Zulfikar Ghose — Hulme’s Investigations into the Bogart Script [1981]

An unpigeonholable talent of immense proportions, Zulfikar Ghose is more than a footnote to the B.S. Johnson saga. Ghose’s eclectic fiction is a fervent skein of complex influences and contradictions. Born to Muslim parents in Pakistan, Ghose migrated to England and was educated at Keele University. His most celebrated work is the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian, whose critical reception (and suggestive cover art) prodded Ghose towards the magical realism camp with Marquez and co.—a label that Ghose refutes, having not read the magical realists, or even the picaresque novelists, at the time of composition. His influences are canonicals such as Proust, Balzac, and Dickens, a lineage reflected in his elegant and musical prose. This failure to compartmentalise his fiction has led to his not-oft-dropped name in various critical circles, coupled with his attitude to publishing—“I have no interest in the reader. I never think of the reader. I don’t know who the reader is. In one’s earlier work there might be some images or expressions put there to please or make an impression on a particular writer friend, but in one’s later work the impulse comes from within the art where one writes in the company of the dead writers who become one’s most intimate associates.”—however, this makes uncovering his canon a far more splendid treat for the unknown and unloved reader. This short novel, published by petite press Curbstone in 1981, is one of the more exuberant and humorous entries in an otherwise stark and unflinching canon and, alongside his 1975 novel Crump’s Terms, showcases Ghose’s more B.S. Johnsonian side, a writer with whom he collaborated on the out-of-print debut collection Statement Against Corpses. Hulme’s Investigations is a riotous read, recalling the freewheeling western fictions of Ishmael Reed, and subverts the clichés of the classic western through hilarious pastiche and withering observation. A paean, of sorts, to his adopted homeland, where as of 1969 Ghose began his professorship at the University of Texas, where he has remained for his entire working career. Protagonist Walt is a vagabond whose fragmented adventures take place in an atemporal America that is old west in timbre, modern in humour (childish innuendo and brash satire pervades), and the novel alchemises Ghose’s readings of quintessential American poets such as Crane, Williams, Stevens, and Cumming into an imaginative conception of America past and present, incorporating myth, cinematic cliché, and pieces of 19^th century travel writing of those heading west into his own resplendent lyrical and outrageous style. Similar touchstones might include Camilo José Cela’s brutal one-sentence assault Christ Versus Arizona, or Reed’s high-spirited Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. Fans of clever and original takes on the usual western tropes should find this an entertaining and alert work. Perhaps the hardest to acquire of Ghose’s novels, the occasional copy should still be available floating around the internet—if not, Ghose’s vast corpus can be dipped into and devoured from the ‘60s to the final ‘90s fictions, each work presenting the reader with a fantastic, harsh, unpigeonholable vision.

Editions:
Paperback, 1981, Curbstone Press. 

Novels: 
The Contradictions, 1966, Macmillan. 
The Murder of Aziz Khan, 1967, Macmillan. 
The Native, 1972, Macmillan. 
The Beautiful Empire, 1975, Macmillan. 
Crump’s Terms, 1975, Macmillan. 
A Different World, 1978, Macmillan. 
Hulme’s Investigations into the Bogart Script, 1981, Curbstone Press. 
A New History of Torments, 1982, Hutchinson. 
Don Bueno, 1983, Hutchinson. 
Figures of Enchantment, 1986, Hutchinson.
The Triple Mirror of the Self, 1992, Bloomsbury. 

Short Fiction: 
Statement Against Corpses, 1964, Constable. 
Veronica and the Góngora Passion, 1998, Tsar Publications.