Five Fags a Day: life on the scrapheap

Continuing the posts on the Walsall author John Petty - whose work I've found surprisingly engaging - I just finished his Five Fags a Day (Secker & Warburg, 1956), a strongly autobiographical novel about the life of a scrap-picker collecting metal from the industrial tips near Walsall.

Petty and Barker on stately homes

Further to the previous revisit to the outcast Black Country writer John Petty, I found a good example of his Angry Old Working-Class Man style: his extremely hostile review of the Duke of Bedford's 1959 autobiography The Sound of Brass, published four years after Duke's opening of Woburn Abbey to the public.

Stiffening fingers (more on John Petty)

If you want to read the literary profile equivalent of listening to Leonard Cohen songs, I just found another article on the depressing life of the Black Country writer John Petty (1919-1973). This one comes from a 1967 Books & Bookmen, written after the publication of his 1966 dystopian SF novel The Last Refuge, and before his 1972 autobiography The Face.

Petty gripes

More on the late Walsall author, John Petty (see previously John Petty: The Face and The Last Refuge). I just found this 1958 article by Petty, which starts with an attack on another writer, briefly digresses to a description of his writing schedule, then concludes with a lengthy anti-intellectual diatribe hostile to, well, every writer of the time more successful than, or who had it easier than, Petty. Enjoy ...

John Petty: The Face

You are afraid.

Do you know of what you are afraid? Afraid of the face of a dream? Of the face of reality?

John Clare wrote: 'I long for scenes where man has never trod.' This was has testament, his expressed longing for release. But release from what?

In this intensely human, haunting and often humorous autobiography, John Petty contends that most men want nothing very much from life—beyond the obvious material things; that to know and have these things; they will shutter their eyes against ... The Face.

This is a cry for the weak, the afflicted, the over-perceptive, for the sane who are not insane, for the forgotten children, for the lost. For, in the last analysis, the brave ...

John Petty and The Last Refuge

Department of little-known novelists: John Petty.

The chewed-up cover (right) is from the 1968 Penguin edition for his 1966 SF novel The Last Refuge. The cover image, featured on The Art of Penguin Science Fiction site, is "by Richard Hollis, using a detail from a photograph by William Garnett in Geology by William C Putnam, Oxford University Press, 1964".