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 JGB NEWS Number 21. December 1993. You and Me and the Continuum: In Search of a Lost J. G. Ballard Novel by David Pringle A brief profile, headed "J. G. Ballard, London" and published on the inside front cover of New Worlds no. 54 (December 1956), introduces the 25-year-old writer and says: "After winning the annual short story competition at Cambridge in 1951 he wrote his first novel, a completely unreadable pastiche of Finnegans Wake and The Adventures of Engelbrecht. James Joyce still remains the wordmaster, but it wasn't until he turned to science fiction that he found a medium where he could exploit his imagination, being less concerned with the popular scientific approach than using it as a springboard into the surreal and fantastic." This profile (probably written by Ted Carnell, the magazine's editor) adds that Ballard gets most of his inspiration from painters, and that "outwardly, at any rate, he lives quietly in Chiswick with his wife and baby son Jimmie. He admits that though she doesn't actually write his stories his wife has as much to do with their final production as he has himself. She hopes to have his novel You and Me and the Continuum finished by the end of this year." There are hints of two lost Ballard novels here: firstly, an "unreadable" pastiche of James Joyce and Maurice Richardson which he wrote immediately after leaving Cambridge in 1951; and secondly, a work called You and Me and the Continuum which, it seems, was nearing completion in 1956 at a time when he was already making his first professional short-story sales to Carnell's magazines. What became of this second novel? Was it actually finished and was it ever submitted to anyone? We don't know. Yet we do know that almost ten years later he was to publish a short story called "You and Me and the Continuum" (Impulse no. 1, March 1966; subsequently reprinted in slightly revised form in his book The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970). Was this story linked in any way, other than by the coincidence of title, to the lost novel of 1956? I raised the matter with Ballard in a 1981 interview (published as "The Profession of Science Fiction, 26: From Shanghai to Shepperton" in Foundation no. 24, February 1982), and he replied as follows: "I did write a sort of experimental novel, nothing like the subsequent story of that name or any of the Atrocity Exhibition stories. At the time I wrote the story 'You and Me and the Continuum,' in 1965, I'd completely forgotten this -- ten years in your 20s and early 30s is a long time -- but the phrase must have stuck in my mind. That was a long time ago, I can't really remember. I suppose it was fiction of an impressionistic nature, no attempt at straightforward narrative or storytelling -- a highly stylized mixture of dramatic dialogue, in some ways rather like a film script, with interludes of prose poetry, a very hot steaming confection with bits and pieces from all quarters." Ballard said no more, and I remain curious. Apart from his published science-fiction stories of the period, what other evidence do we have of Ballard's literary experiments in the 1950s? Just one item that I know of, an eight-page untitled collage which appeared in New Worlds no. 213 (Summer 1978) and was referred to in the editorial of that magazine as "J. G. Ballard material originally done in 1958 and published here for the first time." This gnomic but very interesting item has since been reprinted in Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1984, pages 38-40) with the following prefatory remarks by the author: "[These are] a series of four facing-page spreads that were specimen pages I put together in the late 50s... sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes... The pages from the Project for a New Novel were made at a time when I was working on a chemical society journal in London, and the lettering was taken from the US magazine Chemical & Engineering News -- I liked its very stylish typography. I also liked the scientific content, and used stories from Chem. Eng. News to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalized by the headings around them." The Re/Search book also contains, on page 121, an old photograph of the author which is captioned: "Ballard in front of pages of his text, 1960." This serves as proof that the collage material, which is pinned to a long board behind his head, was indeed in existence by 1960, and it also reveals the intended running order of the pages; alas, the editors of Re/Search reproduce them in the wrong order elsewhere in the book -- their sequence is: spreads 3, 2, 1, 4 -- although, given the nature of the material, this may not matter in the least. If we ignore the lumps of text evidently taken direct from the American science journal, it is precisely in Ballard's "headlines" or "headings" that the peculiar interest of this item -- let us call it "Project for a New Novel" -- resides. They include haunting