Miracles of Life (21 page)

Tired of all this, and feeling that the entire wrangle about
drugs was ripe for a small send-up, I suggested to Martin Bax
that
Ambit
should run a competition for the best poem or
short story written under the influence of drugs – a reasonable
suggestion, given the huge claims made for drugs by
rival gurus of the underground. This time Lord Goodman,
legal fixer for the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, denounced
Ambit
for committing a public mischief (a criminal offence)
and in effect threatened us with prosecution. The competition
was conducted seriously, and the drugs involved
ranged from amphetamines to baby aspirin. It was won by
the novelist Ann Quin, for a story written under the influence
of the contraceptive pill.

Another of my suggestions was staged at the ICA, when
we hired a stripper, Euphoria Bliss, to perform a striptease to
the reading of a scientific paper. This strange event, almost
impossible to take in at the time, has stayed in my mind ever
since. It still seems in the true spirit of Dada, and an example
of the fusion of science and pornography that
The Atrocity
Exhibition
expected to take place in the near future. Many of
the imaginary ‘experiments’ described in the book, where
panels of volunteer housewives are exposed to hours of
pornographic films and then tested for their responses (!),
have since been staged in American research institutes.

I must say that I admire Martin Bax for never flinching
whenever I suggested my latest madcap notion. He was, after
all, a practising physician, and Lord Goodman may well have
had friends on the General Medical Council. Martin responded
positively to my wish to bring more science into the
pages of
Ambit
. Most poets were products of English
Literature schools, and showed it; poetry readings were a
special form of social deprivation. In some rather dingy hall
a sad little cult would listen to their cut-price shaman speaking
in voices, feel their emotions vaguely stirred and drift
away to a darkened tube station.

I wanted more science in
Ambit
, since science was reshaping
the world, and less poetry. Asked what my policy was as
so-called prose editor of
Ambit
, I would reply: to get rid of
the poetry. After meeting Dr Christopher Evans, a psychologist
who worked at the National Physical Laboratory, not
far from Shepperton, I asked him to contribute to
Ambit
.
We published a remarkable series of computer-generated
poems, which Martin said were as good as the real thing. I
went further: they were the real thing.

Chris Evans drove into my life at the wheel of a Ford Galaxy,
a huge American convertible that he soon swapped for a
Mini-Cooper, a high-performance car not much bigger than
a bullet that travelled at about the same speed. Chris was the
first ‘hoodlum scientist’ I had met, and he became the closest friend I have made in my life. In appearance he resembled
Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel
Crash
,
though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure.
Most scientists in the 1960s, especially at a government laboratory,
wore white lab coats over a collar and tie, squinted
at the world over the rims of their glasses and were rather
stooped and conventional. Glamour played no part in their
job description.

Chris, by contrast, raced around his laboratory in
American sneakers, jeans and a denim shirt open to reveal an
Iron Cross on a gold chain, his long black hair and craggy
profile giving him a handsomely Byronic air. I never met a
woman who wasn’t immediately under his spell. A natural
actor, he was at his best on the lecture platform, and played
to his audience’s emotions like a matinee idol, a young
Olivier with a degree in computer science. He was hugely
popular on television, and presented a number of successful
series, including
The Mighty Micro
. Although running a
research department of his own, Chris became an ex officio
publicity manager for the NPL as a whole, and probably the
only scientist in that important institution known to the
public at large.

In private, surprisingly, Chris was a very different man:
quiet, thoughtful and even rather shy, a good listener and an
excellent drinking companion. Some of the happiest hours
in my life have been spent with him in the riverside pubs between Teddington and Shepperton. In many ways his
extrovert persona was a costume that he put on to hide a
strain of diffidence, but I think this inner modesty was what
appealed to the American astronauts and senior scientists he
met during the making of his television programmes. He
was a great lover of America, and especially the Midwest
states, and liked nothing better than flying into Phoenix or
Houston, hiring a convertible and setting off on the long
drive to LA or San Francisco. He liked the easy formulas of
American life. He thoroughly approved of my wish to see
England Americanise itself, and hung California licence
plates over his desk as a first step.

After taking his PhD in psychology at Reading University,
Chris specialised in computers, and spent a year at Duke
University, home to Professor Rhine and the ESP experiments
that involved closed rooms and volunteers guessing
each other’s card sequences. Chris’s American wife, Nancy, a
beautiful and rather remote woman, was Rhine’s secretary
when he met her. ESP experiments were largely discredited
in the 1960s, but I think Chris still had a sneaking hope that
telepathic phenomena existed on some undiscovered level of
the mind. Now and then, as we hoisted our pints and threw
pieces of our cheese rolls to the Shepperton swans, he would
slip some reference to ESP into the conversation, waiting
for my response. He was also surprisingly interested in
Scientology, while claiming to be a complete sceptic. I sometimes wonder if his entire interest in psychology was unconsciously
a quest for a paranormal dimension to mental life.

I often visited Chris’s lab, and admired the American
licence plates and the photographs of him with Aldrin and
Armstrong (this was before the lunar flights in 1969). I was
fascinated by the work his team was doing on visual and
language perception. In the 1970s he was exploring the
possibilities of computerised medical diagnosis, after the
discovery that patients would be far more frank about their
symptoms when talking to a computerised image of a doctor
rather than the doctor himself. Women patients from ethnic
minorities would never discuss gynaecological matters with
a male doctor, but spoke freely to a computerised female
image.

