344- ] English Literature
B. S. Johnson
The last little bit of
Spring trickles away here in North Florida, where beautiful days with highs of
82℉ promise to turn into burning sweaty hell in the next week or two. The
Spring 2021 semester is behind me, and I’ve found a lot more time to read. So,
re: pic, bottom to top:
Paul Kirchner’s latest
collection Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delerium is dope goofy gorgeousness. I’ve
been taking it a page a day or so and am about to run out of the stash. I hope
to have a review of it soon (maybe in The Comics Journal, where I reviewed
Kirchner’s last collection, Hieronymus & Bosch).
Drew Lerman
I picked up Rachel Cusk’s
much-lauded novel Outline a few weeks ago at a Friends of the Library Sale. It
was not for me. The flat, “tell-don’t-show” style didn’t bother me—indeed the
prose is very “readable” (whatever that means)—but I found myself rolling my
eyes a lot. A lot of smart people like this novel (and the trilogy it
initiates), so maybe I fundamentally misread it. And in fairness, the whole
contemporary autoficiton thing has left me cold, with the possible exception of
Elena Ferrante’s so-called Neopolitan Novels, which I loved.
I read four B.S. Johnson
novels in something of a blur. Johnson was an English avant-gardiste writing
primarily in the 1960s. I wrote a bit about some of the novels here. Christie
Malry’s Own Double-Entry ended up being my favorite, with Albert Angelo a close
second. I thought Trawl was extremely tedious. I broke down and ordered a copy
of his “novel in a box,” The Unfortunates—maybe I’ll muster the energy for
something bigger on Johnson.
I’m a little over half
way through Patrick Suskind’s Perfume (trans. by John E. Woods), and I really
dig it—it feels like a long time since I’ve read a good ole fashioned
historical novel told in the third-person omniscient/free indirect style. Set
in France in the mid-1700’s, Perfume is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille,
a perfume genius, a freak, a murderer. I’d seen Tom Twyker’s film adaptation
years ago, but the novel is richer, taking us deeper into Grenouille’s strange
mind. Great stuff.
I recently finished Norah
Lange’s fragmentary memoir, Notes from Childhood (trans. by Charlotte Whittle).
It’s a propulsive and rich read, a loving but unsentimental, magical without a
trace of whimsy. I wrote about it a bit here.
From B.S. Johnson’s novel
Christie Marly’s Own Double-Entry
‘Christie,’ I warned him, ‘it does not seem to
me possible to take this novel much further. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ said
Christie, in a kindly manner, ‘don’t be sorry. We don’t equate length with
importance, do we ? And who wants long novels anyway ? Why spend all your spare
time for a month reading a thousand-page novel when you can have a comparable
aesthetic experience in the theatre or cinema in only one evening ? The writing
of a long novel is in itself an anachronistic act : it was relevant only to a
society and a set of social conditions which no longer exist.’
‘I’m glad you understand
so readily,’ I said, relieved.
‘The novel should now try
simply to be Funny, Brutalist, and Short,’ Christie epigrammatised.
‘I could hardly have
expressed it better myself,’ I said, pleased, ‘I’ve put down all I have to say,
or rather I will have done in another twenty-two pages, so surely. . . .”
‘So I do go on a little
longer ?’ interrupted Christie.
‘Yes, Christie, you go on
to the end,’ I assured him, and myself went on : ‘Surely no reader will wish me
to invent anything further, surely he or she can extrapolate only too easily
from what has gone before ?’
‘If there is a reader,’
said Christie. ‘Most people won’t read it.’
‘Politicians, policemen,
some educators and many others treat “most people” as idiots.’
‘So writers may too ?’
‘On the contrary. “Most
people” are right not to read novels today.’
‘You’ve said all this
before.’
‘I’m very likely to say it again, too, since
it’s true.’
A pause. Then suddenly
Christie said :
‘Your work has been a
continuous dialogue with form ?’
‘If you like,’ I replied
diffidently.
‘Only one of the things
it’s been,’ said Christie generously. ‘It’s something to aspire to, becoming a
critic ! Though there are too many exclamation marks in this novel already.’
Another pause. One of the
girls in what is ill-reputed to be a brothel opposite hung out the shirt of
what might be her ponce. Christie smiled gently, turned back to me.
‘But I am to go on for a
while ?’
‘Of course,’ I assured
him again.
‘Until I have everything ?’
‘Yes, Christie, until you
have everything.’
The excerpt above is the
complete text of Ch. XXI of B.S. Johnson’s 1973 novel, Christie Marly’s Own
Double-Entry. The title of the chapter is “In which Christie and I have it All
Out; and which You may care to Miss Out.” The chapter begins with this
epigraph:
. . . the novel, during
its metamorphosis in respect of content and form, necessarily regards itself
ironically. It denies itself in parodistic forms in order to be able to outgrow
itself.
