Christine Brooke-Rose (1923–2012) came to Carcanet on the advice of George Steiner, sending MNS her new novel Amalgamemnon at the end of 1983. At that time she was still living in Paris, where she taught at the University of Paris VII for twenty years. During the war she had worked in intelligence at Bletchley Park, and that decoding experience informed her approach to language and structure. Although she knew Hélène Cixous very well, ‘the very idea of a “feminine writing” irritated her: she found it too essentialist’. Jean-Michel Rabaté remarks in his affectionate ‘Farewell’ article that ‘her structuralism was tempered by humour’, and that the writing constraints she imposed on herself ‘were the very devices that allowed her to advance. She said that she could never have written an autobiography, as she did with the spectacular Remake (1996), had she not found it interesting to write about her life without using the first person.’1 Carcanet published nine of her books, including a Brooke-Rose Omnibus (1986) collecting her earlier work.
Cabrières d’Avignon
7 February 1996
Dear Michael,
Many thanks for your very nice letter. I’m glad we’ve reached a stage in our friendship when I can occasionally criticise minor things (I know I’ve also done worse). Believe me, I’m very happy at Carcanet, the contact is much easier & more personal than in a huge firm; the production is beautiful etc. etc. I just get slightly distressed at not selling for you, and therefore more so when occasions of selling a few copies are missed. But think how much worse it would be if a big firm did everything with huge ads (it wouldn’t of course, since I don’t sell! vicious circle), and I still didn’t sell.
Of course I wouldn’t resist V and X (or rather X & V) together.2 I even suggested it. And of course the idea of redividing the Omnibus was barmy.
I hope your heart won’t sink, but I’m actually working on a new novel. So Remake did, finally, unblock me, which is why I undertook it (blocked since Txt). It’s going very slowly and I have no idea whether it’s any good or not, but it’s lovely to be writing again. Heather Reyes, who is doing a PhD on me, read the first 25 pages when she was here & liked it, and brought me some documentation.3 It’s about people who sleep in the street so I needed to know the GB admin situation, even if I don’t stick to it literally or in detail. It’s a huge effort of imagination but I needed to invent again after five years of various versions of putting things down merely because they happened, then worrying about what to cut, etc. etc.
So it’s very slow, some 65 typed (still on computer) pages so far. Called Next. This is absolutely entre nous, please don’t talk about it as I may never finish it.
To get back to your plans. I’m glad Verbivore as first was a mistake for Textermination, not only because it’s more accessible but because you liked it so much. And it seems to be out of print, though probably not in U.S. (I get no info about that, perhaps because I hate reading royalty statements with any attention).
I was very sorry to read, late, in LRB, of Donald Davie’s death last autumn. I used to know him years ago when he was at Essex, and he was always very nice to me (we had Pound and poetic diction in common), for all his apparent later grumpiness. I think he was a disappointed writer.4 Did brilliantly as professor but perhaps didn’t pierce through as he’d hoped qua poet. Well, we have that in common too, but I try to take it in my stride. That was a very nice article.5
(No reply expected)
Love,
Christine
Manchester
20 February 1996
Dear Christine,
So far the response to Remake from the people who have solicited review copies has been very warm and I hope that other reviews will follow apace.6 The book is published in two weeks’ time.
Thank you very much for your letter of 7th February. I had a very pleasant lunch the other day with Raymond Tallis who told me about your rather ghastly conference at Warwick.7
Concerning Remake, my only criticism of the production is that there should have been a blank page at the end. It is horrible to pass from the final page to the inside board of the paperback binding. Gillian, too, was particularly agitated by this inadequacy.8
We had a memorial service for Donald Davie last week in Cambridge. Unfortunately Frank [Kermode] was away in Houston and could not come and George [Steiner], though I invited him, did not reply. It was a rather beautiful service with a choir in St Catherine’s Chapel and readings by Tomlinson, Wilmer and Heaney as well as an address by your publisher.9 You are right I think in your diagnosis of Donald as a disappointed writer – not that he could have written better (he could hardly have written better than the poems in To Scorch or Freeze, which are magnificent) but that he felt he deserved a better readership. Somehow we cannot provide – ‘we’ meaning lecturers and teachers – the kind of readership that responds at any depth or with any intensity to the work of the Modernists or of those who have learned from them without succumbing to post-Modernism.
