The New Yorker: Rediscovering a Lost Dystopia and Its Prescient Author
Kay Dick’s novella, which is being republished in February, takes place during an obscure, English descent into mass conformity and philistinism. Photograph by Helen Craig
Kay Dick, a queer editor and writer, died in obscurity in 2001. Did her novella “They” foreshadow our present discontent?
By Sam Knight
Originally published in The New Yorker
In the summer of 2020, Becky Brown, a literary agent who represents dead authors, went to stay with her parents in Bath. Brown was between apartments and somewhat depressed. Like many people during the first months of the pandemic, she was struggling to read for pleasure. Brown represents around a hundred and thirty literary estates at Curtis Brown, a London-based agency. Her work has made her a skilled peruser of thrift and secondhand bookstores. Her eye scans rapidly and from habit, looking for particular colors, colophons, publishers’ logos. One day in August, with nothing better to do, Brown stopped by the Oxfam bookshop in the middle of town. She saw a slit of orange: a Penguin paperback, from 1977, with a cracked spine, perhaps four millimetres wide. The book was called “They” and had an ominous sloping figure, in black silhouette, on the cover. The author was Kay Dick, a name vaguely familiar to Brown from the marginalia of twentieth-century British publishing, but no more than that. “They” cost fifty pence. It was ninety-four pages long: a succession of nine quietly horrifying stories from a dystopian, pastorally radiant England. Brown took the novella back to her parents’ house. “I read it in the bath and it just punched me in the face,” she said.
The following week, Brown received an e-mail from a friend named Lucy Scholes, with the subject “A plea for advice, if I may.” Scholes, a literary critic, writes Re-Covered, a column about overlooked books, for The Paris Review. In the winter, Scholes had come across an obituary of Kay Dick on the Guardian’s Web site, which she sometimes trawls in search of forgotten writers. Dick’s obituary was enticing for its rudeness: “a talented woman bedevilled by ingratitude and a kind of manic desire to avenge totally imaginary wrongs.”
Scholes had never heard of Dick. But she noticed that, for someone apparently overtaken by feuds and writer’s block, Dick had left behind a respectable body of work. During Britain’s first coronavirus lockdown, Scholes ordered Dick’s œuvre from the London Library. There were five mid-century novels: mannered, dated romances. “They just really weren’t particularly exciting,” Scholes said. There was a scholarly work on Pierrot, the sad clown of the commedia dell’arte, and two books of literary interviews. And, seemingly out of nowhere, there was “They.” In August, Scholes wrote about the book, under the headline “A Lost Dystopian Masterpiece.” (Brown did not see it.) Scholes’s endorsement of “They” sparked some publishing interest, and she wrote to Brown as a friend, asking for help tracking down Dick’s estate.
Brown was already on the case. “Lucy, this is the strangest timing,” Brown replied. She picked up the phone. “I was, like, I’ve just read ‘They,’ ” Brown recalled. “And she was, like, How have you just read ‘They’? No one can get hold of it.” Then, as now, it was virtually impossible to find a copy. There were none for sale on AbeBooks, the online marketplace for secondhand books. The London Library had a single hardback, which Scholes had out on loan. Brown marvelled at the coincidence. “I mean, it’s incredibly good luck,” she said. “But it’s also, in some ways, quite likely to happen, because we’re both orbiting what really is a tiny and fascinating circle of dead women.” At the same time, Brown was stunned at how thoroughly the book had disappeared. “It’s incredibly unusual to find a book this good that has been this profoundly forgotten,” she said. “That almost never happens.”