I was sitting in his office in the early 1970s when
something in the waste basket beside his desk caught my eye,
a handout from a pharmaceutical company about a new
antidepressant. Seeing my eyes light up, Chris offered to
send me the contents of his waste basket from then on. Every
week a huge envelope arrived, packed with handouts, brochures,
research papers and annual reports from university
labs and psychiatric institutions, a cornucopia of fascinating
material that fired my imagination. Eventually I stored them
in an old coal bunker outside the kitchen door. Twenty years
later, when I dismantled the bunker, I started reading these
ancient handouts as I rested between axe blows. They were as fascinating and stimulating as they had been when I first
read them.

Chris’s death from cancer in 1979 was a tragic loss to his
family and friends, all of whom have vivid memories of him.

In 1964 Michael Moorcock took over the editorship of the
leading British science fiction magazine,
New Worlds
,
determined to change it in every way he could. For years we
had carried on noisy but friendly arguments about the right
direction for science fiction to take. American and Russian
astronauts were carrying out regular orbital flights in their
spacecraft, and everyone assumed that NASA would land
an American on the moon in 1969 and fulfil President
Kennedy’s vow on coming to office. Communications satellites
had transformed the media landscape of the planet,
bringing the Vietnam War live into every living room.

Surprisingly, though, science fiction had failed to prosper.
Most of the American magazines had closed, and the sales of
New Worlds
were a fraction of what they had been in the
1950s. I believed that science fiction had run its course, and
would soon either die or mutate into outright fantasy. I flew
the flag for what I termed ‘inner space’, in effect the psychological
space apparent in surrealist painting, the short stories
of Kafka, noir films at their most intense, and the strange,
almost mentalised world of science labs and research institutes where Chris Evans had thrived, and which formed the
setting for part of
The Atrocity Exhibition
.

Moorcock approved of my general aims, but wanted to go
further. He knew that I responded strongly to 1960s London,
its psychedelia, bizarre publishing ventures, the breaking-
down of barriers by a new generation of artists and photographers,
the use of fashion as a political weapon, the youth
cults and drug culture. But I was 35 and bringing up three
children in the suburbs. He knew that however much I
enjoyed his parties, I had to drive home and pay the baby-
sitter. He was ten years younger than me, the resident guru
of Ladbroke Grove and an important figure and inspiration
on the music scene. It was all this counter-cultural energy
that he wanted to channel into
New Worlds
. He knew that an
unrestricted diet of psychedelic illustrations and typography
would soon become tiring, and responded to my suggestion
that he dim the LSD strobe lights a little and think in terms
of British artists such as Richard Hamilton and Eduardo
Paolozzi.

I still remembered the 1956 exhibition at the Whitechapel
Gallery, This is Tomorrow, and I regularly visited the ICA in
Dover Street. Many of its shows were put on by a small
group of architects and artists, among them Hamilton and
Paolozzi, who formed a kind of ideas laboratory, teasing out
the visual connections between Egyptian architecture and
modern refrigerator design, between Tintoretto ‘crane-shots’
and the swooping camera angles of Hollywood blockbusters.

In Eduardo Paolozzi’s Chelsea studio, 1968
.

All this was closer to science fiction, in my eyes, than the
tired images of spacecraft and planetary landscapes in s-f
magazines.

I remembered that in the 1950s Paolozzi had remarked in
an interview that the s-f magazines published in the suburbs
of Los Angeles contained more genuine imagination than
anything hung on the walls of the Royal Academy (still in its
Munnings phase). With Moorcock’s approval, I contacted
Paolozzi, whose studio was in Chelsea, and he invited us to
visit him.

We got on famously from the start. In many ways Paolozzi
was an intimidating figure, a thuggish man with a sculptor’s
huge arms and hands, a strong voice and assertive manner. But his mind was light and flexible, he was a good listener
and adept conversationalist with a keen and well-stocked
mind. Original ideas tripped off his tongue, whatever the
subject, and he was always pushing at the edges of some
notion that intrigued him, exploring its possibilities before
filing it away. A woman-friend I introduced to him
exclaimed: ‘He’s a minotaur!’ but he was a minotaur who was
a judo expert and light on his feet.

He and I became firm friends for the next thirty years, and
I regularly visited his studio in Dovehouse Street. I think we
felt at ease with each other because we were both, in our
different ways, recent immigrants to England. Paolozzi’s
Italian parents had settled in Edinburgh before the war,
where they ran an ice cream business. After art school he left
Scotland and attended the Slade in London, quickly established
himself with his first one-man show, and then left for
Paris for two years, meeting Giacometti, Tristan Tzara and
the surrealists. He always insisted that he was a European
and not a British artist. My impression is that as an art student
he had felt deeply frustrated by the limitations of the
London art establishment, though by the time I knew him he
was well on the way to becoming one of the tallest pillars in
that establishment.

Everyone who knew him will agree that Eduardo was a
warm and generous personality, but at the same time
remarkably quick to pick a quarrel. Perhaps this touchiness
drew on the deep personal slights he suffered as an Italian boy in wartime Edinburgh, but he fell out with almost all his
close friends, a trait he shared with Kingsley Amis. One of his
disconcerting habits was to give his friends valuable presents
of pieces of sculpture or sets of screen-prints and then, after
some largely imagined slight, demand the presents back. He
fell out spectacularly with the Smithsons, his close friends
and collaborators on This is Tomorrow. After giving them
one of his great Frog sculptures, he later informed them that
he wanted it returned; when they refused, he went round to
their house at night and tried to dig it out of their garden.
Their friendship, needless to say, never recovered.