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<\/p>\nBy Jonny Aldridge.<\/p>\n
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Richard Milward, Man-Eating Typewriter<\/a><\/em> (White Rabbit Books, 2023)<\/p>\n This winter, while reading Richard Milward\u2019s Man-Eating Typewriter<\/i><\/a> \u2014 a surrealistic novel on the transgressions of wannabee cult leader Raymond Novak written in the 1960s \u201csecret homosexual lingo\u201d Polari \u2014 I happened to end up on the jury of a rape trial. Talk about reframing the narrative. Not that the \u201ccharvering\u201d, \u201clammering\u201d and \u201cgroin-groining\u201d is hard to miss in Milward\u2019s depraved romp. If every novel is about marriage and death, then Man-Eating Typewriter<\/i> is about their carnal incarnations: sex and violence.<\/p>\n This is a psychedelic odyssey shot through with sexual abuse. Anarchic antihero Novak is born in France after his mother\u2019s rape (either by a Nazi or a Dadaist), grows up in squalor in London, is groomed in the merchant navy where he loses his virginity to a cartilaginous fish (\u201cI savvied my sexual partner was a one-eyed stingray [\u2026] My cartso was shoved in its ogle-socket\u201d), is medically castrated in London after soliciting homosexual favours (\u201cI was puzzled to find only smooth fabric where my quongs should be. [\u2026] Nix jewels. NANTI TESTICLES!\u201d), sets up a fashion-boutique-cum-free-love-cult in bohemian London with his \u201cdollies\u201d, and finally transports his \u201cdrugged devotees\u201d on a one-way trip through Morrocco to the Atlas Mountains.<\/p>\n As if rape, imprisonment and torture weren\u2019t enough, the novel is predicated from the foreword on a \u201cfantabulosa crime that will revolt the mond\u201d which Novak intends to commit in 276 days. The protracted mystery of this crime, and its eventual denouement, is so deftly done and holds together as well as any thriller plot. Throughout, we\u2019re faced with a central question of Novak: victim and freedom fighter, or perpetrator and \u201cScum King\u201d?<\/p>\n Back in the courtroom at Teesside Crown Court, Judge Makepeace (yes really) explains to us jurors that there is no typical rape, no typical victim, no typical rapist. It isn\u2019t masked men grabbing women in alleyways at knifepoint; the reality is often bleaker and more mundane than crime dramas, or Milward\u2019s \u201cmeese meshigena\u201d memoirist, would have us believe. The defendant Mr Nash (Nash, adj. dialect<\/i>: firm, stiff, hard) stands accused of penetrating his girlfriend while he thought her asleep. The prosecution claims she woke up and later recorded a confrontation including his admission. The defendant’s fiction is that he was elsewhere, the recording of his apology itself a fiction (some fictions are less convincing than others). We hear the opening statements then ready ourselves for four days of evidence.<\/p>\n Reading Man-Eating Typewriter<\/i>\u2019s lurid depictions of gang rape and sexual abuse makes you wonder, what is the point of this atrocity porn? One point is era-specific: \u201cgirls in the 1960s often felt grossly under pressure to bend to the new \u2018laws\u2019 of the Permissive Society, to offer themselves up as free sex objects rather than face rejection as squares: to conform to nonconformity.\u201d Milward punctuates Novak\u2019s fiction with this cultural history to show a time of failed experiments and misplaced beliefs, in which a sexually frustrated \u201cDicktittler\u201d like Novak could thrive. Sexual liberation becoming sexual exploitation. Religious cults becoming death cults: \u201cMonday, 1st December 1969 \u2013 224 days to go. In the early hours that morning, news broke of the \u2018HIPPIE KILL CULT\u2019 arrested in California for the Tate\/LaBianca murders.\u201d <\/p>\n Without getting too Freud about it, Milward\u2019s oeuvre is preoccupied with emasculation. In Ten Storey Love Song<\/i><\/a> (2009) it\u2019s literal. Johnnie is the \u201cHardest Lad in His Year\u201d but he\u2019s also a \u201cuseless prick\u201d (his prick is useless) who can\u2019t get hard for Ellen. His whole redemptive character arc resolves with a satisfying shag: \u201cHe feels proud of himself, and slightly surprised [\u2026] how incredibly wrong he\u2019s been trying to do it in the past.\u201d In Kimberly\u2019s Capital Punishment<\/i><\/a> (2012) Stevie commits suicide after being raped by a seal on Seal Sands, a coastal beauty spot about 10 minutes\u2019 drive from Teesside Crown Court. Stevie\u2019s suicide note reads: \u201cit was one of the seal bulls on top of me. [\u2026] i am embaresed to even say now but i still have a pain down bellow and am bleeding a lot out of my ther.\u201d<\/p>\n But while Johnnie is a trope of toxic masculinity and Stevie of emasculation, Novak\u2019s impotence \u2014 his status as \u201cZe Walking Contraceptive\u201d \u2014 isn\u2019t only sexual but social, political, economic, metaphorical, and mythical. The impotent man seeking importance. Novak has a writer\u2019s urge to be immortalised, to be known and remembered.<\/p>\n This leads us onto the second point: sexual violence is only one type of violence. Take the financial violence of capitalism: Novak as the destitute child driven to attempt suicide, his vulnerable \u201cdollies\u201d picked out of brothels and peepshows. In Swinging London, Novak admires (and wants to tear down) the \u201cPost Office Colin\u201d, a phallic symbol of capitalism. Then there\u2019s the publisher of \u201cdirty pocketbooks\u201d, Stanley, who \u201cmoonlighted as a backdoor abortionist [and] made a lot more money disposing of foetuses than he did publishing.