Alan Burns (29 December 1929 – 23 December 2013) was an English author and one of the key figures in the short-lived group of experimental writers working in Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s, which included writers such as B. S. Johnson,

Christine Brooke-Rose Christine Brooke-Rose (16 January 1923 – 21 March 2012) was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her experimental novels.Ann Quin and Giles Gordon. Burns wrote eight novels, a play and the script for two short films (one in collaboration with B. S. Johnson), as well as several short pieces, a book of interviews with writers, articles and edited an American report on pornography and censorship for publication in the UK. Burns was one of the earliest teachers of creative writing as an academic discipline in Britain, appointed as the first writer in residence on the

University of East Anglia The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a Public university, public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus university, campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and twenty-six schools of ...

's Creative Writing Master's programme and later he went on to teach this discipline in both Australia and the USA. Burns also worked with Peter Whitehead, writing ''Jeanette Cochrane'', a short experimental film in a montage style, which featured early music from

Pink Floyd Pink Floyd are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1965. Gaining an early following as one of the first British psychedelic music, psychedelic groups, they were distinguished by their extended compositions, sonic experiments ...

and an appearance by

Nico Christa Päffgen (; 16 October 1938 – 18 July 1988), known by her stage name Nico, was a German singer, songwriter, actress, and model. Nico had roles in several films, including Federico Fellini's '' La Dolce Vita'' (1960) and Andy Warhol's ...

Biography and creative works

Alan Burns was born on 29 December 1929 to a middle-class family, the second of his parents' three sons.Peter Burns
"Alan Burns obituary"
''The Guardian'', 13 January 2014. He attended

Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood Merchant Taylors' School is an 11–18 boys Public school (United Kingdom), public day school, founded in 1561 in London. The school has occupied various campuses. From 1933 it has been at Sandy Lodge, a site close to Northwood, London, Nort ...

. Burns recounts his experiences at the school in fictionalised form in ''Buster'', his first and most autobiographical novel. While at the school, Burns published an absurdist and satirical essay on

Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson ( – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The ''Oxford ...

in the school magazine, which he reuses in ''Buster''. Burns subsequently did

national service National service is a system of compulsory or voluntary government service, usually military service. Conscription is mandatory national service. The term ''national service'' comes from the United Kingdom's National Service (Armed Forces) Act ...

from 1949 to 1951 in the Royal Army Education Corps. He studied law at

Middle Temple The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, commonly known simply as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court entitled to Call to the bar, call their members to the English Bar as barristers, the others being the Inner Temple (with whi ...

, and was called to the bar in 1956. He was assistant legal manager at Beaverbrook Newspapers from 1959 to 1962. ''Buster'', Burns's debut novel, was published by

John Calder John Mackenzie Calder (25 January 1927 – 13 August 2018) was a Scottish-Canadian writer and publisher who founded the company Calder Publishing in 1949. Biography Calder was born in Montreal, Canada, into the Calder family associated with th ...

in 1961. Largely autobiographical, it recounts a middle-class childhood spent during the Second World War and an adolescence and young adulthood in its aftermath. Burns's brother and mother both died during the war, and the novel deals with the consequences of their deaths for the remaining family members. All of his subsequent works feature a protagonist who experiences the death of a parent or sibling, and the trauma this engenders. With his second novel, ''Europe After the Rain'', titled after the

Max Ernst Max Ernst (; 2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic trai ...

painting, Burns begins to use collage techniques and cut-ups. As a result, the writing becomes starker, more distanced, as the novel recounts the movements of an anonymous narrator moving through an unnamed but ruined country during a war that several, also anonymous, characters say has ended but whose violence persists so that the distinction between wartime and peacetime is blurred. ''Celebrations'' transposes the techniques of ''Europe After the Rain'' into the workplace, where the violence persists, but is more concealed, occluded by family hierarchies and arcane legal structures. Burns's focus seems narrower, the narrative concentrating on a factory-owning family, particularly the patriarch, Williams and his son, Michael. After Williams's other son, Phillip, is killed in what might be an industrial accident but might also be at the hands of his brother, Williams and Michael compete for the attention of Phillip's widow, Jacqueline. Following ''Celebrations'', Burns published ''Babel'', stylistically his most radical work, and the high point of his experimental phase, with no narrative, a huge cast of characters including politicians and celebrities of the time, and short sections of highly condensed, often grammatically difficult prose. Again, Burns's targets in the novel are the state, violence and power. The novel deals repeatedly with the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam w ...

, the effects of colonialism, religion, the amorality of the political class, the workplace, the violence inherent within the family, with the movement of money and state-sanctioned violence. But more than its explicit content, Burns's novel deals, on a structural level, with the increasing fragmentation of the society it depicts. ''Babel'' received mixed reviews, even from those, like

Robert Nye Robert Nye FRSL (15 March 1939 – 2 July 2016) was an English poet and author. His bestselling novel ''Falstaff'', published in 1976, was described by Michael Ratcliffe (writing in ''The Times'') as "one of the most ambitious and seductive ...

