“Playing Fiona and being happy with Dick”: Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly

Abstract

This article considers two novels by Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly. Where recent critical attention endeavours to emphasize the significance of the former novel as an account of black homosexuality, the intention here is to take these novels together to explore wider concerns of sex and sexuality during the 1960s. In so doing, these novels are located not just within the growing genre of West Indian writing with its emphasis upon the aesthetics of identity in this period, but also in its relation to literature associated with the “Angry Young Men”. The intention is to read Salkey’s work not just as expressions of migrant identity, but as illustrations of British identity during a moment of intense social change with regard to global status, sexual politics and incipient multiculturalism.

Keywords:

• Andrew Salkey
• (homo)sexuality
• identity
• racism
• ambivalence
• West Indian literature.

Notes

1. See Collins, who cites various publications of this nature.

2. See Colin MacInnes’s City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959) and Mr Love and Justice (1960). The three novels together are popularly conceived as MacInnes’s “London cycle”.

3. The original edition referred to here was published by Hutchinson in London in 1960.

4. I have discussed very similar examples of contradictory beliefs in my account of interviews in the ITN “Notting Hill Riots Special”, shown on 5 September 1958 and accessible at http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/itnstudy/. See Ellis, “Produce”.