Lost: Whatever Happened to ‘Severe Joy’?

When Heathcote Williams died recently, I heard from many people who recalled the lasting impact he’d had on them. Jay Jeff Jones, Michael Butterworth, and David Britton were three. They remembered a manuscript of Heathcote’s called “Severe Joy” that never saw the light of day. John Calder, a major London publisher, had failed to bring it out despite signing it up and advertising it as a forthcoming title. Jones and Butterworth both went looking for the manuscript in their files, but neither found it. Butterworth, who recounts a key period in punk music counterculture with his memoir, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio With New Order, did find an undated letter of Heathcote’s probably from 1980 (below), which discusses the idea of publishing the manuscript under Butterworth and Britton’s Savoy Books imprint. It’s not surprising that Savoy, which published radical books and comics, never published “Severe Joy” either. Around that time, following more than 50 police raids on the bookshops that Savoy operated in Manchester to help finance their publishing venture, they were forced into temporary bankruptcy. The shops were shuttered, the publishing office wrecked, and Britton was sentenced to a month in prison for selling so-called “obscene” literature.

Click the images or the captions to read Heathcote’s letter and Britton’s reply.

“PP” in Heathcote’s letter and “your other intriguing package” in the reply are references to a text called “Psychedelic Pogrom.”