\u201d You think of Milward himself working multiple zero-hour jobs across London \u2014 including in a postal sorting office \u2014 to finance the seven-year writing of this novel. What sort of fucked-up world forces writers with \u201cunfathomable literary talent\u201d (White Rabbit blurb) to fellate the boner of capitalism like this? <\/p>\n Or take institutionalised violence which looms large in the novel: the criminalisation of abortion (until the 1967 Abortion Act) and of homosexuality (until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act). Or consider the meta-narrative playing out in my courtroom, beyond the tidy story played out by the trial\u2019s cast: an author of the state paid \u00a3126,000 per annum to preside on high from ten until four, and a cast of characters punished for the crime of being born poor. A conveyor belt of chavs, yobs and wrong\u2019uns bent over by the same systems which have failed them. <\/p>\n It’s in his attempts at \u201creverse-servo-lathering\u201d (reverse brainwashing) that \u201cThe Guru\u201d Novak is most convincing and Milward is strongest. At times, Novak\u2019s utopianism is na\u00efve and endearing: <\/p>\n If one sunny juno I was made supreme dicktittler of this codswallop welt, I would first and foremost abolish all politics. There would be free shelter for all, free munja, free bevvies, free bonbons, free passage from zona to zona, free culture, free transport, nanti gaols, nix hierarchy, no bosses, no blobs on the beat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Can\u2019t we all empathise with this feeling of powerlessness? The feeling of having been \u201cservo-lathered from birth to accept Capitalist battyfanging, to lavvy obediently and politely at the expense of [our] true desires and gay impulses\u201d? Whatever it is, Novak is against it.<\/p>\n This tension between Novak\u2019s awesome ambitions and awful acts would be enough. But Milward has another trick: Novak is a fiction. His \u201cspecjalni sensational memoir\u201d is prefaced, footnoted, addended, interrupted and altered by the publishing team at the \u201cseedy purveyor of pulp fiction\u201d Glass Eye Press, under the leadership of Stanley Merritt (the part-time abortionist mentioned above). Hence comparisons to Nabokov\u2019s Pale Fire<\/i>. And even within the fictional world, Novak doesn\u2019t exist. His memoir is revealed to have been written by one of Glass Eye\u2019s employees, on rather dubious motives: \u201cI thought: maybe I can ridicule the bastard in a novel, a little hoax novel I\u2019d send in. It was just meant to be a joke to start with, a caricature, a grotesque parody.\u201d <\/p>\n So, Novak is a double fiction. And Man-Eating Typewriter<\/i>, Milward reminds us repeatedly, is a fiction. What does it mean when the text is not the world? One reading is that fiction is a vessel for vicariousness and voyeurism. We enjoy it because it isn’t real. Fiction as revenge porn. Fiction as the out-of-control steam train gathering speed. Fiction which holds readers \u201ccaptive\u201d (Novak\u2019s readers literally have their \u201clallies chained to the table-lallies\u201d). Fiction as a tiny white lie which grows into a sexed-up dossier. Fiction in a teacup which swells into a tsunami. The fictive impulse as an inevitable, ever-growing organism (\u201cit was just meant to be a joke\u201d). The man-eating typewriter. In a society obsessed with second-hand violence, with true crime drama, it begs the question underlying Novak\u2019s view of the world: what the fuck is wrong with people? It seems fitting then that Novak\u2019s \u201cfantabulosa crime\u201d is ultimately directed at a peddler of pulp books. Is this karmic justice for a publishing house which profits from sexual deviance, from \u201cfiction which shocks and surprises\u201d? Not quite.<\/p>\n An even more disturbing reading comes from the introductory quote to Novak\u2019s prologue: \u201cEverything you can imagine is real\u201d (Pablo Picasso). For Milward, the fact-fiction binary is itself a fiction, and reading his poioumena<\/em> (a metafiction about its own creation) purposely puts you in \u201cthat strange shtate [sic] between life and death; fact and fiction; the known and the unknown\u201d (Kimberly\u2019s Capital Punishment<\/i>). Instead, a strange series of reversals, doublings and mirrorings takes place. For example, Novak mirrors Milward: both are surrealists, both work in multiple arts (Novak as a fashion designer, Milward as a painter with a fine art degree from Central Saint Martins). Novak is simultaneously a victim and perpetrator of abuse. Through his constant insertions, the publisher Stanley Merritt becomes the author. Merritt is the victim (of Novak\u2019s crime) and the \u201cSupreme Dicktittler\u201d (who exploits violence for profit). Everyone is culpable.<\/p>\n For the reader, this is a bad trajectory to be heading, very bad indeed. We start with a sense of the novel needing to make sense. We just want justice. But we\u2019re part of the fiction; sense and justice aren\u2019t ours to claim. At the midpoint of Kimberly\u2019s Capital Punishment<\/i>, after the Grim Reaper accidentally kills the wrong Kimberly Clark, Milward performs a sudden rug-pull: \u201c\u2018Well, what about the Reader?\u2019 I suggest, nodding up at you; yes, YOU, the one holding the book. You stare down at the page, reading this sentence, wondering what you\u2019ve got to do with it.\u201d The reader \u2014 the \u201ctranscendental peeping tom\u201d, the \u201cnosy bastard bookworm\u201d \u2014 is culpable too. It\u2019s a slim price to pay for the thrilling, mind-bending, pyrotechnic, \u201cfantabulosa\u201d feat which Milward has created.<\/p>\n Finally, the judge summarises the case before sending us to deliberate, which takes us all of twenty minutes: guilty. For his crime, Nash gets eight years. Plenty of time to write an exceptional novel.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/53152751713_952899348e_z.jpg\")
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