With love as always,
Michael
Cabrières d’Avignon
25 June 1996
Dear Michael,
I rang several times after the bombing and could get no reply, then after several days I got Carol, at home, who told me no one had been hurt but that all the files etc. etc. would have to be built up again slowly. What a disaster for you. I hope you’ll get compensation. She told me anything sent to the old address would reach you at the provisional premises, so I’m sending the novel, registered, and will of course be patient in the circumstances (but try not to take 5 months again). I thought it would be better to send it before the summer vacation as arranged.
Frank Kermode read it while he stayed with me last week and liked it, says all my work has a ‘signature’. But he was slowed down by the very things I intend as slowing down (all my novels have something to try and force the reader to read attentively!), as no doubt you will be too. Namely: the different layers of Cockney, though the spelling is very consistent and one should in theory get used to it; and, more needful of concentration, the abolition of conventional announcements or even spaces for switches of viewpoint (i.e. there are no ‘chapters’ or even spaces between sections). This is voulu, partly for concentration but also to express our feelings that these people are indistinguishable from the outside, like ‘niggers’ in the old days… If the reader has concentrated it should be absolutely clear we are in someone else’s mind or in a different dialogue, from what is thought or said, and apart from the absence of marking I give plenty of other clues, immediately or very soon. These are the ‘visibles’. Another visible, but which should cause no problem is that I scatter the text whenever a character is alone, and, if it’s a homeless character, he loses his ‘I’, recovering it only when he’s with others. This last does not apply to the other poor characters who do have homes (Jacinto, Blake, Adelina).
Secondly, the alphabet theme is important, and recurs with explanation at the end, i.e. all the characters have names beginning with one of the 26 letters, but the ten homeless ones have names beginning with the top row of keys on a typewriter. Also, I don’t use the verb ‘to have’ (for obvious reasons, these are have-nots). I did a search but will remove any that have crept in in proof and in a last close reading before I send the disk. So don’t bother to look for them, or about literals. These are the ‘invisibles’ I like to play with. The ‘visibles’ will be pounced on. Be patient therefore. I just warn you of both so that you don’t make them the subject of criticism, as I don’t intend to change them. Any other criticism welcome.
My printer conked out just before the last two pages, so I typed them out, the print is a bit larger so the scattering may be a bit different, but it will be OK on disk. I’ve had to type this letter too.
All the best, and ‘courage mon ami’, and love,
Christine
Cabrières d’Avignon
25 June 1996
Dear Michael,
Here are the last two pages which my printer, after complex manip[ulation]s, unexpectedly delivered. So please (when you get my TS & letter) replace my two typed ones, they look better.
I received your sad circular this morning. Of course I’ll cooperate. But all my reviews except those for Remake are in my archive at Austin Texas (Harry Ransom Humanities Center) so if you really need all the back ones you’ll have to write to them. As for the photo I prefer to have a new one when (& if) you next publish me. And I’ll send a Xerox of my last contract, unless you specifically tell me you want them all (they’re all the same, I think). With copies of the few Remake reviews.
Did you send this circular to Jerzy?10 I assume the Norwid is bombed, & hope he kept a copy of it all. That wasn’t a real Q. you need answer, just a reminder in case he wasn’t on the list.
You should be getting the novel next week, I posted it yesterday, registered, with a framed request to forward to postbomb premises.
Good luck, and courage.
Maybe the damage is less than you surmise.
Love,
Christine
Replying to Brooke-Rose on 1 July, MNS wrote that ‘it appears we may not have access to our offices for some time yet. The damage was very extensive.’ He had asked all the authors to send in materials in order to reconstitute their files: contracts, photographs, reviews. In a letter of 10 October to Brooke-Rose he states ‘I cannot refer to past correspondence since the correspondence is all at the disaster warehouse being hoovered.’ In order to reconstruct the Carcanet mailing list, MNS sent out a circular on 11 July requesting names of ‘up to five individuals who you feel might like to receive information about Carcanet… we are naturally especially anxious that our readers miss none of the major books we are publishing this autumn.The new list is our most ambitious ever. We are re-launching fiction in paperback. The range and depth of the poetry, Fyfield and Lives and Letters programme are impressive. The Graves and MacDiarmid programmes make significant advances too.’
Carcanet did manage to publish 36 books in 1996.
Manchester
21 August 1996
Dear Christine,
Many thanks for your letter of 9 August. I believe we have worked out a strategy to have copies of Remake and other titles at your conference in Switzerland (they have already been despatched), which looks like being quite an impressive intellectual spread. I am agonising still over reissuing the Omnibus. The book is so long that when we reprint we will have to charge £14.95 on a 500 run or £12.95 on a 1000 run. There is no way we can pull it back to £9.95, which is where it could attract students. Its absence is a real problem. I hope to have a decision on it by mid-September. We are putting Textermination into paperback next year as you know.