, whom Burns saw as supporters of his work, and sold relatively poorly. But Burns continued his commitment to its style in ''Dreamerika!'', which traces a fictional history of the Kennedy family in America, seeing them as exemplars of the insidious movement of money and power, and of the relationship between politics and money. In the novel the Kennedys become mythical figures, but incredibly wealth and influence cannot shield them from an essentially tragic character, and as the various members die, it's possible to see Burns replicating his own family pattern. Following the publication of ''Dreamerika!'', Burns's style changes significantly. His next book, ''The Angry Brigade'' (

Allison and Busby Allison & Busby (A & B) is a publishing house based in London established by Clive Allison and Margaret Busby in 1967. The company has built up a reputation as a leading independent publisher. Background Launching as a publishing company in May ...

, 1973), presents a fictionalised account of several members of the short-lived British activist group known as

The Angry Brigade The Angry Brigade was a British group responsible for a series of armed actions against the establishment in England between 1970 and 1972. Using small bombs, they targeted banks, embassies, a BBC Outside Broadcast vehicle, and the homes of Co ...

. Burns presents their accounts in the form of transcripts from interviews, and in fact Burns did interview several people (including some left-wing activists) in preparing the novel. Though Burns is still working with found material, gone are the difficult to parse sentences, the bursts of incongruous images and non-sequiturs. Instead, the focus is on how a community performs its politics, and the way in which their personal interactions and day-to-day living conflict with their ideologies. The question of the efficacy and morality of using violence against the state in activist projects, as the real Angry Brigade did, and were imprisoned for, hangs heavy over the novel, and its protagonists endlessly discuss how they can avoid simply replicating the strategies of the state in their attempt to inspire political change. Burns's drastic change in approach comes at a time when a great deal was changing in his personal life. In the early seventies his first marriage, to author and artist Carol Burns broke down, and Burns moved from being a full-time novelist to taking on teaching roles, where he became increasingly permanent as a member of staff. In 1974 this led to Burns moving to Australia to work as a senior tutor in creative writing at the Western Australia Institute of Technology (now

Curtin University Curtin University (previously Curtin University of Technology and Western Australian Institute of Technology) is an Australian public university, public research university based in Bentley, Western Australia, Bentley, Perth, Western Australia. ...

). Burns later taught creative writing at various educational institutions, including the

Norwich Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of the county of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. It lies by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. The population of the Norwich ...

, the

City Literary Institute City Lit is an adult education college in Holborn, central London, founded by the London County Council in 1919, which has charitable status. It offers part-time courses across four schools and five "centres of expertise", covering humanities an ...

, London, the

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the flagship institution of th ...

, and

Lancaster University Lancaster University (officially The University of Lancaster) is a collegiate public university, public research university in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. The university was established in 1964 by royal charter, as one of several new univer ...

. Burns was the

's first

writer-in-residence Artist-in-residence (also Writer-in-residence), or artist residencies, encompass a wide spectrum of artistic programs that involve a collaboration between artists and hosting organisations, institutions, or communities. They are programs that pr ...

. Aspiring writers who came under his tutelage included

Ian McEwan Ian Russell McEwan (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, ''The Times'' featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and ''The Daily Telegraph'' ranked him number 19 in its list of the ...

. In his own accounts of the period, Burns suggests that the reasons for his change in writing style are political and theoretical, claiming to be inspired by

Heinrich Böll Heinrich Theodor Böll (; ; 21 December 1917 – 16 July 1985) was a German writer. Considered one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers, Böll received the Georg Büchner Prize (1967) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1972). Bio ...

's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which extolled the virtues of writing plainly to achieve a political effect. Burns, in his interviews, seems uncomfortable with the associations that experimental writing has with elitism and, following Böll, sees the need for a plainly expressed writing which can speak to, and inform, a wide audience. Alongside these personal and theoretical changes, the group of experimental writers that had formed in London in the mid sixties had lost much of its impetus following the suicides of Ann Quin and B.S. Johnson, both in 1973, less than three months apart, the first in August, the latter in early November. Burns had been close friends with Johnson. They wrote the short film ''Unfair'' together, and Burns considered writing a biography of Johnson, two short chapters of which appear in the 1997 Fall issue of the ''Review of Contemporary Fiction'' alongside another short piece by Burns and several critical essays. In 1981, Burns published ''The Day Daddy Died'', his most conventionally written novel. The novel traces the life of Norah, a working-class woman, whose life is made up of a series of encounters with institutions which exploit and oppress her, and with men who are representatives of those institutions. Toward the conclusion of the novel Norah and her large family (she has five children with five different partners) are confined to what Burns describes as "factory, hospital and work-camp ombinedinto an all purpose institution to represent the power of the State", a particularly Thatcherite institution in which the workplace, the prison, the hospital and the school combine, and here in particular Burns seems to anticipate the sweatshops and maquiladoras that arrive with emerging globalisation. The novel is written in a very straightforward, vernacular style, and again Burns used interview material as his source for the novel. In 1982 he co-edited (with Charles Sugnet) ''The Imagination on Trial: British and American writers discuss their working methods'', which ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'' "Book World" called "diverting, iconoclastic, and compulsively readable".''The Washington Post'' "Book World", 4 July 1982. The book included interviews with 11 authors (as well as Burns himself):