phrases, fragments of narrative and elusive references to fictional characters, most of which have recurred in Ballard's fiction since. Here are some of them, roughly in the order that they appear: Spread 1: zero synthesis COMA: the million year girl KLINE: rescoring the cns mr. f is mr. f Xero Run Hot with a Million Programs Starts xero "I am 7000 years old" Spread 2: am: beach hamlet pm: imago tapes : the existential yes! TIME ZONE....... pre-uterine claims KLINE the A-girl COMA Time pack MR F ...Coma slid out of the solar rig Spread 3: T-1 EMERGENCY MEGA-CHANNEL Thoracic drop "Mainline," Kline dialled "L-5 on the big routes." ...depth squad: programming the psychodrill: coded sleep and intertime Spread 4: time sea T-12 time probe Volcano Jungle: vision of a dying star-man ...Coma,' Kline murmured, 'let's get out of time.' The phrase "Mr F. is Mr F." was later used as the title of a 1961 short story (reprinted in The Disaster Area, 1967), about a Mr Freeman who regresses to the womb -- his wife's womb. The references to a "Volcano Jungle" and the "vision of a dying star-man" immediately suggest the 1959 short story "The Waiting Grounds" (reprinted in The Day of Forever, 1967), in a which a settler on another planet discovers a sort of alien temple and experiences a vision of the grand cycle of cosmos. The phrases "TIME ZONE," "Thoracic drop" and "time sea," and the references to "T-1" and "T-12," would seem to prefigure the 1962 novel The Drowned World with its central notion of a night-time dream-journey down humanity's collective spinal cord to earlier, prehistoric, states of being. But some of the other phrases, and also the allusions to the characters Kline, Coma and Xero, are what most interest me here. (In passing, I should note that a character called Coma appears in the 1960 story "The Voices of Time," where she is described as "raven-haired" with "intelligent but somehow rather oblique eyes" and is referred to jokingly as "the girl from Mars.") Now I am not about to claim that the 1958 "Project for a New Novel" is the lost 1956 novel You and Me and the Continuum, or a segment thereof, but it occurs to me that there may well be strong links. Just as Ballard borrowed material from a science journal, so he may well have borrowed words, phrases and fictional persons from his own recently-written but unpublished novel. For further clues, let's turn to the 1966 short story which bears the same title -- and to its immediate successors. "You and Me and the Continuum" was the first of the stories which later went to make up The Atrocity Exhibition. It did, however, have a stylistic predecessor: "Confetti Royale" had been published two months earlier, in the January 1966 issue of Rogue magazine (it was later retitled "The Beach Murders" and collected in Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories, 1976). This was Ballard's first fully non-linear story, in effect the first "condensed novel." Originally subtitled "An Entertainment for George MacBeth," it is clearly influenced by that writer's prose poem "The Ski Murders" (published in Ambit, a magazine with which Ballard was now associated, in 1965). Like MacBeth's piece, Ballard's "Confetti Royale" is a narrative broken up into non-sequential paragraphs, each headed by a mysterious word or phrase in bold face, with those headlined paragraphs presented in alphabetical order as elements of an insoluble puzzle. Clearly, this pastiche of MacBeth was a jeu d'esprit for Ballard, an "entertainment" indeed: its subject matter is that of a James Bond-type spy thriller, with such characters as a CIA man, beautiful femmes fatales and various Russian agents. The content of the story is completely unserious (and unoriginal) but the form seems to have been an inspiration to Ballard; for, in writing "You and Me and the Continuum" immediately afterwards, he used exactly the same form (including the alphabetization) to a much more original purpose. Thus the condensed novels of The Atrocity Exhibition sequence were born: the later stories drop the alphabetization gimmick, but they retain the other features, so that "You and Me and the Continuum" can be seen almost as a halfway stage between "Confetti Royale" (and MacBeth's "The Ski Murders") and Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition stories proper. But why did he call that first story of the new sequence by the old (to him) title of "You and Me and the Continuum"? In the interview quoted above Ballard claimed that the lost 1956 novel was "nothing like the subsequent story of that name or any of the Atrocity Exhibition stories." However, he also admitted that he couldn't really remember, and my suspicion is that there were indeed some links in terms of the content and possibly the theme. In its specific form the novel may have been "nothing like" the later story and its successors -- for the evident reason that the condensed novels couldn't have come about until after Ballard had read MacBeth's "The Ski Murders" and written his own pastiche