This is a guest post by David Quantick.
Prayer: “Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality.”
Response: “Which is an illusion caused by mescaline deficiency.”
N. F. Simpson wrote those words in his play A Resounding Tinkle, and they are as true today as they were then, which is to say as true as anything else. Simpson, born Norman Frederick but known to everyone as “Wally” – a play on the name of Edward VIII’s lover, of course – was a great writer, an influence on Cambridge comic writers like Peter Cook and John Cleese, and a popular and critically-acclaimed playwright from the 1950s onwards, admired both by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Wally wrote mostly for the stage, but also for television and cinema and, on one exceptional occasion, as a novelist. He was able to outdo Lewis Carroll by thinking of a million impossible things for breakfast but, unlike his contemporaries who could make their work only absurd, he could also be as funny as a writer he admired greatly, P. G. Wodehouse. More philosophical than absurdist, Simpson nevertheless created surreal worlds whose logic was as rigorous as that of Aristotle, only much more hilarious.
In his long career – his work was first performed at the Royal Court in London in 1957, and his last new work for the stage, If So Then Yes, debuted in 2009 – N. F. Simpson produced many extraordinary works, from A Resounding Tinkle and One Way Pendulum (the latter filmed by Peter Yates in 1964) to television work as diverse as episodes of the ITV serial Crown Court (which vehicle Simpson subverted to near-breaking point) and Elementary My Dear Watson, a 1973 TV play in which John Cleese played Sherlock Holmes.
Harry Bleachbaker, published 1976, is not his only prose work, but it is his only novel and, being an N. F. Simpson novel, is very little like anything else in fiction. Based, at times so closely as to be verbatim, on his 1972 play Was He Anyone, Harry Bleachbaker has very little in the way of plot and an enormous amount in the way of diversion, rumination and side-tracking. Its plot, which unfolds over a hundred or so pages with the speed of a Galapagos tortoise making its mind up, is extremely simple: a man named Albert Whitbrace has fallen into the Mediterranean and plans are put into motion for his rescue. Or rather, plans to make plans to rescue him are put into motion, or if not put into motion, then discussed. The whole thing reads – probably intentionally – at times like the minutes of a very tortuous civil service meeting. Practicalities are weighed up, pros and cons are debated, issues are raised, and all the time Albert Whitbrace remains floating in the Med. There are footnotes, there are illustrations, there are sections rendered in dialogue but the thrust of the story is never out of focus: Albert Whitbrace is in the sea and he must be got out. And eventually, a decision is made.
At times Harry Bleachbaker (the titular character remains obscure) reads like Flann O’Brien, at others like Samuel Beckett, and at still others like an extended Monty Python sketch, but always it is pure N. F. Simpson: a world gone mad which is nevertheless ordered by the strictest rules of logic. Simpson, who laughed at reality, nevertheless went to great pains to replicate it faithfully at the same time as he was mocking it. And from the very first page of Harry Bleachbaker, nothing is safe. The Author’s Note at the beginning warns the reader:
This is an uneven book, parts of it having been deliberately made more boring than was in itself strictly necessary in order to highlight those parts which are less so.
Even the blurb cautions, “This is not, it goes without saying, a book to be read through from cover to cover at one sitting, or even at several sittings. It is not, indeed, a book to be read from cover to cover at all….” Simpson’s own biography lacks the usual elements of self-promotion and enthusiasm: “He was born in 1919, though without having first gone into the thing properly to see what it was likely to entail. Had he done so he would not be here now.”
The whole thing sounds quite daunting, and the lack of a conventional storyline doesn’t help the casual reader. Simpson’s lack of interest in narrative, he explained in the radio documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson, was caused by stems from the death of his mother when he was a child: ever since then, he seemed to imply, nothing had made sense. But the book, whether dipped in from time to time or read from cover to cover in a manic burst of brain-frying, is fantastic. Simpson’s ear for dialogue is incredible. His ability to capture the details of human selfishness (for this is not a book about Good Samaritans) and the tangled mess of bureaucracy (this is also a satire on the modern age of red tape) creates a world where the reader, who should feel like ALBERT WHITBRACE that they are drowning in a sea of madness, is buoyed up by laughter and a sheer helplessness at the force of Simpson’s imagination.
As an introduction to Wally’s work, Harry Bleachbaker is accessibly hilarious as well as being fairly easy to find online. As a stand-alone novel, there is very little like it, however you choose to read it. Be careful, though: it will lure the reader into the world of N. F. Simpson, from which, thank God, there is no escape.
(The documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson is available at http://www.curtainsforradio.co.uk/downloads/reality-is-an-illusion-caused-by-lack-of-nf-simpson-2/)
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.