I have made a very slow start on Next. So far I have the sense of a novel which goes ‘back’ to develop some areas of your work which many of your readers most like, in terms of structuring and reification of language. I find it very hard to read continuously.11 It may be that I am tired and old, but I suspect that this is a novel to which I will find myself unequal. I will persist, after Japan, and hope to like it. I will not burden you with one of my enormous letters unless I feel it’s necessary.
My unease with the novel does not mean that – if I don’t warm to it in the end – we will not publish it. You are a Carcanet author. I feel that you wrote Remake for me, so I would be churlish not to let you write Next for yourself and those readers who can warm to it.12 My difficulty will be in ‘presenting’ it. I hope that after thirty more pages I’ll be taken over by it, as I was by Xorandor and Textermination, though not by Amalgamemnon or Verbivore. I am your middle-brow and sub-intellectual publisher.
Would you be content to have Next published in February or March of 1998? We have Textermination in 1997, and the costly reprint of the Omnibus in whatever form we finally decide. If you have a problem with 1998 we can discuss alternatives, though we are extremely constricted in scheduling. Delaying the book into 1998 would not mean delaying considerations till then: I want to give you a less incomplete response soon.
Love as always,
Michael
Cabrières d’Avignon
4 October 1996
Dear Michael,
I forgot to tell you in my last letter, just posted, that I followed your brilliant suggestion of omitting possessive pronouns, and to thank you for it.13 It was more difficult than I thought: not only did I have to search for the dialect forms as well (me, mah etc.), but I couldn’t, as you thought, simply replace with ‘the’ (the most alienating word in current English). Sometimes a demonstrative would do (this, that) or the indefinite article, but sometimes I had to rephrase (‘what are you called’ for ‘what’s your name’, etc.), and once or twice, to omit altogether. And I had to give up Ivy’s ‘mah raobics’ for ‘my aerobics’ (replaced with the less funny ‘nahraobics’, as if from Nairobi). But it was interesting and, you were right, it should add (by my own theory) to the unconscious feeling of non-possession.
I only did it for the ten homeless. And even when they’re talked to or about (i.e. no ‘your’, yours’ or ‘his/her’). All the other characters (the Goan family, the woman at the job centre and her husband, the wife, the interviewer etc.) keep their possessives. So it will be invisible, like my other constraints.
But you can add it to the blurb if you like.
Love,
Christine
MNS wrote to Doreen Davie on 5 November 1996 to thank her for sending flowers to the new office (4th Floor Conavon Court, 12–16 Blackfriars Street), which he described as ‘a kind of Edwardian lantern on top of a Victorian building’:
We receive back from the storage centre in Worsley today the debris from the Corn Exchange and it will be possible at last to assess the extent of actual loss and damage. It will be interesting to greet this material, last seen on 14 June when the offices were put to bed for the night, never to wake up again. We have reason to believe that the archive material, which was boxed pending removal to the Rylands, may have survived intact.
Postscript: On 22 May 2017, as people were leaving a concert by Ariana Grande at the Manchester Arena, a radical Islamist detonated a home-made bomb, which killed 23 people (including the bomber) and injured 139, more than half of them children. MNS emailed Alison Brackenbury on 30 May:
I had occasion to Facebook your lovely poem about the previous bomb. Then I got some nasty comments from people saying we were exploiting the present tragedy by remembering the earlier one. That certainly saddened me. It has been a hard place to live this last week, Manchester. Probably England itself, of which we are a metonym…
Brackenbury emailed back on 31 May:
I am very sorry about the Facebook comments. The Internet can be a magnet for crazy and destructive people. There’s usually one of these on any busy bus. But most of the other people on the bus are fine, shaking their heads over their shopping. Manchester is the place, I’ve found, where people are kindest on the buses. I am sure your city will, in the end, keep its good heart.