of it -- but in its ideas and characters the novel may well have prefigured some of the elements which go to make up the 1966 short story and several others which follow it. The circumstantial evidence for this comes largely from the "Project for a New Novel," produced so soon after the 1956 You and Me and the Continuum was (presumably) abandoned. The following phrases occur in the 1966 short story, and all of them echo very strongly some of the words which I quoted above from the 1958 collage (the page references are to the 1979 Panther paperback edition of The Atrocity Exhibition): "Coded Sleep and Intertime" -- page 102 Imago Tapes -- page 104 the spinal level T-12 -- page 104 the need to re-score the C.N.S. -- page 106 pre-uterine claims -- page 106 this beach Hamlet -- page 106 This nearly word-for-word repetition of material from the "New Novel" collage would indicate that it was not only the title of the 1966 story which was a hangover from the 1950s. Clearly, many of the same ideas and images had been present in Ballard's mind in 1958 -- and perhaps in 1956. But what is the short story actually about? In its original magazine version, "You and Me and the Continuum" carries a brief author's introduction which describes the piece as concerning "the Messiah or, more exactly, the idea of the second coming and how this might take place in the twentieth century. In my version, which I would describe as a botched second coming, the Messiah never quite managing to come to terms with the twentieth century, I have used a fragmentary and non-sequential technique... and have tried to invoke some of the images that a twentieth century Messiah might see." This theme of the Second Coming is amply borne out by the text. The central character remains nameless, but he is possibly "a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia... or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ" (page 101). There follows a series of baffling anecdotes, as clues to the identity of this mysterious visitor are gleaned from science, technology and the media landscape; e.g.: "The X-ray plates of the growing foetus had shown the absence of both placenta and umbilical cord. Was this then, Dr Nathan pondered, the true meaning of the immaculate conception -- that not the mother but the child was virgin, innocent of any Jocasta's clutching blood, sustained by the unseen powers of the universe as it lay waiting within its amnion?" (page 106). In the last act of a second coming which is after all "botched," the stranger breaks into (or attempts to break into) the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and is then seen walking into the sea: "He had come bearing the gifts of the sun and the quasars, and instead had sacrificed them for this unknown soldier resurrected now to return to his Flanders field" (page 109). Exactly what has "happened" in the story is never made clear, but the language and imagery are hauntingly allusive. The second-coming motif has recurred in Ballard's fiction and non-fiction, and would seem to have a strong appeal to his imagination. A short interview about the psychological significance of car crashes, by June Rose (Sunday Mirror, May 19, 1968), quotes him as follows: "Crash victims like Jayne Mansfield, James Dean, Aly Khan, Jim Clark and President Kennedy (the first man to be murdered in a motorcade) act out the Crucifixion for us. Their deaths heighten our vitality in a blinding flash. The death of Kennedy was a sacrificial murder, connived at by the millions of people who watched it endlessly recapitulated on television. If Christ came again, he would be killed in a car crash." The short story "The Comsat Angels" (Worlds of If, December 1968; reprinted in Low-Flying Aircraft, 1976) is explicitly about a second coming of Christ and his twelve apostles. And a much later story, "Answers to a Questionnaire" (Ambit, Spring 1985; collected in War Fever, 1990), also touches effectively on the theme. In a recent conversation, Ballard makes a similar allusion: "Imagine Christ being born in his manger surrounded by all the TV networks buying exclusive rights on this, that and the other as the baby opens its eyes to reality" (unpublished interview by Lynne Fox, recorded in January 1991). Given the persistence of this sort of notion in Ballard's mind over several decades, is it too much to suppose that the lost 1956 novel, the ur-You and Me and the Continuum, was also about a second coming? The next story in the sequence, "The Assassination Weapon," published in New Worlds just one month later (April 1966), has an even richer array of allusions in common with the 1958 "Project for a New Novel." These familiar names and phrases occur: Kline, Coma, Xero -- page 37 Coma: the million-year girl -- page 41 Pre-Uterine Claims -- page 41 An Existential Yes -- page 46 But more important than the mere occurrence of such phrases in "The Assassination Weapon" is the fact that the mysterious Kline, Coma and Xero actually appear several times as