The context for this feature on Alaric Sumner is artistic; but I cannot personally completely separate my regard for the friend from my regard for the artist. The ongoing interviews, for instance, aim not just to clarify matters relating to his artistic output, but also to give some idea of the person.

I am doing that for myself, of course: when we mourn, we mourn our own mortality. I would like to think that I am doing it for others: I have known an absolutely remarkable human being - who was also, of course, "silly like the rest of us" - and I want you, whoever you are, to know about him.

However, it is not the intention to present here even a brief full biography of Alaric Sumner; Alaric would have been amused and perhaps annoyed at the idea. I offer you some facts and opinions about someone I knew which are, I believe, intrinsically interesting. If they provide a context for beginning to read a selection of a startling life of writing, well and good: they are not intended to be and cannot be, a key to that writing - the writing itself denies that.

I'll start with a little background information from Sumner himself:
 

“My grandfather on my mother’s side was Cornish, a Johns from Germoe in Penwith, but had moved to Kettering and then Bedford early in his life (1890s). I was born in South Africa (in 1952 just before Apartheid) of parents who had left the UK to work there a year earlier. I came to the UK aged 6 months with my mother. (I have had virtually no contact with my Mancunian father or his side of the family.) All my childhood holidays were spent here since my grandfather felt a strong connection to Cornwall. I lived in London from 1957 to 1991 when I moved my permanent home to St Ives. I spent a year in Leeds University doing my MA and am now back in St Ives. As you will gather, I have connections and Cornish blood in me, but I could hardly be called a Cornish writer.” [Letter, late January 1995, to A. Kent]

There is a computer file, retrieved from Alaric’s Mac, a word-processed chart called “My Life”. It is in four columns. The first is the calendar year, incrementing by one on every row; and that starts at the year of his mother’s birth. The second is her age. The third is his own age. And the fourth gives indications in one or two words of what he was up to at that point.

I have used that file as a framework for organising Sumner biographical material from my recollections and from Sumner’s own records - in particular a copy of a job application to University of the West of England around 1999 - and from conversations with his mother and his friends. There are also a few value judgements of my own; and I haven’t tried to hide those. 

Stephen Graham Antony Alaric Sumner was born in Grahamstown, South Africa on 13th March 1952. (He chose Alaric as his primary name in early adolescence though family and family friends continued to refer to him as Stephen throughout his life.) His parents separated soon after he was born; and, within six months, his mother and he had returned to England where she took up a post at Summerhill in 1953. She speaks of teaching with Alaric in a pram outside the teaching hut.

Other work took her, and of course Alaric, to Sweden for just under a year in 1956. Unsurprisingly, he remembered nothing particular of it. By 1957 they were back in London and Alaric was attending Fitzjohns Primary.

Between 1966 and 1970, at Haberdashers' Aske's Senior School in Elstree, he gained O-levels in English Language, English Literature, Mathematics, French and Spanish; and A-levels in English and General Studies.

"My history" for 1967 says "SIXTYSEVEN ACT" and, for 1969, "STONEWALL"; and he was early "out", a gay man involved in gay activism: 
 

"My first encounter with GLF was my mother giving me the Jill Tweedie article. I had had a couple of sexual experiences in Nottingham, but was very green." (Letter to Lisa Power 19 June 1995)

“I joined the London Gay Liberation Front Youth Group in 1970 or 1971, was involved in Gay Sweatshop during the first season in (was it? Rupert Street?) Piccadilly. I then got involved in the Brixton Radical [Ef]Feminist Commune which later moved to Nottinghill. A few years later I was involved in Gay Rights At Work. So, during most of the 70s I was very involved in the London radical gay scene.” [undated - possibly 7 July 1995 - letter to a colleague]

In 1970-71, he had worked as a full-time stagehand at Nottingham Playhouse, recorded in "my history" as " Nottingham - GLF Graham, Les", , a post he left to go to East 15 Stage School. He was there from 1972 until 1974. His chart shows that; and, also, for each year until 1976, the name "Paul". In 1976, it becomes "Paul?"; then, in 1977, "Leave Paul?" after which it vanishes, though a few years later the person concerned reappeared as his attacker, an attack which had a lifelong negative impact upon his self-confidence.