“They,” which is being republished on February 3rd by Faber, in Britain, and by McNally Editions, in the United States, takes place during an obscure, English descent into mass conformity and philistinism. Unnamed figures—they—patrol the streets and beaches, looking for signs of difference and of artistic stirrings: people who choose to live alone or paint or have noticeable feelings. “Nonconformity is an illness,” a surviving potter, named Rick, observes. The novella is suffocating—its subtitle is “A Sequence of Unease”—in part because of its odd depth of focus. The dystopia is distant and lightly sketched: “They cleared the National Gallery yesterday,” one character says, while cutting late-flowering roses, in the first story. It is also disturbingly intimate: they creep into the narrator’s house and remove Shelley’s poems and Katherine Mansfield’s “Journal” from the shelves. People who resist are blinded, maimed, or brainwashed. The episodes in “They” seem to take place at different stages of the disaster; you’re never quite sure whether it is just beginning or hope is gone. The pages seethe with casual violence: dogs are murdered, men hit women on riverbanks. Society is monitored by radar, computers, and ships that move along the coast. Almost everything happens amid great beauty and in glorious weather. “A Light-Hearted Day,” which tells of a singer who is being “cured” of her identity, opens like this:
The day was light-hearted. A wind, slight and soft on the skin, enhanced rather than reduced the sun’s warmth. Plumes of foaming waves surfaced like fresh paint on the sea. A day for falling in love.
Ahead of the novella’s republication, Margaret Atwood has described “They” as “creepily prescient.” Brown told me that the book’s uncertain narrative progression reflected her own sensations of being caught in the vying currents of the pandemic, political and cultural conflict, and environmental collapse. “It feels like we’re in something,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like we’re after something.”
Dick’s narrator has no name or gender. Dick was bisexual but rejected definition along these lines. (“I have certain prejudices and one of them is that I cannot bear apartheid of any kind—class, colour or sex. Gender is of no bloody account,” she told the Guardian, in 1986.) In a foreword to the Faber edition, Carmen Maria Machado writes that it is easy—and not wrong—to see parallels between the chauvinism embodied by the book’s they and by contemporary forces of reaction: conservative politicians and hacks. “But I don’t think Kay Dick would let us off that easy; censorious impulses and exasperatingly misguided discourse and soft bigotry are hardly the exclusive property of the right,” Machado writes. “The radical queer author of They had to be rediscovered by the whole world, after all.” Scholes and Brown both told me that their favorite episode in the novella is “The Fairing,” in which the narrator takes a beautiful country walk that ominously and breathlessly closes in on itself. “It’s about the space you are safe in contracting,” Brown said.
It took Brown only a day or two to track down Dick’s estate. She died in 2001, without children, and left her literary work in the care of younger friends. Dick spent her last three decades living in a basement apartment on Arundel Terrace, in Brighton, on England’s south coast. She was short on money and sold pieces of her literary archive to survive. During the Second World War, at the age of twenty-six, Dick had been the first female director of a British publishing house. Under a pseudonym, she edited The Windmill, a literary magazine, where she commissioned work from George Orwell. (Orwell inscribed her copy of “Animal Farm”: “Kay—To make it and me acceptable.”) Dick was bohemian and fully on the scene. She wore a monocle, used a long cigarette holder, and kept her short hair in a permanent wave. A pencil drawing of Dick was featured in Tatler and Bystander, in December, 1958, when she was at work on her Pierrot book. “Kay really went for it,” Michael Ratcliffe, a former literary editor of the Times, recalled. “She was a bit like an Edwardian dandy.” In her prime, Dick wore a cloak and carried a cane to dive bars in Soho, and threw parties in Hampstead with her partner, Kathleen Farrell, who was also a novelist, and with whom she lived for twenty-two years.
Candida Lacey, one of Dick’s literary executors, met her at a publishing party in the eighties. “She was wearing a sort of long, black operatic gown,” Lacey said. “She swept me up and said, ‘Oh, darling, you live in Brighton. You must come and have cucumber sandwiches for tea.’ ” At the time, Dick was finding it hard to produce anything. (Her last novel, “The Shelf,” was published in 1984.) She was rumored to have accepted two contracts to write a biography of Colette, but fulfilled neither. “I think people were wary of her,” Lacey said.