on-stage personae. They follow the central character, here called Traven, and on page 45 they are described as "his watching trinity." Who are these strange figures? Certainly not the well-rounded characters of any conventional piece of fiction; rather, they seem to be personifications of the Super-ego, the Anima and the Id: "Of the three figures who were to accompany him, the strangest was Xero. For most of the time Kline and Coma would remain near him, sitting a few feet away on the embankment of the deserted motorway... Coma was too shy, but now and then he would manage to talk to Kline... By contrast, Xero was an archangel, a figure of galvanic energy and uncertainty. As he moved across the abandoned landscape near the flyover, the very perspectives of the air seemed to invert behind him. At times, when Xero approached the forlorn group sitting on the embankment, his shadows formed bizarre patterns on the concrete, transcripts of cryptic formulae and insoluble dreams. These ideograms, like the hieroglyphs of a race of blind seers, remained on the grey concrete after Xero had gone, the detritus of this terrifying psychic totem" (pages 38-39). Kline, Coma and Xero, singly or in differing combinations, are present in stories 3, 4 and 5 of the sequence: "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe" (Ambit, Spring 1966), "The Atrocity Exhibition" itself (New Worlds, September 1966) and "The Death Module" (New Worlds, July 1967; later retitled "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" for the book). As usual, they seem to haunt the central character, whose name changes from piece to piece (Tallis, Travis, Trabert). On page 10 the watching figures (not actually named in this instance) are referred to as "couriers from his own unconscious." Later, Coma is described as "madonna of the time-ways" (page 56), and we have the reappearance of a familiar 1958 phrase to describe the alarming third member of the trinity: "Xero: run hot with a million programmes" (same page). In summary, my tentative hypothesis is this: Ballard's lost You and Me and the Continuum of 1956 was probably a modern-day novel about a botched second coming -- or, at any rate, about a "man who fell to earth" -- with a Christ-like central character who is haunted by three personae from his unconscious named Kline, Coma and Xero. Although it didn't closely resemble the condensed novels of later years, it was no doubt unconventional in form, with parts resembling a film script and parts which amounted to prose poetry: a "hot steaming confection" incorporating a good deal of scientific and psychoanalytical terminology and many surrealistic juxtapositions. Perhaps it was never finished, and it is likely that it would have been considered unpublishable in its day. But parts of it remain embedded, as literary fossil remains, in The Atrocity Exhibition. This conclusion is highly speculative, and one day it could be proved quite wrong. For the moment, however, I believe there may be some truth in the theory I have outlined here. (DP) Ballard's Recent Writings The following is a list of JGB's published non-fiction writings (all those of which I'm aware) since JGB News no. 20. Do please inform me if you know of anything which is missing. 1. "Sculptors Who Carve the Clouds" in The Independent (September ?, 1992): ?. Short article in a series entitled "Second Thoughts," written to mark the British paperback re-publication of Vermilion Sands. (Missed at the time of the last newsletter: thanks to Matthew Dickens for sending me a clipping.) 2. "Sticking to His Guns" in The Guardian [review section] (August 24, 1993): 8. Review of The Letters of William Burroughs, 1945 to 1959 edited by Oliver Harris. 3. "A Mind Firmly Set on the Universe" in Daily Telegraph ["Weekend" section] (September 4, 1993): XIX. Review of The Private Lives of Albert Einstein by Roger Highfield and Paul Carter, and Einstein: A Life in Science by Michael White and John Gribbin. 4. "Blue Velvet (1986)" in The Guardian [special magazine section entitled The Movies: The Readers' Choice] (September 18, 1993): 7-8. Three-paragraph contribution to a series of brief appreciations by various hands of the hundred best movies made since 1980 (as selected by Guardian readers). David Lynch's Blue Velvet comes second in the list of 100 films. 5. "Was the Holocaust Scripted by This Man?" in Daily Telegraph ["Weekend" section] (September 26, 1993): XXIV. Review of Marquis de Sade: A Biography by Maurice Lever. 6. "J. G. Ballard" in Time Out ["25th Anniversary Special" supplement] (October ?, 1993): 4-5. Short contribution to this sizeable compendium of tributes, in which Ballard writes about his memories of life in London and of the year 1968. Other early-in-the-alphabet contributors featured on the same two-page spread include Lindsay Anderson, William Boyd and Julie Burchill. 7. "Let the Women Have Lipstick and High Heels" in Daily Telegraph ["Weekend" section] (October 30, 1993): 25. Review of Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China by Richard Evans. 8. "All the World in Its Humour and Chaos" in Daily Telegraph ["Weekend" section] (November 27, 1993): 30. Review of Fellini by John Baxter, Life in Hollywood, 1936-1952 by Peter Stackpole, Hollywood Royalty: Hepburn, Davis, Stewart and Friends at the Dinner Party of the Century by Gregory Speck, Marilyn: The Ultimate Look at the Legend by James Haspiel, A Star Danced: The Life of Audrey Hepburn by Robyn Karney, Guinness Book of Movie Facts & Feats by Patrick Robertson, 100 Best Films of the Century by Barry Norman, The Incredibly Strange Film Book by Jonathan Ross, 5001 Nights: Shorter Reviews from the Silents to the '90s by Pauline Kael, Brief Encounter by Richard Dyer, In a Lonely Place by Dana Polan, L'Atalante by Marina Warner, Ealing Studios by Charles Barr, and Film: An International History of the Medium by Robert Sklar. 9. "Books of the Year" in Daily Telegraph ["Weekend" section] (November 27, 1993): 35. Brief contribution to this round-robin item, in which Ballard commends Genet by Edmund White. Letter from J. G. Ballard 13th October 1993 Dear David: Many thanks for JGB News 20, as always full of fascinating material more or less new to me. I admire your expert detective work into Kindness of Women -- you're pretty well absolutely accurate. I've always stressed that both Empire and Kindness of Women were novels, though based on my own life without which they could never have been written at all. They represent my own life seen through the body of fiction that was prompted by that life. Most of the characters in Kindness of Women are complete inventions. Sally Mumford, Peggy Gardner and David Hunter are wholly imaginary, and Sally is not drawn in any way from Emma Tennant, though there were lots of scatty young women like her in London in the 60s. Hiyashi was the real name of the Lunghua commandant, a former diplomat who was moved by the Japanese military when they took over the camp in the last much tougher year of the war. (By which I mean they kicked Hiyashi out and put one of their officers in charge -- the Japanese army had run Lunghua and all the other camps from the start.) Curiously, after the war my father travelled down to Hong Kong to speak in Hiyashi's defence at the war crimes trials there, and he was rightly acquitted. -- J. G. Ballard, Shepperton Other Readers' Letters September 1993 Dear David: Thanks very much for JGB NEWS 20. I'd been meaning to write after no. 19 [with Ballard's short article from 1966]: it was great to meet non-linear and quantified time again. Exhilarating, in fact. One question I'd love somebody to ask Jim now is, what happened to the moratorium on the past, the rejection of sequential and consequential fiction, since Empire of the Sun? The article was a powerful reminder of the ambitions Ballard et al used to have for an sf that conducted real moral and epistemological inquiries in forms appropriate to the matter and the times -- in part, what I was talking to [sf writer] Chris Evans about at Harry Adam Knight's [Carnosaur] party, while behind us on the video screen slimy little dinosaurs burst out of women's bellies. Sf these days seems to be mostly about professionalism -- not the innocent pulp professionalism of the Golden Age, which perhaps ought more appropriately to be called the Yellow Age, from the colour of the paper -- but a wholly self-conscious pro-fessionalism -- fractal formalism -- what Angela C. indicated when she said the real meaning of postmodernism was mannerism. I greatly enjoyed The Kindness of Women when I read it. It's intriguing to see it anatomized and laid out like a cadaver on a Cambridge dissecting table, one might almost say... I'd forgotten how episodic it actually is. I was so caught up by the imaginative intensity, it felt like an arc, ascending into the freefall ecstatic fusions of 1967 and descending through the 70s into damage and domesticity and the payment of dues. My sense of it was probably enhanced by the way I read it, in two bites, pausing exactly halfway through. Maybe episodic recollection is, in fact, all that remains of "quantified time." -- Colin Greenland, Harrow, Middlesex September 1993 Dear David: I wish I could supply you with lots of information but the best I can do is to fill in a few dates in your Ballard-on-TV-and-Radio list (JGB NEWS 20): Item 8. "Face to Face." This was on BBC 2 [not Channel 4 as I erroneously stated -- DP] as part of the "Late Show" series. 