Széll Zsuzsa
Válságés regény (p. 101)
Akadémia (Hungary) 1970
transl. by Novák Gyorgy
This particular chapter
might stand as a synecdoche of Christie Marly’s Own Double-Entry itself.
Posted in
LiteratureTagged B.S. Johnson, Christie Marly's Own Double-Entry, Literary Criticism,
Literature, Postmodernism
Four novels by the
sixties avant-garde novelist B.S. Johnson (Books acquired the first week of
May, 2021)
I think the first time I
heard of the British experimental novelist B.S. Johnson was some time around
2008 or so, when New Directions republished his “book in a box,” The
Unfortunates (1969). I thought it sounded like a cool but maybe gimmicky idea
at the time, and then Johnson dropped off my radar until more recently. I
started to see his name pop up when I’d search out more information about the
British avant-garde novelist Ann Quin, whose novel Berg I consider perfect.
So I asked around and
ended up finding an online copy of Picador’s omnibus reissue of three of
Johnson’s novels: Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966), and House Mother Normal
(1971). I also ordered Johnson’s penultimate novel Christie Malry’s Own
Double-Entry (1973) (as well as a copy of The Unfortunates which has yet to
arrive).
I tucked into the omnibus
last week, starting with Albert Angelo, which I think is the superior of the
three novels the edition collects (I’ve still got a final third of Trawl to go,
but I can’t see it turning a corner). AA is an experimental pastiche, a
bildungsroman that ironizes the künstlerroman. Our hero Albie, trained as an
architect, makes his so-called living as a substitute teacher in some of
London’s rougher schools. His narrative is an assemblage of
stream-of-consciousness, dramatic dialogues, advertisements, and other
rhetorical techniques—including literally cutting out parts of a few pages.
Albie is angry and witty
and generally good company throughout the brief novel. Albert Angelo will
resonate with teachers who remember those rough first years—sympathy with the
students, anger at the system, but also a realization that they are in a kind
of battle to earn the respect of their pupils. (Near the end of the novel, we
get a litany of student essays that Albie has assigned. The subject: Albie
himself. Student reviews are, for the most part, scathing.) Johnson’s assemblage
is impressive, energetic, and still feels fresh over fifty years later.
House Mother Normal is
also a lively novel, with an energy we might not expect in a novel subtitled A
Geriatric Comedy. The novel takes place over a few hours in a single day in a nursing
homes, telling the same “narrative” from the viewpoint of eight residents—as
well as the titular house mother. Each resident (and the house mother) gets
twenty-one pages to relate their version of the days events. Or, more
accurately, we dwell in their consciousness for those twenty-one pages. Some
residents are of clearer minds than others, but together, they offer a
fragmented minor Sadean saga that is both abject and occasionally moving.
Trawl is a more
“traditional” novel, at least in the modernist sense. Unlike House Mother
Normal and Albert Angelo, Trawl takes a straightforward,
stream-of-consciousness first-person tack, detailing three weeks the narrator—a
version of Johnson himself—spent on a deep-sea trawler in the Barents Sea. It’s
a sort of memoir, loosely figured around the various women that the narrator
has successfully or unsuccessfully bedded, with dips into his childhood
billeted away from his London family in World War II. In between, we get
snapshots of life on the trawler. The unifying theme of the book is shame,
paralleled with the narrator’s desire to create a work of Great Art. The
narrator peppers his memoir with interjections that the whole thing is boring,
worthless, and meaningless. Like I mentioned above, I haven’t gotten to the end
of Trawl, but it became a slog about a third of the way in. Johnson’s narrator
hems and haws, hedges and defers—and comments on his hemming and hawing. It
seems to approach the confessional style of American poetry in the l950s and
1960s without revealing too much. I don’t know. There’s something guarded about
it, even as it tries to be a naked affair. I’m hoping I like Christie Malry’s
Own Double-Entry more. Here’s publisher New Direction’s blurb:
In a brief but productive
career, B.S. Johnson (1933-73) was recognized as the most original of the
English experimental writers of his generation. Combining a bellicose
avant-gardism with pointed social concerns, he won the praise of critics and
fellow writers as well as a readership not usually gained by a literary
maverick. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is Johnson’s most broadly humorous
book, though as readers will discover, his humor has a bite. Christie is a
simple man. His job in a bank puts him next to but not in possession of money.
