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80.
THE FANATIC #1-6 + issue #21/2 + The Fanatic off-print + The Fanatic Supplement (Bath/Amsterdam/Cambridge/London/Frankfurt: c. 1975-c. 1980) - all published.
A complete set of The Fanatic, envisioned by its founder, John Michell, as a magazine that anyone could publish using the publication title The Fanatic: “The two principal qualifications of a fanatic preacher are, his inward light, and his head full of maggots, and the two different fates of his writing are, to be burnt or worm-eaten” (Jonathan Swift).
i) Fanatic #1: The Special Cosmological Issue from Bath. 4to. Wrps., 12pp., unbound. Edited, written and published from Bath by John Michell, c. 1975. Designed by Carl Willson; Fanatic masthead by Heathcote Williams. Illustrated. Contents include “A funny story - violent attack on Professor Ayer - exciting new cosmology - religious fanaticism in Bath” and more. Light creasing and age-toning.
ii) Fanatic #2: Special Low Mindedness Issue. Edited, written and published from Amsterdam by William Levy, c. February 1976. Sm. folio. Wrps., 8pp. Designed by Willem de Ridder. Illustrated throughout, including a photograph of Brion Gysin in his Tangier restaurant by Herbert List. Fine. This infamous issue features Bill Levy’s “Nothing Personal But... A Tale of Passion for Brion Gysin”, his lengthy letter to John Michell on sexual shenanigans in Tangier involving previous girlfriends, and Brion Gysin (and his cook Targuisti), with a passing reference to Heathcote Williams’s self-immolation on Jean Shrimpton’s doorstep. It also features Levy’s notorious attack on Ian Sommerville (“A Portrait of a Humanoid”) in which he is described as a “tea-boy to the beat generation” with a mishapen penis. Levy prints two of Sommerville’s love letters to Susan Janssen (Levy’s Dutch girlfriend and future wife, who seduced the notoriously misogynistic Sommerville and claimed to have taken his virginity), along with “His Humourous Bibliography” and pithy quotes on Sommerville from Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and others.
Levy also prints a conversation with Ira Cohen in which they discuss Gysin and Sommerville (Cohen claims that the latter’s virginity had been taken by a girl called Lucia long before in Tangier, and Levy argues that “Burroughs did his best work before and after he lived with Ian!”). Other features include the pre-suicide letters of a fanatic obsessed with Rita Maria Linnenkamp (whose full-page naked photograph by Susan Janssen appears inside the front cover); anti-semitic texts by Céline and Pound assembled by Levy; an angry memo from Sinclair Beiles; a John Michell rant; and “Don’t Shave Your Legs” by Lynne Tillman.
Xeroxed holograph letter from John Michell to Bill Levy and Susan Janssen informing them of the death of Ian Sommerville loosely inserted: “6th Feb ‘76 Dear Bill & Susan, Brief, sad news of a tragedy. Ian S. had a new car, used to motor into Bath for drinks. Yesterday he smashed into someone, broke his head. The brains were all mangled and though his body remained alive for a while in a hospital machine, because a Bristol surgeon wanted his kidneys, his death took place at 6pm, Feb. 5. He could never drive steadily. His mother is here; funeral after the inquest. Other, more cheerful matters in next letter. Love, John”.
This issue of The Fanatic has sometimes been cited as the cause of Sommerville’s death, most notably by William Burroughs, who accused Levy of “killing” him with words. In “Literary Outlaw”, Ted Morgan’s biography of Burroughs, Gysin is reported as claiming that he informed Sommerville of Levy’s character assassination in The Fanatic over the phone from Paris shortly before his accident, and that the distress it caused him led to his fatal inattentiveness behind the wheel. In fact, as Susan Janssen has informed this cataloguer, the magazine had only just been collected from the printers in Amsterdam on the day of the accident (coincidentally Burroughs’ birthday) and could not yet have been seen by Gysin. In seeding this myth, it seems Gysin was propagating the kind of occult conspiracism he shared with Burroughs, a viewpoint from which nothing is ‘coincidental’ and no accident, death or misfortune is ever simply an ‘accident’. The more mundane reality was that Sommerville, as Barry Miles writes in his definitive biography, “Call Me Burroughs”, was simply the victim of a collision caused by the driver of an oncoming car mistakenly indicating the wrong turn signal.
