I called A. L. Kennedy to see how she would define the term “cult fiction”. What made a cult author? “Someone with a loyal, slightly flaky following,” she offered. “I was defined as cult when they thought that might work, because my fan base is loyal and flaky. You’d hope it meant that certain books were looked after and cherished by readers in the face of public opinion — but more and more that’s happening full stop: the idea of reading non-bestselling fiction, the stuff that isn’t on
Richard and Judy, is becoming a kind of cult in itself.”
A somewhat despairing take; but one that must be allowed given the impossibility, it seems to me, of any kind of narrow definition. The new Rough Guide to Cult Fiction is just published — we print some examples of quirky writing lives opposite — and causes a reader to ask: just what do they mean? The editors note in an introduction that Toby Litt once said that in their purest form, cult books ought to have been out of print for ten years — and that might be a good way to start. By those lights, though, this is no rough guide: Jonathan Franzen, author of the bestselling, Oprah-impressing The Corrections, a cult author? I wouldn’t have thought so, but you’ll find him in these pages.
A. S. Byatt was as puzzled as I was when I remarked on Franzen’s inclusion. I wondered if (aside from a desire the editors might have felt to put into their book authors at least some people had heard of — though you could argue that defeats the object; OK, we could go around in these circles for ever) there might be some confusion between cool and cult. Franzen: cool, yes; cult, no.
Byatt herself doesn’t appear in these pages, and yet when she described the behaviour of some of her fans to me there was something cultish to it. There’s a woman in California who makes furniture based around Possession; another in New York who makes tapestries drawing on all of Byatt’s oeuvre. She didn’t think that sales were necessarily anything to do with the matter: she considers one of her favourite authors, the bestselling Terry Pratchett, a cult author because readers either adore him or feel completely excluded from his work. When she travels in America and sings his praises, no one has ever heard of him. But aspiring to cult status, she thinks, can be dangerous. She is a great admirer of the novelist Tibor Fischer; but felt worried by her certainty that “he would love to have a cult”. Will Self, at least according to the editors of this guide, has one: he’s included. How does he feel about that? “I’ m happy to be included in anything,” he says. “I was the boy who wasn’t picked for sports at school.” According to Self, “cult” is a genre like any other: “a kind of sanitised avant-garde”.
Inquiring after the Rough Guide’s standards, Kennedy fired off a series of four names, only one of which met the RG’s criteria, whatever they might be. For the record, that was James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. The others were: Venedikt Yerofeev (the author of Moscow Stations); Boris Vian (“pataphysician, trumpeter, writer and bon vivant,” it says on one website), author of I Spit on Your Graves ; and Frederick Exley, American author of A Fan’s Notes and Pages from a Cold Island. As she noted, the advent of the internet has made seeking out “cult authors” much easier than it used to be.
In a sense, each book that speaks strongly to an individual reader creates its own cult: there can be many subcults along the way. A simple “I have heard of him, you haven’t” might be a good definition of cult — then nearly anyone can be let into this somehow elite and yet infinitely expandable club.
The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction is published by Rough Guides, £8.99 (offer, £7.64) on April 28
NEAL CASSADY
Muse to the beats
The creative force behind the 1950s Beat Generation and Ken Kesey’s original hippies, Cassady inspired numerous literary works — Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Visions of Cody, John Clellon Holmes’s Go, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Kesey’s The Further Inquiry, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and several other poems.
Cassady (1926-68) lived in Hollywood until he was six, then moved to Denver with his father, where they shared a condemned building with a group of alcoholics. He lost his virginity at nine and by 12 was having sex in exchange for food. By 21, he had stolen 500 cars and done time in reform schools and juvenile prisons, although he’d also begun to educate himself in philosophy and literature.
In 1946 Cassady met and entranced Kerouac and Ginsberg. A sexual chameleon, he began an affair with Ginsberg and soon afterwards embarked with Kerouac on the first of the aimless cross-country adventures that provided the material for On the Road.
Cassady worked as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad for much of the 1950s. In 1958 he was arrested for possession of marijuana and spent two years in San Quentin prison. He met Kesey in 1962 and set off on another great American road-trip with Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, driving a psychedelic bus.
He died aged 42 in Mexico — he fell asleep on a long walk after a wedding party and was found in a coma the following morning.
Although he published nothing while alive, his unfinished autobiography, The First Third, describes his childhood in a chaotic, free- flowing style, while his Collected Letters, 1944-67 show where all that Beatnik fire came from.
GEORGES BATAILLE
The uses of effrontery
The Observer, reviewing an intellectual biography of Georges Bataille (1897-1962), summed up the problem he poses in its opening line: “His obsessions were human sacrifice, surreal porn and monkey-ogling, but what were his faults?”
The French are obliged to take Bataille seriously. Yet the critic Peter Conrad is surely right when he says: “Bataille adopted extreme positions in a spirit of zany, cunning frivolity. As a surrealist, he understood the uses of effrontery and is best understood as a subversive intellectual comedian.”
With a case like Bataille, the temptation is always to blame the parents, and the fact that his mother tried to kill herself several times, while his father was blinded and paralysed by syphilis before dying in 1915, must have affected young Georges.