My friend and colleague Michael Freeman was and remained enthusiastic about Christine Brooke-Rose’s novels, and he had a wonderful way of dealing with her: patient, calm, intelligently acquiescent. Others were less emollient. When we published her quartet of early experimental novels Out, Such, Between and Thru in The Brooke-Rose Omnibus, a colleague mused aloud, ‘Will the next novel be called Bitch?’ Creative, if a little harsh. Christine was a formidable writer who once stood, beside her then-friend Muriel Spark, on the threshold of a great popular success. In The Novel: a biography, I wrote:
At first Brooke-Rose and Spark were taken together, as if growing from a common trunk. In 1965 Spark was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Mandelbaum Gate. The following year, for her second experimental novel, Such, Brooke-Rose received the same award. In their early careers Spark and BrookeRose were friends, but Spark managed her life and her career efficiently, did not bother with husbands after the first one, and after limping along the poor, hard lanes found the main highway. Christine Brooke-Rose became a more obviously experimental and theoretical writer. She was five years Spark’s junior. None of her books made a breakthrough, those who praised her – Angela Carter, Frank Kermode, Lorna Sage – come to her with critical and interpretative tools sharper and subtler than general readers are expected to possess.
There was a good deal of affection underpinning our carping, which went in both directions. Her concern for Carcanet after the bomb soon gave way to a concern for her own work. I have often been a slow editor and her five-month wait was not unusual, especially for fiction writers on the list. It must be infuriating (I know it is, from an author’s point of view), and not uncommon in publishing at that time.
The main disappointment Christine experienced with Carcanet, apart from my tardiness in response and, in some cases, my failures as a reader, was Carcanet’s inability radically to improve – that is, to increase – her readership. In terms of reviews, essays and academic attention she always had a strong pull, though it did depend on the progressive fascination of her writing which became more and more difficult for her as she progressed, refusing to repeat herself and always avoiding the boredom of conventionality.
It has been a disappointment that we did not gain a wider readership for our fiction list. Christine stayed with us, and we with her, despite slow sales. Gabriel Josipovici, another novelist/critic deeply engaged with European modernism and with an innovatory style, has been with us for four decades and his work has found a slowly expanding and committed readership. Our translation list was ahead of its time – now Clarice Lispector, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg and others are being re-rediscovered. The same is bound to happen to these remarkable British novelists.
It’s a disconcerting performance – sometimes dry, sometimes moving, sometimes eccentric and evasive. But this is another way of saying that she leaves you wondering whether this is a book about someone experimenting in writing, simply telling it differently, or someone who experimented in living; and that uncertainty is exciting, like the unreasonable feeling of being on the verge (only on the verge, but never mind) of something new.
I’m sorry you were sorry [the novel] ended as it did. Can’t change that, but you must have missed the sudden metafictional author-intrusion towards the end. I don’t understand your ‘essayistic’: I’m inside Tek’s mind (as with all the characters, no narrator-voice except for above), and he’s gone mad. In fact I’ve added a lot in that vein, as I did to the Tek/Ulysses conversations. But I’m doing no more changes, out or in.
John Ashbery, Can You Hear, Bird
Cliff Ashcroft, Faithful
Jane Austen, Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family, edited by David Selwyn
Iain Bamforth, Open Workings
Nina Berberova, Aleksandr Blok: a life, translated by Robyn Marsack
Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: a study of the literature of the Great War
Yves Bonnefoy, New and Selected Poems, edited and translated by Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer Christine Brooke-Rose, Remake
Bo Carpelan, Urwind, translated by David McDuff
Miles Champion, Compositional Bonbons Placate
John Clare, By Himself, edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell
Donald Davie, Poems and Melodramas
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, edited by Bill Hutchings
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: selected poems
Barbara Guest, Selected Poems
Sophie Hannah, Hotels Like Houses
John Heath-Stubbs, Galileo’s Salad
Elizabeth Jennings, Every Changing Shape: mystical experience and the making of poems
Elizabeth Jennings, In the Meantime
Elizabeth Jennings (ed), A Poet’s Choice
James Keery, That Stranger the Blues
Danilo Kiš, Homo Poeticus: essays and interviews, edited by Susan Sontag
Chris McCully. Not Only I
Ernst Meister, Not Orpheus: Selected Poems, translated by Richard
Dove
James Merrill, Selected Poems
Christopher Middleton, Intimate Chronicles
Edwin Morgan, Collected Translations
Sinéad Morrissey, There Was Fire In Vancouver
Les Murray, Subhuman Redneck Poems
Robert Pinsky, The Figured Wheel
John Rodker, Poems and Adolphe 1920, edited by Andrew Crozier
C.H. Sisson, Collected Translations
Iain Crichton Smith, The Human Face
Miguel Torga, The Creation of the World, translated by Ivana Carlsen
Sir Thomas Wyatt, Selected Poems, edited by Hardiman Scott