Dick nursed grievances and picked fights with her neighbors. But, when a check came in, she bought champagne and filled the apartment with friends. “She was the most amazing, informal salonnière,” Lacey said. Dick was a compulsive sharer of people. “I have never been able to tame the passion I have for introducing my friends to each other, certain that this will produce instant delight, which is often not the case,” Dick wrote, in a foreword to “Friends and Friendship,” a collection of interviews with seven fellow-writers, published in 1974. She encouraged young artists and was fond of children. Dick called Lacey’s baby daughter the Heiress.
Dick left no explanation for the origins of “They.” In 1975, she wrote a short story called “Hallo Love,” which became the novella’s concluding episode. The story describes a writer who injures her ankle and is prescribed a fortnight of “permitted pain” by a doctor, which becomes a chance to vent other feelings. “I allowed myself the luxury of going utterly to pieces for forty-eight hours,” Dick writes, “moving like one demented through the hours, flooding my mind with old memories, metaphorically wailing at the wall of my loss.” In 1977, when the novella appeared, it carried a copyright credit referring to an article in the Sunday Times that described a new psychiatric treatment for bereavement, in which emotions were supposedly “burnt out.” Dick had left London after the breakdown of her relationship with Farrell. She had an affair with a married woman, who died by suicide. Dick had also tried to kill herself. “Such a demonstration of free will had its psychological repercussions,” she wrote later. “An inability to work properly and function as a writer—that all too impenetrable work block.”
But she wrote “They” apparently easily and fast. “She was very proud of it,” Michael Ratcliffe said. “I think she realized that it appeared with a fluency which she had struggled with in earlier times.” The book veers between the rapture of individual escape and the paranoia of being targeted for precisely that longing. “They” is dark, but the light never quite goes out. In “A Light-Hearted Day,” the narrator asks whether there is any point continuing to make artistic work in such oppressive conditions:
“And the pressures? The increasing isolations? The sharp loneliness?” I hammered my points.
“To be assimilated, used, communicated,” Sebastian said. “There’ll always be someone to listen, to see, to hear.”
“They” won the South East Arts Prize, a minor literary award, but otherwise had a doubtful reception. Reviews in the major British newspapers ranged from lukewarm praise to sexist bile. “As a fantasy sprouting from some collective menopausal spasm in the national consciousness, ‘They’ (the book that is) has a certain nagging, nudging, low-voltage power,” the Sunday Times concluded. It’s hard to tell whether any of the critics had personal vendettas against Dick. They probably did. But it is also possible that the book was read differently forty-five years ago. The artistic resistance that Dick describes is quaint and highbrow: brave souls with names such as Thoby and Egon risk their lives to sketch a garden. In contrast, the sinister they are characterized by their insistence on pop music, television, and vile manners as much as by book stealing and brainwashing. In one scene, the narrator and her friend confront a group of they-children, who have trapped butterflies in a milk bottle. The kids kick the protagonists’ ankles and run away. “You sloppy shit,” one girl says. “They” was out of print within two years.
I was sent a copy of “They” by Faber, just before Christmas. Nobody told me that it was coming. Like Brown, I was taken by its slimness and confident strangeness. I put it in my pocket and opened it on the Tube, where, like most people, I was wearing a mask, afraid of Omicron and used to feeling unsure. The book is supple with dread. My favorite episode is when the narrator seeks refuge in a beautiful converted mill—“Tea was laid: boiled eggs and a comb of honey”—which turns out not to be safe at all. “I remembered how they began, a parody for the newspapers,” Dick writes, toward the beginning of the book. “Nobody wrote about them now.” It has taken global misfortune and some sliding toward the abyss for “They” to speak fully and be heard. And a great part of the rediscovery is the figure of Dick herself: a fully formed narrator, bowed and unbowed, monocle intact, who has weathered the storm already. “It wouldn’t have been very easy to be Kay Dick now, so I can’t imagine what it was like being Kay Dick in 1940,” Brown said, when we spoke. “I think that’s the beauty of it, right? You just feel like she’s dusted off. . . . There’s this feeling of, Oh, my God, we almost lost this and it was our fault.”
Sam Knight is a staff writer at The New Yorker, based in London. His first book, “The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold,” was published in May, 2022.