Man-Eating Typewriter - A Fantabulosa Feat
Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts,
By Jonny Aldridge.
Richard Milward, Man-Eating Typewriter (White Rabbit Books, 2023)
This winter, while reading Richard Milward’s Man-Eating Typewriter — a surrealistic novel on the transgressions of wannabee cult leader Raymond Novak written in the 1960s "secret homosexual lingo" Polari — I happened to end up on the jury of a rape trial. Talk about reframing the narrative. Not that the "charvering", "lammering" and "groin-groining" is hard to miss in Milward’s depraved romp. If every novel is about marriage and death, then Man-Eating Typewriter is about their carnal incarnations: sex and violence.
This is a psychedelic odyssey shot through with sexual abuse. Anarchic antihero Novak is born in France after his mother’s 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 ("I savvied my sexual partner was a one-eyed stingray […] My cartso was shoved in its ogle-socket"), is medically castrated in London after soliciting homosexual favours ("I was puzzled to find only smooth fabric where my quongs should be. […] Nix jewels. NANTI TESTICLES!"), sets up a fashion-boutique-cum-free-love-cult in bohemian London with his "dollies", and finally transports his "drugged devotees" on a one-way trip through Morrocco to the Atlas Mountains.
As if rape, imprisonment and torture weren’t enough, the novel is predicated from the foreword on a "fantabulosa crime that will revolt the mond" 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’re faced with a central question of Novak: victim and freedom fighter, or perpetrator and "Scum King"?
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’t masked men grabbing women in alleyways at knifepoint; the reality is often bleaker and more mundane than crime dramas, or Milward’s "meese meshigena" memoirist, would have us believe. The defendant Mr Nash (Nash, adj. dialect: 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.
Reading Man-Eating Typewriter’s lurid depictions of gang rape and sexual abuse makes you wonder, what is the point of this atrocity porn? One point is era-specific: "girls in the 1960s often felt grossly under pressure to bend to the new ‘laws’ of the Permissive Society, to offer themselves up as free sex objects rather than face rejection as squares: to conform to nonconformity." Milward punctuates Novak’s fiction with this cultural history to show a time of failed experiments and misplaced beliefs, in which a sexually frustrated "Dicktittler" like Novak could thrive. Sexual liberation becoming sexual exploitation. Religious cults becoming death cults: "Monday, 1st December 1969 – 224 days to go. In the early hours that morning, news broke of the ‘HIPPIE KILL CULT’ arrested in California for the Tate/LaBianca murders."
Without getting too Freud about it, Milward’s oeuvre is preoccupied with emasculation. In Ten Storey Love Song (2009) it’s literal. Johnnie is the "Hardest Lad in His Year" but he’s also a "useless prick" (his prick is useless) who can’t get hard for Ellen. His whole redemptive character arc resolves with a satisfying shag: "He feels proud of himself, and slightly surprised […] how incredibly wrong he’s been trying to do it in the past." In Kimberly’s Capital Punishment (2012) Stevie commits suicide after being raped by a seal on Seal Sands, a coastal beauty spot about 10 minutes’ drive from Teesside Crown Court. Stevie’s suicide note reads: "it was one of the seal bulls on top of me. […] i am embaresed to even say now but i still have a pain down bellow and am bleeding a lot out of my ther."
But while Johnnie is a trope of toxic masculinity and Stevie of emasculation, Novak’s impotence — his status as "Ze Walking Contraceptive" — isn’t only sexual but social, political, economic, metaphorical, and mythical. The impotent man seeking importance. Novak has a writer’s urge to be immortalised, to be known and remembered.
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 "dollies" picked out of brothels and peepshows. In Swinging London, Novak admires (and wants to tear down) the "Post Office Colin", a phallic symbol of capitalism. Then there’s the publisher of "dirty pocketbooks", Stanley, who "moonlighted as a backdoor abortionist [and] made a lot more money disposing of foetuses than he did publishing." You think of Milward himself working multiple zero-hour jobs across London — including in a postal sorting office — to finance the seven-year writing of this novel. What sort of fucked-up world forces writers with "unfathomable literary talent" (White Rabbit blurb) to fellate the boner of capitalism like this?
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’s cast: an author of the state paid £126,000 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’uns bent over by the same systems which have failed them.
It’s in his attempts at "reverse-servo-lathering" (reverse brainwashing) that "The Guru" Novak is most convincing and Milward is strongest. At times, Novak’s utopianism is naïve and endearing:
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.
Can’t we all empathise with this feeling of powerlessness? The feeling of having been "servo-lathered from birth to accept Capitalist battyfanging, to lavvy obediently and politely at the expense of [our] true desires and gay impulses"? Whatever it is, Novak is against it.
This tension between Novak’s awesome ambitions and awful acts would be enough. But Milward has another trick: Novak is a fiction. His "specjalni sensational memoir" is prefaced, footnoted, addended, interrupted and altered by the publishing team at the "seedy purveyor of pulp fiction" Glass Eye Press, under the leadership of Stanley Merritt (the part-time abortionist mentioned above). Hence comparisons to Nabokov’s Pale Fire. And even within the fictional world, Novak doesn’t exist. His memoir is revealed to have been written by Glass Eye’s Head of Complaints, Audrey Hulme, on the dubious motive of "revenge" on the company’s cover artist Mark ‘Davy’ Noon (an anagram of Raymond Novak) for raping and humiliating her: "I thought: maybe I can ridicule the bastard in a novel, a little hoax novel I’d send in. It was just meant to be a joke to start with, a caricature, a grotesque parody."
So, Novak is a double fiction. And Man-Eating Typewriter, 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 "captive" (Novak’s readers literally have their "lallies chained to the table-lallies"). 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 ("it was just meant to be a joke"). The man-eating typewriter. In a society obsessed with second-hand violence, with true crime drama, it begs the question underlying Novak’s view of the world: what the fuck is wrong with people? It seems fitting then that Novak’s (i.e. Audrey Hulme’s) "fantabulosa crime" is to shoot-up his (her) own Fitzrovia publishing house with a sawn-off shotgun. Is this karmic justice for a publishing house which profits from sexual deviance, from "fiction which shocks and surprises"? Not quite.
An even more disturbing reading comes from the introductory quote to Novak’s prologue: "Everything you can imagine is real" (Pablo Picasso). For Milward, the fact-fiction binary is itself a fiction, and reading his poioumena (a metafiction about its own creation) purposely puts you in "that strange shtate [sic] between life and death; fact and fiction; the known and the unknown" (Kimberly’s Capital Punishment). 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 Hulme’s crime) and the "Supreme Dicktittler" (who exploits violence for profit). Everyone is culpable.
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’re part of the fiction; sense and justice aren’t ours to claim. At the midpoint of Kimberly’s Capital Punishment, after the Grim Reaper accidentally kills the wrong Kimberly Clark, Milward performs a sudden rug-pull: "‘Well, what about the Reader?’ 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’ve got to do with it." The reader — the "transcendental peeping tom", the "nosy bastard bookworm" — is culpable too. It’s a slim price to pay for the thrilling, mind-bending, pyrotechnic, "fantabulosa" feat which Milward has created.
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.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Jonny Aldridge is a writer based in northeast England. His writing has featured in Liars’ League, Litro, Bookslut, The Writer, Sabotage Reviews, Cent Magazine and more. He writes the Writing Stories blog and is currently working on a novel.