Paul Ableman; Guardian obit (avant-garde novelist)
Hyfler/Rosner
Avant-garde novelist of the 1960s, inspired by Kafka and
Beckett
GJ Buckell
Friday December 8, 2006
Guardian
In 1958 Maurice Girodias, of the Olympia Press in Paris,
published the first novel by Paul Ableman, who has died aged
79. Olympia specialised in works banned in Britain and
America: I Hear Voices was one of the company's more
experimental publications, focusing on a mentally ill man
confined to a hospital bed as his perception of the exterior
world slowly dissolves, and making the reader his only point
of contact in the book's critique of society.
Ableman's journey had thus begun with experimentation with
literary form. It was to end with his development of his own
theory of human consciousness - his lifelong aim was to
penetrate the mystery of consciousness and its relationship
to society at large.
Inspired partly by Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Samuel
Beckett, heroes to many 1960s avant-garde authors, I Hear
Voices often resembled the cut-up fiction of William S
Burroughs. Yet for all its modernist influences, both form
and content of the novel owed as much to the psychoanalytic
theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich as to
avant-garde literary techniques.
He published four further novels, As Near As I Can Get
(1962), The Twilight of the Vilp (1966), Vac (1971) and
Tornado Pratt (1977). He also contributed a chapter to BS
Johnson and Margaret Drabble's collaborative novel London
Consequences (1972) and found himself, at the end of the
1960s, embroiled in a court case - which he won - when he
was, ridiculously, charged with obscenity after the
publication of his nonfiction illustrated essay, The Mouth.
Born in Leeds into a Jewish family, he was raised in London
and New York by his mother, who had left his father, a
tailor, for an American journalist. The family went to New
York, where Ableman was educated at Stuyvesant high school
on Manhattan's lower east side. Returning to England, after
national service he began reading English at King's College
London. But Paris was more attractive until he returned to
London, and lived in Hampstead.
For the stage, he put together 50 of his short dramas
influenced by absurd and surrealist theatre in Tests, first
performed in 1966. Green Julia, his first full-length play,
was hugely successful at the 1965 Edinburgh Festival: it
featured two flatmates, a physiologist and an economist,
whose fantastical play-acting moves into dangerous, darkly
funny territory.
His preoccupation with artists' attempts to smash bourgeois
morality developed across two mischievously funny short
plays, Madly in Love and Hank's Night (both 1968), first
performed at London's Open Space theatre.
Ableman cannot easily be placed within any of the postwar
movements in British or American fiction, or the avant-garde
circles that BS Johnson struggled to constitute. Ableman's
belief in the revolutionary potential of dreams owed a debt
to French surrealism, a movement that had a particular
impact on him.
His nonfiction book Beyond Nakedness (1990) applied ideas
from Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents to the human
need to be clothed, studying nudist societies of various
places and times. "Removing your clothes symbolises 'taking
off' civilisation and its cares," Ableman maintained: the
repression of sexuality through clothing underscored the
violence inherent in "civilised" society. On the other hand,
he believed that nakedness, while in itself liberating,
creates a whole new set of taboos. Ableman's interests in
dreams, and in stream of consciousness writing, were
synthesised in The Secret of Consciousness (2000).
Ableman funded his literary writing through radio and
television scripts: Dixon of Dock Green in the mid-1950s, a
Wednesday Play in the 1960s, a mini-series A Killing on the
Exchange (1987) and Tales of the Unexpected (1988). There
were also book spin-offs from television such as Shoestring
and Porridge (both in 1979) and Arthur Daley Straight Up -
the Autobiography, from the television series Minder (1991).
Ableman's first marriage, in 1958, to Tina Carrs-Brown,
ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Sheila
Hutton-Fox, and their son, and a son and step-daughter from
his first marriage.
Sarah Broadhurst writes: I first met Paul Ableman in 1960s
London: a man of firm opinions, with an infectious laugh, a
mischievous twinkle in his eyes and an anarchic literary
talent, he was a rascal, a Bohemian, a lover of women and
words, food and drink, argument and debate and a seeker of
both truth and, latterly, the beauty of the English
countryside.
We launched a writers reading group which listed BS Johnson
and Alan Sillitoe among its members, and I helped him ferry
away copies of The Mouth when the police were about to seize
it. Later, he focused more on his family life, walking in
the countryside and compiling a detailed journal of
observations, running to many millions of words. He never
put it forward for publication, but it is a fascinating
record of an unconventional, generous and vital
intellectual.
· Paul Ableman, writer, born June 13 1927; died October 25
2006