J. G. Ballard James Graham Ballard (15 November 193019 April 2009) was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, s ...

Eva Figes Eva Figes (; 15 April 1932 – 28 August 2012) was an English author and feminist. Figes wrote novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hit ...

, John Gardner,

Wilson Harris Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyana, Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and ...

, John Hawkes, B. S. Johnson, Tom Mallin,

Michael Moorcock Michael John Moorcock (born 18 December 1939) is an English writer, particularly of science fiction and fantasy, who has published a number of well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has wo ...

Grace Paley Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007), Goodside, was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist. Paley wrote three critically acclaimed collections of short stories, which were compiled in the Pulitzer Pr ...

Ishmael Reed Ishmael Scott Reed (born February 22, 1938) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, songwriter, composer, playwright, editor and publisher known for his Satire, satirical works challenging American political culture. Perhaps his best-known wor ...

, and

Alan Sillitoe Alan Sillitoe FRSL (4 March 192825 April 2010) was an English writer and one of the so-called " angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel ...

. Burns published his final novel in 1986. ''Revolutions of the Night'' was a return to a lighter prose style, and in places its short, gnomic utterances recall his work in ''Celebrations''. Again the title is taken from a Max Ernst painting, and the focus is a wealthy, middle-class family in which one member, on this occasion the mother, dies early on, and the remainder of the novel is focussed on the fallout from her death. The novel consists of a series of set pieces, most of which concern the incestuous relationship between the two children of the family, Hazel and Max, a relationship which seems to shield them from the institutions of the state that they encounter. Midway through the novel a war, or revolution, appears to begin, Max is imprisoned and then released, and the novel ends, in scenes that are reminiscent of the ending of ''Europe After the Rain'', the two siblings escape the country and live together. Burns taught briefly at Lancaster University in the 1990s, before returning to London, where he moved in with his ex-wife, Carol Burns, as a lodger. This movement, back to his first wife, to his hometown, retraces the movement of the protagonist of Burns’s first novel, Buster, and is itself an instantiation of the traumatic encircling and repetition that takes place in his novels. He died in December 2013.

Selected bibliography

* ''Buster'' in ''New Writers 1'' ( Calder, 1961) * ''Europe After the Rain'' ( Calder, 1965) * ''Celebrations'' (Calder and Boyars, 1967) * ''Babel'' (Calder and Boyars, 1969) * ''Dreamerika! A Surrealist Fantasy'' (Calder and Boyars, 1972) * ''To Deprave and Corrupt: Pornography, Its Causes, Its Forms, Its Effects'' ( Davis-Poynter, 1972) * ''The Angry Brigade: A Documentary Novel'' (

Allison & Busby Allison & Busby (A & B) is a publishing house based in London established by Clive Allison and Margaret Busby in 1967. The company has built up a reputation as a leading independent publisher. Background Launching as a publishing company in Ma ...

, 1973) * ''The Day Daddy Died'' (Allison & Busby, 1981, illus.

Ian Breakwell Ian Breakwell (26 May 1943 – 14 October 2005) was a British artist, active as a diarist, a draughtsman, a film-maker, a painter, a photographer and a print-maker. Life Breakwell was born on 26 May 1943 in Long Eaton, in Derbyshire. From ...

) * ''The Imagination on Trial: British and American writers discuss their working methods'' (eds Burns and Charles Sugnet; Allison & Busby, 1982) * ''Revolutions of the Night'' (Allison & Busby, 1986)

References

External links

* Peter Burns
"Alan Burns obituary"
''The Guardian'', 13 January 2014. * David W. Madden
"A Conversation with Alan Burns"
from ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', Summer 1997, Vol. 17.2. Dalkey Archive Press. {{DEFAULTSORT:Burns, Alan 1929 births 2013 deaths Academics of the University of East Anglia Members of the Middle Temple People educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood 20th-century English lawyers 20th-century English writers

Biography and creative works

Selected bibliography

References

Further reading

External links