Miracles of Life

Kennedy’. Churchill made a song and dance in the newspapers, demanding that Ambit’s modest Arts Council grant be withdrawn and describing my piece as an irresponsible slander, all this at a time when the ordeal of Mrs Kennedy and her courtship by Aristotle Onassis were ruthlessly exploited by the tabloid newspapers, the real target of my satire.

A prime engine of change in the 1960s was the entirely casual use of drugs, a generational culture in its own right. Many of the drugs, led by cannabis and amphetamines, were recreational, but others, heroin chief among them, were intended for use in the intensive care unit and the terminal cancer ward, and were highly dangerous. Moral outrage had a field day, while preposterous claims were made for the transformation of the imagination that could be brought about by LSD. The parents’ generation fought from behind a barricade of gin and tonics, while the young proclaimed alcohol to be the real enemy of promise.

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