He encounters the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping and adapts them in his
own dramatic fashion to settle his account with society. Under the column
headed “Aggravation” for offenses received from society (the unpleasantness of
the bank manager is the first on an ever-growing list), debit Christie; under
“Recompense,” for offenses given back (scratching the façade of an office
block), credit Christie. All accounts are to be settled in full, and they are —
in the most alarming way.
The Unfortunates
The Unfortunates is the
fourth novel by English author B. S. Johnson. An experimental "book in a
box", it was published in 1969 by Panther Books, then reissued in 1999 by
Picador and in 2008 by New Directions.[1 It features 27 unbound sections, with
a first and last chapter specified, but the 25 sections between them, ranging
from a single paragraph to 12 pages in length, being designed to be read in any
order, giving a total of 15.5 septillion possible combinations that the story
can be read in. Christopher Fowler described it as "a fairly
straightforward meditation on death and friendship, told through
memories." Jonathan Coe described it as "one of the lost masterpieces
of the sixties".
BBC producer Lorna Pegram
employed Johnson to talk about this creation for the TV series Release after
she was lobbied by Carmen Callil of Panther Books. With barely any negotiation
the interview was ready months before the book was ready for publication. The
film included Johnson holding a mock-up of the book that was not at all similar
to the final publication.
Johnson said of the book
"I did not think then, and do not think now, that this solved the problem
completely… But I continue to believe that my solution was nearer; and even if
it was only marginally nearer, then it was still a better solution to the
problem of conveying the mind's randomness than the imposed order of a bound
book."
Plot
A football writer is sent
to a city (identifiable through landmarks as Nottingham) on an assignment. Upon
arrival by train, he is struck by the memory that this is where his deceased
friend Tony, who had died of cancer, lived and worked. Over the course of the
novel the narrator travels around the city, during which he reports on the
match, but at the same time is haunted by past memories of Tony. The novel
concludes with the narrator taking the train back home, contemplating both
Tony's death and his own mortality.
Development
In order to supplement his
income, Johnson worked as a football writer for The Observer, and was tasked to
write a report on a Nottingham Forest match. Nottingham is where
Johnson's friend Tony Tillinghast had worked and lived, with Johnson's debut
novel Travelling People being dedicated to him. Tillinghast was diagnosed with
cancer in 1962, dying in 1964. The Unfortunates was an truthful attempt to
recreate the randomness of memory, hence the move to publish the chapters loose
and not to have a fixed order, arguing that the order of memory is not
fixed.
Publisher Secker &
Warburg originally reacted negatively to the idea of an unbound book, partly
due to the expense. Johnson also made demands for a particular kind of
paper to be used in the production of the chapters.
Releases and adaptations
A 1999 re-release of The
Unfortunates, displaying the separate chapters
Originally published in
1969 by Panther Books, The Unfortunates was re-released by Picador in 1999 with
an introduction by Jonathan CoeIn 1969 and as part of the BBC Two arts magazine
programme Release, Johnson presented and directed a feature segment about The
Unfortunates, detailing the origins of the novel and how it came to be
structured. This was later released on DVD as part of the BFI Flipside
collection You're Human Like the Rest of Them.
When The Unfortunates was
first published in Hungary, it was released as a normal paperback. To allow the
reader to still read the book in a random order, symbols were printed above
each of the twenty-five random sections, with the same symbols reprinted on the
back page of the book. The reader was then instructed to cut out the symbols or
trace them, put them into a receptacle, and draw them out to create a random
order.
In 2010, The Unfortunates
was adapted for BBC Radio 3, with Martin Freeman playing the role of the
sportswriter who in the broadcast is named Bryan, this being Johnson's first
name. This adaptation was recorded in 17 parts, which were randomised in a draw
that took place on The Verb. The programme was then posted on the BBC website,
where listeners could make their own random order to listen to .
The book was also the
subject of an episode of BBC Radio 4 documentary series The Exploding Library
in 2023, in which comedian Rob Auton presented the show in a random order
similar to the novel
Reception
When The Unfortunates was
originally published, reviews were negative. Fellow writer Christine
Brooke-Rose was unimpressed, saying it was not as original as the cut-up works
of William S. Burroughs, and Robert Nye thought that The Unfortunates was
pointless, self-indulgent, and the Johnson was, "not boring enough to be
'real', yet he is too dull to be true."[20] Other criticisms commented on
the lack of solidity in the way that Johnson had reported his characters, while
Stephen Wall of The Observer called The Unfortunates, "a modest, sincere,
small-scale novel", and another critic described the boxed work as a,
"Kleenex novel". Some critics disliked the random ordering of the
work, with one review in the Ottawa Citizen writing that the wrapper that held
the loose chapters, "is ALL that holds this novel together."
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