ exhibition. Despite these early successes, he was unable to get a solid foothold in either London’s art world or its advertising industry. In May 1964, he took a short trip to New York, during which he visited Leo Castelli again. According to Apple, Robert Rauschenberg – one of the gallery’s artists – was there too. Apple had brought with him one of his Self-Portraits from the Gallery One show (the ones printed with the Robert Freeman photographs), unrolled it and placed one of his bronze apples on top. Castelli was impressed. Apple returned to London enthusiastic about his prospects for an art career in New York, and decided to make a permanent move in August. When he got there, Castelli’s assistant Ivan Karp arranged for him to have the studio of sculptors Eva Hesse and Tom Doyle, who were out of town for a while.
Though Castelli decided not to add Apple to the gallery’s stable, the art dealer arranged for him to go around to Bianchini Gallery, where Ben Birillo was organising the exhibition ‘American Supermarket’. It opened in October 1964, and has since become a seminal moment in the story of American Pop. Apple’s bronze fruit were included alongside Warhol’s soup cans and Brillo boxes, a plastic turkey by Tom Wesselmann, Jasper Johns’s beer cans, chrome eggs by Robert Watts, and works by Roy Lichtenstein. The exhibition was made to look like a functioning supermarket, complete with turnstiles, designed by Richard Artschwager. On 20 November 1964, Life magazine – the same publication that had declared Larry Rivers a ‘wonder boy’ six years earlier – ran an article about the exhibition by Calvin Tomkins, with photographs by Henri Dauman. Two of the prominent images were of Warhol with his Brillo boxes, and Apple with his watermelon slice.
It was an auspicious start to Apple’s New York career. Just a couple of weeks earlier, Hockney had also had his New York debut – a solo exhibition at Alan Gallery, which sold out. Hockney had finished ‘A Rake’s Progress’ in May 1963, and the proceeds from selling the publication rights to Editions Alecto had funded his move to the US – to California rather than New York. There, he began to make the paintings which would come to define his work – and that are still arguably his best: nude men sunbathing by swimming pools, through to A Bigger Splash, 1967; Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972; and his remarkable double-portraits like Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, 1969.
Apple doesn’t remember if he went to Hockney’s exhibition at Alan Gallery. He does, though, remember Hockney visiting him in Hesse and Doyle’s studio around that time. From that point on, Apple was in New York for a quarter-century, exhibiting regularly, setting up one of the city’s first artist-run spaces in 1969, and working intermittently with some of the top people in New York advertising, including Bill Bernbach, Bert Stern and Helmut Krone. Hockney settled into California life too, using it as one of his long-term bases. Quin, meanwhile, bounced between the States, the UK and Europe until her death. She drowned at Brighton in 1973.
It’s significant that, in 1964, all of them clearly saw a brighter future for their work in the States than in London (Frank Bowling wasn’t far behind them, moving to New York in 1966). All three were still comfortably shy of thirty; all three had major achievements under their belts on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the identities they’d forged in London around 1962 – and their intense explorations of how identity is forged – that had launched them. Within three years at the RCA – and in that year between the summers of 1961 and 1962 in particular – they’d discovered not only themselves, but new strategies and ideas for how to represent the self, in the age of mass communication.
This interrogation of selfhood was what, in the end, elevated them beyond their contemporaries, many of whom were more fixated on the literal signs of mass consumerism – products, pin-ups, pinball machines, cereal boxes – than the human, subjective consequences of these cultural shifts. Rather than a break with the existentialism of the previous generation, Quin, Apple and Hockney represented a new phase for it: one in which – as Laing, McLuhan and Mailer had all argued – the individual had to push back against their pasts, against conformity and against the madness of the masses. Larry Rivers had invited them to do something similar too (‘Thank your grandparents and parents for what they did, but stay out of the covered wagon, you are blocking the highway’).
For much of the sixties, all three were at the coal-face of their respective disciplines: Quin in experimental writing on both sides of the Atlantic; Hockney in figurative painting; Apple in New York Pop, then conceptual art, all the while keeping a toe in the advertising world. By the late sixties, much of what they’d achieved in their personal explorations of individualism and self – the sexually, creatively, political-liberated artist – was starting to crumble at a wider societal level: Laing, McLuhan and Mailer all disappearing down different countercultural wormholes; the civil rights movement, with race riots and assassinations, heading towards the racial ‘chaos’ Mailer has anticipated in 1957; anti-Establishment self-absorption in free love and LSD twisting the sexual revolution and psychotherapy into new and monstrous forms; the failures of the 1968 student revolts; and the creeping rise of a new, conservative individualism – neoliberalism – which would become the dominant force in economics and politics, both in the US and the UK. The art world wouldn’t be immune to its effects, either.
In 1962, though, the liberated individual – freed from their history, freed from collective morality and a restrictive society, freed to be who they wanted to be – felt like a figure worth fighting for. Something had changed in the corridors and studios of the RCA. And it was three brilliant young people, all outsiders when they’d arrived in 1959, who would recognise the full potential of that transformation – looking in the mirror and asking serious questions of their reflections, and coming up with radical, culture-changing answers in reply.