Rayner Heppenstall
John Rayner Heppenstall (27 July 1911 in Lockwood, Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England – 23 May 1981 in Deal, Kent, England) was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
He was a student at the University of Leeds, where he read English and Modern Languages, graduating in 1932.[1][2] He had a brief teaching career, in Dagenham.[3]
Coming to London in 1934, he rapidly made initial contacts in the literary world. A short study Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality (1934) brought him for a time into John Middleton Murry's Adelphi commune at "The Oaks", where in 1935 he worked as a cook.[4] In 1935, also, he met Dylan Thomas, sent to meet him by Sir Richard Rees of the Adelphi magazine.[5] In short order he became a Catholic convert, and married Margaret Edwards in 1937.[6] In the mid-1930s he was influenced by Eric Gill.[3][7]
He was a friend of George Orwell, encountered also in 1935 through Thomas and Rees,[8] and later wrote about him in his memoir Four Absentees. Heppenstall, Orwell and the Irish poet Michael Sayers shared a flat, in Lawford Road, Camden. Heppenstall once came home drunk and noisy, and when Orwell emerged from his bedroom and asked him to pipe down, Heppenstall took a swing at him. Orwell then beat him up with a shooting-stick, and the following morning told him to move out. Friendship was restored, but after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote an account of the incident called The Shooting-Stick.[9]
During World War II, he was in the British Army, but with a Pay Corps posting at Reading, close enough to remain in touch with literary Fitzrovia.[10] He was also posted to Northern Ireland.[11]
[edit] Novelist
Heppenstall's first novel The Blaze of Noon (1939), was neglected at the time. Much later, in 1967, it received an Arts Council award.[12] He was Francophile in literary terms, and his non-fiction writing reflects his tastes.
Critical attention has linked him to the French nouveau roman, in fact as an anticipator, or as a writer of the "anti-novel". Several critics (including, according to his diaries, Hélène Cixous) have named Heppenstall in this connection. He is sometimes therefore grouped with Alain Robbe-Grillet, or associated with other British experimentalists: Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Stefan Themerson and Eva Figes. The Connecting Door (1962) is singled out as influenced by the nouveau roman.[13]
He was certainly influenced by Raymond Roussel, whose Impressions of Africa he translated. Later novels include The Shearers, Two Moons and The Pier. He also wrote a short study of the French Catholic writer Léon Bloy (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1953).
[edit] Radio work
From 1945 to 1965, he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation on radio as a feature writer and producer, and then for two further years as a drama producer. One of his early adaptations was of Orwell's Animal Farm in 1947.[14]
In his journals, Heppenstall mentions problems he had with Evelyn Waugh regarding a radio broadcast in the 1940s. Waugh apparently felt that Heppenstall purposely insulted him when he was sent to take him to the broadcast.
[edit] Works
- Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality (1934)
- First Poems (1935)
- Apology for Dancing (1936) ballet
- Sebastian: New Poetry (1937)
- Poems (1938) with Lawrence Durrell, Ruthven Todd, Patrick Evans, Edgar Foxall, and Oswell Blakeston
- The Blaze of Noon (1939) novel
- Blind Men's Flowers Are Green (1940) poetry
- Saturnine (1943) novel, reissued as The Greater Infortune (1960)
- Poems, 1933–1945 (poems) (1946)
- The Double Image: Mutations of Christian Mythology in the Work of Four French Catholic Writers of To-Day and Yesterday (1947)
- Imaginary Conversations: Eight Radio Scripts (1948)
- Three Tales of Hamlet (1950) with Michael Innes
- The Lesser Infortune (1953) novel
- Léon Bloy (1953)
- My Bit of Dylan Thomas (1957)
- Architecture of Truth: The Cistercian Abbey of Le Thoronnet in Provence (1957)
- Four Absentees: Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill, J. Middleton Murry (1960)
- The Fourfold Tradition: Notes On the French And English Literatures, with Some Ethnological And Historical Asides (1961)
- The Woodshed (1962)
- The Connecting Door (1962)
- The Intellectual Part: An Autobiography (1963)
- Raymond Roussel: A Critical Study (1966)
- The Shearers (1969)
- A Little Pattern of French Crime (1969)
- Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man (1969)
- French Crime in the Romantic Age (1970)
- Bluebeard and After: Three Decades of Murder in France (1972)
- The Sex War and Others: Survey of Recent Murder, Principally in France (1973)
- Reflections on the "Newgate Calendar" (1975)
- Two Moons (1977)
- Tales from the "Newgate Calendar" (1981)
- Master Eccentric: Journals, 1969–81 (1986)
- The Pier (1986)
[edit] Critical studies
- Buckell, G.J. (2007). Heppenstall – A Critical Study (DAP). ISBN 1-56478-471-1 : ISBN 978-1-56478-471-1
[edit] References
- ^ Buckell, p. 15.
- ^ http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/article/show/184
- ^ a b http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mellor2/rayner2.html[unreliable source?]
- ^ J. P. Carswell (1978), Lives and Letters: A. R. Orage, Katherine Mansfield, Beatrice Hastings, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky, 1906–1957 pp. 247–249.
- ^ Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (2003), p. 130.
- ^ Lycett, p. 146, 175.
- ^ Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (1989), p. 162, p. 269.
- ^ Gordon Bowker, George Orwell (2003), p. 164.
- ^ Bernard Crick: George Orwell: A Life, 1982
- ^ Robert Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939–45 (1977), p. 62.
- ^ Clair Wills, That Neutral Island (2007), pp. 158–9.
- ^ Buckell, p. 38.
- ^ Randall Stevenson, The Last of England?, Oxford English Literary History vol. 12, p. 408.
- ^ George Orwell: A Kind of Compulsion 1903–1936 (1998), p. 378.
[edit] External links
- Dalkey Archive Press on Heppenstall's life and works
- 3:AM Magazine on Heppenstall
- Heppenstall on imdb.com
- Jonathan Goodman (ed.), The Master Eccentric: The Journals of Rayner Heppenstall, 1969–1981 (London and New York, Allison & Busby, c1986), 278p. ISBN 0-85031-536-0
