An Aesthetic of Obscenity

Jeff Nuttall was born in 1933 in Lancashire. Prolific in many disciplines, Nuttall trained as a painter before taking up poetry, fiction, and acting. His 1960s publication My Own Mag was among the most significant underground venues for experimental writing. Nuttall published copious volumes of poetry, fiction, cultural criticism, auto/biography, and illustrated chapbooks across his career, acted in many notable films, and worked in various academic capacities at Leeds Polytechnic. He died in Abergavenny in 2004.

Jeff Nuttall's fiction displays an impatience with the constraints of words and language; the predictable course of a line carrying a thought across a page. The conventional order of narrative traditions were beneath his initial ambition. Never preoccupied with well-wrought description and dialogue that attempted to simulate real events, his objective was far more provocative: to lure readers into original experiences, from the carnal to the cerebral, from high art to low down and dirty humour. His strategy included the prospecting of biological intimacy, through conduits and chambers, tactile immersions in flesh, fluids, viscose matter; resurfacing where instincts manifest through swelling, dilation, tumescence; changes in hue, temperature, scent and flavour. He was a shameless chronicler of the body, as labyrinth and topography. His commitment to his material was intense and sustained. This anthology collects five novels published between 1975 and 1994: Snipe's Spinster, The House Party, The Gold Hole, The Patriarchs, Teeth.

"We are left with a handful of novelists preoccupied with purifying their own means and materials . . . Jeff Nuttall has pushed this situation towards one of its most interesting ends and, in doing so . . . has give the novel a whole new voice to work with." - John Calder