30 min. 7th November 1989. Item 9. "Moving Pictures" by Chris Petit. This was shown on 13th October 1990. Item 10. "Kaleidoscope." This was broadcast on 5th November 1990. The Ballard interview is seven and a half minutes long. I'd like to get a copy of the TV documentary "The Making of Empire of the Sun," if you know anyone who has it. I have a large video collection which is available for swaps. -- Robin Davies, Hertford, Herts. September 1993 Dear Mr Pringle: I was particularly interested in the list of media appearances by JGB as noted in issue #20. Item 17, "Bookmark: Shanghai Jim," sounds particularly fascinating, and I am wondering if you have any suggestions as to how I could obtain a copy of it. -- Steven B. Allen, Lucas, TX, USA Perhaps you and the previous letter-writer, Robin Davies, should get together by post? October 1993 Dear Mr Pringle: I wonder if you can tell me whether there is a new JGB book forthcoming? I have been in correspondence with him recently regarding the illustrations for the American suppressed version of The Atrocity Exhibition (I'm sure you know that the illustrations were published in Ambit 44, but I'll mention it just in case) and he agreed to sign some of my first editions at his next London signing session, but neglected to mention where or when this might be. Do you have any clues that might help? -- Austin Reeve, Great Dunmow, Essex The exciting news is that Ballard is due to deliver his next novel to publishers HarperCollins this very month, December 1993. I know nothing about the book (and indeed neither his editor nor his agent knew anything about it when I last spoke to them -- not even a provisional title). Malcolm Edwards of HarperCollins told me some months ago that he had the book down in his publishing schedule as "Untitled J. G. Ballard Novel." If all goes well with the delivery and editing, it could be published as early as June 1994. Perhaps I'll have more definite information in the next of these newsletters. As to signing sessions: these usually take place at various London bookshops around the time of publication. They're advertised in Time Out and elsewhere, and there are often handout leaflets in the shops a few weeks in advance. Forbidden Planet in New Oxford Street is one shop to watch. Flying the Flag A recent review by Patrick Parrinder of two books about the English novel ("Flying the Flag," London Review of Books, 18th November 1993, pp 23-24) contains an interesting aside about Ballard. Parrinder is discussing The Modern British Novel by Malcolm Bradbury (Secker) and After the War: The Novel and English Society Since 1945 by D. J. Taylor (Chatto). The last two paragraphs of his quite lengthy review go as follows: "Is modern fiction inadequate because the modern world is too complex for the novelist to grasp? Taylor took this view in [his previous critical book] A Vain Conceit, though it isn't much emphasised in After the War. 'Is there a novelist now writing who can adequately explain the scientific basis of the modern world? Of course not,' he once wrote. On another occasion, arguing that readability and formal experiment are not mutually exclusive, he said -- as if to clinch the argument -- 'Look at J. G. Ballard.' But in neither of his books has he stopped to look at Ballard, or any novelist like him. Ballard takes an original view of English society in some of his books, and could also have a fair shot at explaining the scientific basis of the modern world; but, as a genre writer, he presumably doesn't count. (Imagine what Orwell would have said about that.) Similarly, Malcolm Bradbury only gives Ballard a passing mention or two, focusing on the moment at which, with Empire of the Sun, he 'became an important mainstream novelist.' "Ballard is one of the main contemporary successors to that magnificent group of late 19th-century writers -- Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, the early Wells -- who have added hugely to the international standing and influence of British fiction without ever fitting comfortably into the literary canon, let alone being admitted to the 'great tradition'. They are writers who appeal to adolescents as well as to grown-ups, and they are the successors to the Gothic novelists who had much the same formative impact. Perhaps it is time to point out that these writers bulk larger in world literature than the Victorian worthies who form the bedside reading of British prime ministers. If we learned to integrate the Gothic, science fiction, the short story and all the other sub-generic forms into our general history of fiction we would have a new understanding of our national tradition. It could have still greater fascination than the histories we now have, and the claims of the 'British novel' could be advanced with still greater confidence." A nice tribute to JGB from a dyed-in-the-wool Wellsian. I intend to continue producing this newsletter at approximately twice-yearly intervals. If you want to receive the next issue, please send me relevant cuttings, photocopies or a letter of comment. If in doubt as to whether I may want a particular item, please phone me on 0273-504710. Failing that, but if you still want the next issue, please send £2 (£3, or US$4 overseas) to help defray my costs. All back issues, nos. 1-20, are available at £1 each from me (£1.50, or US$2, overseas). SEASON'S GREETINGS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR David Pringle, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton, UK
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