Between 1974 and 1979, he had “various jobs (Central heating salesman, barman etc) while seeking work as actor.” That period was when he attended meetings at The Poetry Society, especially Bob Cobbing's Experimental Workshops; and then founded words worth magazine with Peter J King.

The community at The Poetry Society soon broke up after a majority of the Society’s General Council capitulated, as many saw it, to the Arts Council of Great Britain on how it should run its affairs...

Alaric spent much of his life looking for communities in which to live and express himself, though clearly his main purpose in attending The Poetry Society had been to learn and enjoy as much as he could.

Slowly, those of us who had been based at Earls Court Square saw less of each other and so, inevitably, of Alaric. We went there less. He went there less; and he seems not to have replaced that mental space with another of like function.

By 1979, he appears to have given up the idea of being a professional actor; and, for many years, he was a typesetter at a number of companies in London -
 

1979 - 1984 Typesetter, Range Left Photosetters
1984 - 1985 Typesetter with Lithosphere
1985 - 1991 Typesetter with Colour Solutions

He was already motivated to learn print-related skills because of what he was able to do with such skills.

Though it is now out of print, my own book Mutation, published by Zimmer Zimmer, remains important to me, beyond my estimation of the contents, for the care with which Alaric designed and made the copies. When I wrote to him to that effect in 1999, he replied: “I was so pleased to be able to make something that you liked and that I liked out of something of yours.” He showed the same commitment to and respect for his author, at the expense of considerably more work, years later, when he came to publish Carlyle Reedy’s book under the words worth imprint.

Later, access to professional typesetting equipment enabled him to produce the striking layout for his Voices (for 9) script. (At The Poetry Society there was a golfball typewriter and that was it.)

He had been somewhat enthusiastic about the typesetting profession in itself, but only somewhat. In later years, in this context, I had referred to the character in Peter Sellers’ Balham skit who asserts that putting the bristles into toothbrushes is interesting work; and Alaric said that was too near the mark to be at all funny. He declared that his years as a typesetter were wasted years. In fact, the artistic work he undertook then retains considerable interest.

By 1991, he had reached something of a crisis in his private life and reappeared in the "poetry world", but far from London and, initially, via a London Post Office Box number. 

He had moved in late 1991 to St Ives, firstly into lodgings at Merryn Rock Flats and then into his own place. He had to work as a keyboard operator on lousy wages, a distance away on infrequent public transport, to make ends meet; but, as he made a new life, he began to rework and build on his existing writing and graphics, which included a lot of material made during the 80s, which few had seen. He regained confidence. He became busy. He was full of energy. By 1992 he was showing at Penwith Gallery in St Ives (he had submitted to Whitechapel Art Gallery in the late 1980s); and he performed with others at Sub Voicive Poetry in London in 1992.

In 1993 he moved temporarily to Leeds while a full time student on the MA in Theatre Studies at University of Leeds, funding himself, where he did brilliantly.

In 1994 Shatter (largely written by him) was presented at the Pleasance in the Edinburgh Fringe and Voices (for 9) was presented Royal Court, London. Rhythm to Intending and Lurid Technology and the Hedonist Calculator were published.

By 1995 he was the first Writer-in-Residence at the newly-opened Tate St Ives where he also exhibited and performed. Elsewhere, he performed as part of Ken Turner's General Specific.

There were some uneasy tensions within the group which were quite visible when they performed at Sub Voicive Poetry; and Sumner has spoken of it himself:
 

“The fact that the group [General Specific] is breaking up is not a bad thing since I have learnt a lot and actually got to a stage where I enjoy performing as long as it is on my terms and I don’t have to remember my lines.” [Letter to Antje Deidrich, 14 June 1995 ]

He revived words worth  magazine and, via words worth books, published his own Waves on Porthmeor Beach, with drawings by Sandra Blow, which sold in hundreds and had to be reprinted. He had what many publishers would regard as a good seller. Two large print runs sold out; and thereby he widened his potential readership greatly.

He could have developed a “style”, copying what had succeeded and becoming at least a local celebrity. If it had occurred to him, he would almost certainly have rejected the idea.

During 1996, he began studying for PhD at University of Warwick, but transferred to Dartington College of Arts in 1998; and began a new career as a lecturer, initially at Leeds and Dartington, giving one-off talks. These developed and evolved, and he began calling them lecture performances, a term he seems to have acquired from Ken Turner.

That year, 1996, Error Studies and Portraits was presented at Dartington College of Arts and Conversation in Colour at Tate St Ives & Dartington College of Arts and he became a lecturer in Performance Writing at Dartington on a part-time contract, initially ending in 1999 and then extended until 2001.

Dartington College became a focus. He took a small flat in nearby Totnes and spent increasing amounts of time in Devon.

In those last years, he had success with The Unspeakable Rooms which Rory McDermott devised and performed from Alaric's text; he made a number of pieces with the musician John Levack Drever; and then Nekyia, made with the composer Joseph Hyde.

His last publication during his life was Bucking Curtains, a large format book (2 x A3) of plundered texts and apparently abstract visuals launched in Totnes on 1 March 2002. Sumner performed remarkably that night. He had always been wary of improvisation, but then he improvised, verbally and non-verbally, and with aplomb.

Bucking Curtains and its performance were well-received; and he was buoyant. It was one of a number of his recent texts which were genuinely new, rather than reworkings of old material. It was unlike anything else anyone had seen; and he saw it opening up new areas of performance activity.

Alaric Sumner was about to produce more astonishing work; and he seemed to know it himself.

His last emails were upbeat and generally confident about work and about his life. On 6 March 2000, he wrote to an old friend:
 

“I was promiscuous in the 70s, monogamous in the 80s, celibate in the 90s and I am hoping that something extraordinary is going to happen in the new millennium.”

Later, he wrote of Bucking Curtains:
 

“…When we did it on 1 March there were 2 of us and we couldn't do the whole text but didn't think it wise to stretch the audience's patience with longer... however, it is quite indeterminate and might be possible to extend if there were more voices. I would like to hear it done with other voices (ie me and lawrence and x and y and z)” [email to Elizabeth James, 20 March 2000]

By then he was ill. His very last messages were resigned to temporary suffering, but without apprehension: 
 

"I have just been poisoned with cheese and have spent the last week (and probably the next two) in acute reaction (exhaustion, ache in every muscle, diarrohrrea (never can spell it!), extreme confusion - horrible). [...] What are you doing in May? I am performing on 24th in London." (email 17 Mar 2000 to an old friend]

In his last few days, though not knowing them to be that, he went back to St Ives to recuperate. The illness had sapped his strength to the point at which an undetected heart problem became fatal. He died on 24th March 2000, suddenly, unexpectedly.

He was buried at Longstone cemetery, near St Ives, without religious rites, just as he would have wished, with friends and colleagues speaking of him. The cemetery building, hardly small, was too small to contain everyone who turned up, many from far away.

His "my history" chart is extended to the age of 65 for him (with his mother alive but somewhat elderly). For 2001, when his contract at Dartington ran out, DARTINGTON has been abbreviated to DART. That is probably no more than weariness at having typed the name repeatedly; but it does also suggest an irritation with the place, a desire to be done with it. 2002 is represented as a string of interrogation marks ending in a greater than sign, producing a long questioning arrow. For much of the time, though not all of it, I suspect that the arrow pointed towards New York where he felt there were more opportunities and less danger for him as a gay man.

His attitude to Cornwall had become ambiguous. At the start of the 90s he seemed to think that living in St Ives would be a solution to many problems; but that attitude changed. Increasingly, he spoke of going to live in what he hoped would be a more accepting community.

One can see him distancing himself in a letter to a professional colleague from 10 November 1998: "I lived in Cornwall while at the Tate. Truro is a nice little village. Very far from the centres of activity. Exeter (3.5 hours from Truro) is a thriving provincial town with all sorts of active elements. Plymouth... is very different but also comparatively active. But Truro is 2 hours away from Plymouth. Give up hope of concerts, good theatre, art, intellectual company, good libraries, good restaurants, good transport. But enjoy the cold, damp winters. The countryside is beautiful. The coasts are stunning. Truro is a bit landlocked for me - I prefer St Ives. But I don't drive. You will probably LOVE it for 2 years. be frustrated for 2. hate it for 2 more and then it will have made you into someone who couldn't live anywhere else. Find a home with sea views. [...] There is such an active community of active contemporary writers/artists/composers here [in Dartington] that the beauty of the surroundings and the intellectual fire make it a pleasure to work here.

He could also write, in October 1998 - to a relatively new friend: "I have yet to recover fully from my own break up in 1991 with a lover I had been with since 1980... On the other hand, I am so glad my lover left me because I could not see at the time how damaging we had become for each other. I moved to Cornwall and every success I have now has come from not being a part of a couple (able to take uncluttered decisions). On the other hand, it can be lonely."

I recall meeting up with him, after 12 or 13 years without contact, in the very early 90s. We were each trying to pull away from relationships which we had found destructive, especially retrospectively. Since our last intimate conversations in the late 1970s, we had each experienced violence in a relationship, and associated involvement with The Law…

As we told each other more of the details, the more they seemed to be like experiences, and we investigated that. And Alaric gave as much of his time and of himself as it took, more than he could spare without personal disruption, to support me when later I needed support. I had other friends like that, I have been very fortunate; but I believe he had the greatest empathy of all my friends, male, female, gay or straight, in that situation.

He took friendship seriously. What survives of his large paper and electronic correspondence would provide excessive evidence of that. Here’s one:
 

“You can shine. You are not at peak energy. I so want you to be. Great things will come if you run full tilt at life! This is what you taught me. If you have forgotten, let me remind you.” [email to a friend 23 March 1998]

I’ve seen a little bit of the rejection of Alaric and the would be mockery: he was gay-bashed on a number of occasions, being quite seriously hurt. Once, when we were walking through St Ives together, without warning, he began “This is where it started”… “and this is where they hit me”… “and this is where I passed out”. The quiet agitation and intensity in his voice was telling.

Yet there was no bitterness in him that I saw and I can imagine him unwittingly making things more dangerous by inquiring into the desires underlying the antagonism against himself or by reasoning with the antagonists:
 

“After some talk and looking, one of them said to me “You don’t think I’m going to hit you with this milkbottle”. I felt strangely calm and said something like “I think it’s quite possible, but it seems completely irrelevant”. Somebody else spoke and I turned, which meant that when he hit me the bottle shattered on my forehead and cut the bridge of my nose. If I hadn’t turned it might have cut my eyes.” [letter to Lisa Power of 19th June 1995, speaking of events in his youth]

Increasingly, as he spoke of himself to me, Alaric saw himself as a gay writer - though not at all, I think, only as a Gay Writer - his position was complex. He wrote to a friend, thinking ahead to performing in Hull:
 

“Since I don't get to go to gay places, I might like one night to find Hull's gay pubs to sit and read in (teetotally of course). I never manage to speak - never want to! - but I like to be in a space where the side of me that thinks of itself as identifying itself as a gay man thinks it ought to feel at home.”
[email 10th March 1998]

And though he was sometimes more interested in the psychology of aggression and injustice than in evading it, he was an angry man, in his writing. Look for the anger in his writing and it will show itself; but it is only anger, without the frequently concomitant hostility.

He had a wonderful sense of humour. If you spoke to Alaric, you knew that very soon you were going to laugh. He didn’t tell jokes. A lot of his humour was irony and all of it was contextual. And the real thing. Not the use of the label to mask incoherent thought, nor exploitative ridicule. At his most light-hearted, the chances are he was undermining a most stable assumption and making it wobble; though you might not find out till you tried to use it again.

He had a quick wit and loved debate entered in good faith. As Christmas 1998 interrupted a back-channel debate with Doug Oliver, he wrote
 

“I have a sneaking suspicion we should have been doing this in public, not backchannel. Had I expected you to reply, I would have fronted it, but you said you wanted to stop.

so stop!

(but I'd love to hear your opinion on.......”
[email to Doug Oliver 22 Dec 1998]

At other times, the quickness of his brain showed up in his turn of phrase. Ken Edwards has recalled that when Alaric reappeared from his point of view, he - Ken - asked “Where have you been?” and Alaric replied “in a relationship”, as if that were a place; saying, in that - I am sure - conscious conflation, so much of how he saw the relationship. Similarly, recently I read an email where someone had responded to what I take had been a buzzy or exuberant message: “Alaric, what are you on?” The immediate return reply was: “my own”.

He liked puns and verbalising the unlikely. In his speech and his writing he would put apparently unconnected things side by side, often ludicrously, always ambiguously; and, by the time slower wits caught up with the connection, its feedback had already done some work. 

In discussion he might use such connections to make his way; but he didn’t argue to win, though he did argue to correct and expand ideas.

In that regard, I believe that almost everything he did was, in his terms, political whether it was a matter of friendship, of love, of art, or of teaching. He wrote:
 

“Your enthusiasm for work thrills me (though, in my cramped British way, I would question your faith in 'Art'). Your enthusiasm is what I attempt to drag out of my students - the excitement in language, the excitement in ideas - they have it in them, but so often it is blocked and killed by their education, their social life, their beliefs, the way they think they are supposed to behave.” [email to Alison Croggon 29 April 1999]

He planned a series of publications using the very largest commercial paper sizes - architectural sized publications, with pages A0 and A1, for which he would apply for grant aid for production. He had asked a number of artists to consider making such book objects. And his imprint for the project was called Bigger Buggers!

He loved the ridiculous and the playful; and, on his return from a conference at the University of Vechta in Saxony, he wrote:
 

“Just got back from Deutsxhuberalice having fun(????) with people who think poetry is numbers (metrists).

If I can be bothered, I will go back next year and do a talk on Mac Low, Stonehead and Cayley. That should hit them where it hurts - in the mathematics.” [email 30 May 1999 to Lawrence Upton]

That tone isn’t fun but considerable exasperation at what he saw as a failure to achieve full potential. He condemned it in himself; and he condemned it in others. In an email of March 1998, he says of a performance he has seen - “performance which needed 1) a feminist critique, 2) a marxist critique, 3) a sentimentality check and 4) an injection of sexuality instead of the cultural trappings of sexuality.”

He wrote, probably in 1999: “I view practice and theory as inextricable. Practice without theory (like the ‘apolitical’) is merely unaware of its own theoretical basis. Theory without its exploration in practice can be enjoyable, but is of no practical use.” (application for a job he did not get)

Alaric Sumner was not a person to whom the filing of documents came easily or much at all. Papers in a folder with an appropriate label of his own devising are generally signs of a momentary imbalance...

He didn't think in the modes required by office filing, though I doubt that he actually lost much. (I have only known one person who could always find every piece of paper he had generated or received, immediately, in the correct filing slot; and nothing that man ever put on paper was of any use to himself, those around him or the world in general; he drained his colleagues of energy, he had no friends and he hurt people in pursuit of behavioural predictability and control.)

The kinds of mental connection ("theoretical" and "creative") which Alaric Sumner made rendered maintenance of a suspended filing system a pointless task for him.

If he could have filed a piece of paper, then that piece of paper would have served its purpose for him already or have proved to have had no useful purpose; so why keep it? (Though he might well have done!) His kind of sonant creativity needed a time- and space-based storage system, one that modelled both time and space physically rather than symbolically. And, while the world remained in flux, he needed a truly suspended filing system, incorporating a fuzzy logic of negative capability, a capability he had in terabytes. Long before there was software for the graphical representation of time and quantity data-mining, Alaric was doing it - piling the papers, stacking them, overlaying them, copying them. His method was accretive and synthetic; his audit trails were topological and concrete within his domestic and professional space, a distinction he did not often make.

It's a pain, now, that he didn't label things; but, if he had done, I doubt I should want to read them.

Because his paper storage system was associative, based on recall, his sudden and unexpected death creates considerable editorial problems.

He had a habit of reprinting draft texts even if he had only changed one or two words, so that different versions may appear at first sight to be identical. He tended not to incorporate dates of printing and version numbers into prints... He liked to experiment with format, especially as a way to cope with writing blockage, so that two apparently different documents may be identical in terms of verbal content. His computer file names do not follow "good practice" -  How he would have taken that phrase apart! - and there are often various digital versions of a text, with many of them called "final".

His death caused temporary confusion in itself and an unknown number of his papers, variously located, were lost during that confusion. Others were destroyed in the belief that they were copies of what was already safe: they may or may not have been.

Of what is missing in hardcopy and manuscript, a substantial amount remains in digital form, but somewhat corrupted... It is usually possible to know what was written, but not always how it was to be laid out.

The editorial process is, therefore, sometimes not just of ordering but of inductive reconstruction; and it continues.