A literary game of consequences remembered
WAY BACK IN 1971 I was associated with the literature panel of a body called the Greater London Arts Association, or GLAA, of which the novelist B. S. Johnson was chair. I never quite knew what GLAA was supposed to be doing, and I was always a hopeless committee member: the whole enterprise vanished along with Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council. “BSJ” or Bryan, was active and inventive, however, and in 1971 he cooked up a scheme for funding a kind of literary quiz, called London Consequences, to celebrate the Festivals of London the following year in the spring of 1972. This was to be a communal novel, written by as many writers as we could cajole into participation, and it would follow the traditional game of consequences: each author would compose a chapter, then hand it on to the next participant, and eventually the result would be published, with all sections anonymized, but the authors alphabetically named and listed. As I recall each writer would know only the chapter immediately before and after their own, and Bryan and I were to invent the characters and the framework, and to write the opening and closing sections. A prize of £100 was offered to any reader who could correctly allocate the chapters to their respective authors, and the authors were paid £25 each for world rights. This endeavour was intended to support writers, readers and literature – £25 wasn’t a bad rate in those days.
Some of us met in my Hampstead house on the evening of April 2, 1971, to discuss this project. Bryan aroused some mirth by stipulating that the principal characters, a journalist called Anthony Sheridan and his wife, Judith, could do anything they liked apart from committing adultery: I think he used the pompous phrase “extra-marital intercourse”. This proviso was to prove provocative. Why Bryan insisted on this, and why I let him do so, is not clear to me. It must have had something to do with his own marriage and his impending suicide. He took an overdose in his Islington home in November 1973, a tragedy of which some contributors knew more than I did, though I had been aware for years that Bryan’s mental health was unstable. We had recruited, of course, from among our own friends, Bryan being responsible for convening most of the experimental writers, whereas I must have been party to persuading Olivia Manning, Andrea Newman, Paul Ableman, Melvyn Bragg and Julian Mitchell to join the gang. (Paul, although more of BSJ’s literary persuasion, was a good friend of mine whom I greatly liked.) Either of us might have roped in Adrian Mitchell and Piers Paul Read, and Andrea probably suggested Jane Gaskell. I knew Eva Figes (who also lived in Hampstead), but always felt she disapproved of me, so she was more probably one of Bryan’s choices.
A recent academic query from Cambridge about Wilson Harris’s
