kiss me deadly

My chief influences age 13 were Archy & Mehitabel, The Golden Amazon and various Georgian poets, how embarrassing. They can’t be separated but formed a pure, angular complex the robustness of which I couldn’t explain now even if you offered me three pages of the TLS & said, “Write whatever you like.” Later I would add anything by Mickey Spillane or TS Eliot. That was before I fell from grace and, at seventeen or eighteen years old, after reading Murphy and “The Voices of Time” on the same day, conceived my grand plan of combining the two under the aegis of the Nouveau Roman. After that, there was no home for me but New Worlds, a magazine I proceeded to deluge with monologues featuring neither characters nor punctuation. If I’m exaggerating here, it’s not by much.