iii) Fanatic #21/2: Special Dutch Issue. Edited, written and published from Amsterdam by Susan Janssen, c. early 1976. Tall 4to. Stapled wrps., 4pp. Designed by Williem de Ridder. Illustrated. Text in Dutch. Mainly devoted to the Dutch novelist and poet, Louis Ferron, and the influence of Céline on his writings. Fine.
iv) Fanatic #3: Children & Pets. Edited, written and published from Bath by John Michell, c. 1976. 4to. Wrps., 4pp., unbound. Designed by Carl Willson. Illustrated. “Extraordinary Stories, Poems and Obsessions from recent arrivals on the planet.” Includes “Beasts’ Liberation” by Heathcote Williams, a meditation on humanity’s relationship with animals: “Humans’ love of Beasts has been riddled with narcissism and sentimentality: most animals that are loved are so bowdlerised by domestication that they’ve become models of the greedy, over-sexed madhouse that is this capitalist society.” Very Good plus.
v) Fanatic #4: Internal Exile Special: Official Organ of the New Age Movement. Edited, written and published from Cambridge and on the move by John Nicholson and Cecilia Boggis, c. 1976. 4to. Stapled wrps., 16pp. Illustrated. One of 500 numbered copies. Lightly worn. Very Good.
vi) Fanatic offprint: A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File. London: Open Head Press, c. 1976. Lge. 4to. Stapled wrps., 8pp. Illustrated. A chronology of the JFK murder written and edited by Bruce Roberts. A full-page ad. printing John Michell’s holograph text in facsimile promises what became the contents of the following issue. Very Good.
vii) Fanatic #5: The Silver Jubilee Issue - A Paper of Passion. London: Open Head Press, c. July 1977. Edited by Heathcote Williams; designed by Richard Adams. 4to. Stapled wrps., 56pp. Printed in red and black. Illustrated. Includes contributions from Abbie Hoffman; Sinclair Beiles; Robert Crumb (5pp.); Lord Buckley; Jim Morrison; Hunt Emerson; Rod Beddall; Peter Till; Ed Barker; and others. Very Good plus.
viii) The Fanatic #5 [sic]. The Word That Heals & The Word That Kills Are The Same Word. Written, designed and published from Amsterdam by William Levy and the Dutch artist and illustrator, Peter Pontiac, 1976. Single small folio-size sheet, printed on both sides, folded once. Subtitled “The Purpose of Writing Is To Make It Happen… A True History - A True Mystery”. Peter Pontiac’s centrefold artwork depicts Brion Gysin lying in a hospital bed (he lost a toe in a motorcycle accident in 1969) opposite an image of Ian Sommerville’s fatal car crash (though there is no visual resemblance to either Gysin or Sommerville), presumably a riposte to the Gysin-propagated myth that Sommerville’s death was caused by Bill Levy’s article in the second issue of The Fanatic (the back cover epigraph is by Levy). Slightly age-toned, o/w Near Fine.
ix) Fanatic Supplement: Illuminatus/Immortalist. London: Open Head Press, 1977. Edited and written by Heathcote Williams and John Mackay; designed by Richard Adams and printed dos-à-dos. Folio. Wrps., 8pp. Illustrated. Produced to coincide with Ken Campbell’s staging of the Illuminatus trilogy at the National Theatre. Includes an interview with Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea, and contributions from David Solomon and Mike Lesser. Old central horizontal fold, o/w Very Good plus.
x) Fanatic #6: D'Fanatic. Frankfurt: Studio Malaria, c. 1980. Edited, written and designed by Heinz Peter Weiss, Micky Remann, Johannes Beck, Indulis Bilzens and William Rottger. Folio. Wrps., 36pp. Illustrated. Texts in German. Includes a piece on the British post-punk a cappella foursome Furious Pig (they appeared on the same bills as The Slits, The Fall and Pere Ubu, among others). Near Fine.
Fanatic reappeared in 1986 as the name of an Amsterdam-based “Post Art Art Ensemble” who released a cassette titled “Neuropa” that was publicised around the same time in a broadsheet titled The International Fanatic, edited by William Levy and Willem de Ridder and also included here.
Most issues of The Fanatic are scarce, full runs even more so.