Too much of a loose cannon for the Surrealists — André Breton expelled him — Bataille is chiefly of interest as a writer of erotic fiction (though as a journal founder he discovered Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes). His unholy trilogy — The Story of the Eye, Blue of Noon and The Abbott C — was every bit as odd as you would expect from a man whose favourite set of photographs, pored over at intervals throughout his life, show a Chinese soldier, stoned on opium, being dismembered. The Story of the Eye is an exploration of taboos involving eggs, eyeballs removed from corpses and wardrobes. In Blue of Noon, Bataille’s lovers copulate in a graveyard and watch a Hitler Youth band play marching songs. His strength may be that no one, not even the Marquis de Sade, has ever seen things quite like him — or had the gall to commit such a vision to print.
LEIGH BRACKETT
Pulp princess, New Wave godmother and Hollywood hired hand
Howard Hawks was looking for someone gifted — and cheap — to make a screenplay out of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. After reading a hardboiled novel called No Good for a Corpse, he decided to enlist the author Leigh Brackett (1915-78), but was shocked to realise he had hired a woman.
Brackett had been writing since infancy, making her initial mark with such swashbuckling space sagas as The Dragon Queen of Jupiter. She wrote for magazines like Planet Stories in the 1940s, but, intrigued by a new kind of pulp fiction, the hard-boiled crime novel, created No Good for a Corpse. She was in demand for the next 40 years, especially after she (with William Faulkner) made The Big Sleep a smash. She wrote scripts for El Dorado, her favourite until Hawks changed the sad ending, and The Long Goodbye, the panned Robert Altman film of the Chandler novel now recognised as a classic. Just before her death she completed a draft for The Empire Strikes Back.
Her most notable novels are The Long Tomorrow, a serious allegory about a fascist America; The Tiger Among Us, a tale of vigilante justice; and I Feel Bad Killing You, published in 1944, which anticipates the brutal force of Mickey Spillane.
Today Brackett is treasured chiefly for her film work and her science-fiction tales that inspired George Lucas. The writer Michael Moorcock said: “She brought the spare, laconic prose and psychically wounded heroes of Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler into sci-fi pulp.” To that writer, and others, she is one of the “true godmothers of the New Wave”.
JERZY KOSINSKI
Charlatan or genius? The mystery endures
Born into a Jewish family in Lodz, Poland, Kosinski had learnt the dangers of admitting who you really are by the time he was six. He survived the Nazi occupation — his parents were wealthy enough to ensure that he was given fake Catholic documentation — but had other problems: an accident when he was nine left him mute until he was 14.
After such troubles, Kosinski decided to determine his own fate. An elaborate hoax ensured he was invited to attend Columbia University. His marriage to the steel heiress Mary Hayward Weir gave him access to wealthy socialites. Then, in 1965, came The Painted Bird, his tale of a child learning to survive in Nazi-occupied Poland. It marked the pinnacle of a career that also included Being There, in which the enigmatic Chauncey Gardiner becomes a presidential adviser, media icon and tycoon, and The Devil Tree, about an amoral steel baron’s travels to Africa.
After The Devil Tree was published in 1973, rumours began circulating that Kosinski’s novels were merely English translations of works unknown outside Poland. An article in The Village Voice cited as evidence the fact that his novels were wildly different from each other and that his English wasn’t good enough to be able to write such stories. One of Kosinski’s editors supported the author, saying he only edited Kosinski’s words, “no more, no less”.
The rumours destroyed Kosinski’s spirit. He responded in 1988 with The Hermit of 69th Street, inserting footnotes for almost every term used. But the rumours continued and he threw in the towel in May 1991, his suicide note reading: “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual.”
KATHY ACKER
Power, punk and porn
A random selection of the titles of the works of Kathy Acker (1947-98) — Hannibal Lecter, My Father; I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac; Pussy, King of the Pirates — conveys her talent to shock, rebel and outrage. These all came masterfully together in her most famous work, Blood and Guts in High School. No respecter of critics, literary greats (she was famous for violent, pornographic pastiches of classics such as Don Quixote), narrative (William Burroughs’s cut-up techniques were a favourite device) or the rules of language, Acker is a literary warrior princess, credited with inventing a new kind of feminist prose: aggressive, spartan, even primordial, yet intimately personal.
Born in New York, Acker never knew her father and fell out with her mother, supporting herself as an erotic dancer. Her first work, Politics, was published in 1972 when she was 25. With Blood and Guts she became notorious. Britain cherished her, but after Harold Robbins threatened to sue her in the British courts for plagiarising a sex scene, she fled to New York and then to California, where she took up body-building and taught literature to rich kids, while writing numerous books, including the fine Empire of the Senseless. Breast cancer was diagnosed in 1996; she died two years later.
There is, as Brian Bowdrey said of Pussy, King of the Pirates, “something to offend everybody” in her fiction. Robert Lort summed her up best: “Kathy was always out on her own, a strange girl blown out towards the thresholds of language and thought.”
Edited extracts from The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction
