339- ] English Literature
B. S. Johnson
at the complete review:
Name: Bryan Stanley JOHNSON
Nationality: English
Born: 5 February 1933
Died: 13 November 1973
Awards: Gregory Award (1962)
Somerset Maugham Award
(1967)
B.A. from King's College, London
Was poetry editor of the
Transatlantic Review
Also worked in film and
TV
Committed suicide
Bibliography
Travelling People -
novel, 1962
Albert Angelo - novel,
1964
Statement Against Corpses
- poetry (with Zulfikar Ghose), 1964
Trawl - novel, 1967
The Unfortunates - novel,
1969
B. S. Johnson v. God -
play, 1971
House Mother Normal -
novel, 1971
Christie Malry's Own
Double-Entry - novel, 1973
Aren't you a Bit Young to
be Writing your Memoirs ? - non-fiction, 1973
See the Old Lady Decently
- novel, (1975)
Please note that this
bibliography is not necessarily complete.
Quotes
What others have to say
about B. S. Johnson:
"Johnson, at least,
saw much of his work into print. He went through four publishers in six novels
and even more if we throw in the collections of stories, poetry. If he were
alive today he would be unpublished. I'd bet on it." - Thomas McGonigle,
Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer, 1985)
"Johnson made
experimental writing seem not only natural but inevitable." - James
Marcus, The New York Times (29/6/1986)
"(I)nstead of being
forgotten Johnson has been consigned to what some might regard as an even worse
fate: that of being endlessly invoked as a reference point in a sporadic and
none too fruitful argument about something called 'experimental' fiction. It is
high time his other novels were made available again, so that we can all be
reminded of what he was really up to. (...) What strikes me most forcibly now,
looking back over his work as a whole, is its consistent accessibility." -
Jonathan Coe, The Spectator (24/8/1991)
"When Malcolm
Bradbury edited The Novel Today in 1977 B. S. Johnson's contribution rubbed
shoulders with Philip Roth, John Fowles and Doris Lessing. Two decades on, his
work is out of print, and his name means little to all but a few somewhat
jealous admirers." - Henry Hitchings, New Statesman (11/8/1999)
"Back in his late
Sixties heyday B. S. Johnson was, if not exactly a household name, then a
figure of some consequence in any analysis of what were then called
'developments' in the novel. Of all that tribe of spiky experimentalists who
clogged up space in the review pages of 30 years ago -- Alan Burns, Eva Figes,
Ann Quin and others -- he was the spikiest of all." - D.J.Taylor, The
Spectator (16/10/1999)
"While Calvino and
Perec have had huge influence on the mainstream (...) their contemporary B. S.
Johnson, the supreme British experimentalist of his day, has barely survived
even as cult. Despite the fact that Anthony Burgess compared him to Sterne and
Joyce, and Samuel Beckett declared himself a fan, the attitude of the literary
establishment was best exemplified by Peter Ackroyd, who in 1975 wrote, in The
Spectator, of Johnson's "lamentably archaic 'experimentation'...an
anachronism masquerading as something different and new"." - Giles
Coren, The Times (21/10/1999)
"Johnson ist keiner
dieser Kandidaten, die das Experimentieren als mühsame Suche nach dem
Originellen verstehen. Im Grunde ist seine antirealistische Schreibweise eine
Art Realismus. Und das Wichtigste: Er langweilt uns nie – weil er, uns zum
Vergnügen, sich selbst aushebelt. (...) Verfremdungseffekte finden sich bei
Johnson zuhauf, eigentlich tut er alles, um sein Publikum vor den Kopf zu
stoßen, zieht es aber dadurch gerade an, wie in der modernen Werbung." -
Peter Urban-Halle, Die Zeit (25/2002)
"Johnson saw each of
his novels as a problem to be solved. The specific problem varied slightly with
every book, but the deeper, underlying problem was always the same: how, using
the poor, inadequate, blunt instrument of language, can you capture anything of
the simultaneity and multiplicity of modern life ? " - Jonathan Coe,
Prospect (2/2003)
"Rebelling against
that cramped tradition, and embracing the implications of Joyce's epistemology,
Johnson burst the seams of narrative convention; in seven novels, which he
wrote between the ages of twenty-six and forty, he developed a uniquely engaging
brand of estrangement, discursive but compact, formally challenging yet often
viscerally funny and -- in his own words -- "desperate in its
seriousness". " - Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement
(18/6/2004)
"Johnson's plan to
revolutionise the novel came down to the use of 'devices' intended to disrupt
ordinary forms of attention by involving the physical book itself, the material
base of writing, in unusual ways, as if to take revenge on it for a long
history of tyranny. (...) Johnson was very serious about these innovations, but
they kidnap the notion of experiment or estrangement by making it appear that
the violation of narrative order in the interests of what he thought of as
truth must be blatant. In fact these tricks simply prompt one to ask what the
point of this sort of innovation really is." - Frank Kermode, London
Review of Books (5/8/2004)
"B.S. Johnson
brought to all his endeavors, in whatever medium, a personal zeal and
forcefulness that sometimes crossed over into the boorish, and yet it's plain
that he wasn't a writer because it was fun or would bring in buckets of cash,
or somehow turn him into a celebrity. Worthwhile imaginative prose, he felt,
needed to push hard against the limits, to extend and challenge the
achievements of Joyce -- above all, to scorn the facile, commercial and
false." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post (5/6/2005)
Pros and Cons
of the author's work:
Pros:
Experimental, in the best
sense of the word, and willing to see what can be done with fiction, without
ever becoming daunting
B.S.Johnson's name still rings fairly
familiar, but he is much less of a presence than he once was. His perhaps most
famous book, The Unfortunates, which comes not bound neatly in one volume but
in nearly thirty smaller booklets that can be read in any order, was recently
republished, and an Omnibus of several of the novels seems close to
publication, but generally his works are hard to come by. In 1985 American
publisher New Directions initiated "its plan to bring the work of the late
English author (...) to the attention of American readers over the next few
years", but the project seems to have petered out by 1987, after only
three volumes. Jonathan Coe, who has long maintained that it was important that
Johnson's work should once again be made available, has written a biography,
scheduled for publication in late-2001. Perhaps that will help stir interest.
Johnson is too often seen as an
experimentalist, and thus thought of as someone whose work is too hard to
bother with (and, often, simply boring). But Johnson is a more complex case --
and a simpler one. Most of his work is readily approachable. Readers can put as
much effort into it as they care. There are depths here too explore but they
can also enjoy it with an absolute minimum of effort. The stories are fairly
straightforward, and while the telling may be formally unusual at time, none of
his experiments should scare off any but the laziest of readers. Other than the
danger of literally losing a portion of The Unfortunates Johnson's work should
pose few problems. But most readers never get that far, it seems, never
becoming actual readers of Johnson's work. It's a vicious circle.
Johnson is also a very funny writer -- and
it is not the kind of humour where the reader feels that s/he is being laughed
at. And there are stories here too, real stories, worth telling -- and worth
telling the way Johnson chooses to tell them. Here is a man who understands how
form and content must go together, a surprisingly rare gift. There are few
authors since who have pulled it off with similar success.
Certainly, Johnson is a writer's writer,
carrying on about the art, popping up at the most unexpected places within the
fictions, but these too should (or at least can) be seen as welcome asides and
insights. There is social commentary too, and wondering about the world.
Throughout there is novelty: Johnson doesn't get stuck in ruts, he constantly
tries something new. So if one novel doesn't please, for whatever reason, turn
to the next: it will, at the very least, hold something different.
A complex man, and apparently not the
nicest of people (at least in some circumstances), his personality does not
seem to have helped his lasting image (though friends speak and write warmly of
him). He published a solid shelf worth of books, despite a career cut very
short: he was a young suicide. It is unfortunate: it would have been
fascinating to see what else he might have done. It is unfortunate, too, that
young writers are not familiar with his work, and not using it as a springboard
for future fictions.
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