351- ] English Literature - Jon McGregor

351- ] English Literature

Jon McGregor 

So Many Ways to Begin (2006)

Jon McGregor

Bibliography

McGREGOR Jon [1976-] Novelist. Born in Bermuda. Novels So Many Ways to Begin (2006: longlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize for Fiction); If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002: winner of a 2003 Somerset Maugham Award and the 2003 Betty Trask Prize for Best First Novel; shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, Eurasia region, and the Best Newcomer in the 2004 British Book Awards; longlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize for Fiction)

Description

David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife Eleanor would be the sparkling girl he once found so irresistible; that his job as a museum curator could live up to the promise it once held; that his daughter's arrival could have brought him closer to Eleanor. But a few careless words spoken by his mother's friend have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around a lie.

Jon McGregor, whose first novel was the acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), turns thirty this year, though you wouldn’t know it from So Many Ways To Begin. Merely at the level of physical description McGregor seems to know what it feels like not just to be far older than he is but to have become far older. The action of So Many Ways To Begin takes place over several decades; characters age, wither, die. Not even John Updike – whose adjectival roguishness McGregor shares – can compete. It took him thirty years and more to anatomise a similar time-span in the life and death of Rabbit Angstrom.

Not that McGregor’s hero, David Carter, is anything like Updike’s. For one thing, he’s rather more uxorious. Even though his wife Eleanor descends into a catatonic withdrawal after the birth of their daughter Kate, he resists the blandishments of other women. In one of the novel’s best scenes he visits

Books by Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor is the author of five novels and two story collection. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham.

350- ] English Literature - Jon McGregor

350- ] English Literature

Jon McGregor

 Interview: James Walker

Wednesday 01 November 2006

reading time: 5 min, 1146 words

Literature

Interview

Jon McGregor

"These things, the way they happen. These things, the way they begin"

69e54615-683f-492c-96c1-6fbeb1b4d085.jpg

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002) earned Jon McGregor numerous awards as well as a Booker Prize nomination, quite an achievement for a debut novelist. Through a poetic and absorbing prose the novel magically transforms the ordinary everyday lives of its characters into something quite beautiful. His recent novel, So Many Ways To Begin, examines what happens when our lives fail to take the turns we expect through the eyes of David, a museum curator, who finds out his whole life has been constructed around a lie. James Walker went in search of truth…

What brought you to Nottingham?

I was following a girl; she came here to do a post-grad diploma and I just tagged along. Obviously it was the right thing to do because we're married now.

…and how have you found the city?

There's not that moany old London thing of expecting life to be served up on a plate, which is refreshing. The pleasures are harder to find than in some cities, but if you look closer they're there; and I have to say LeftLion are doing a lot to bring some of the more underground stuff to the surface.

Are you still living on a boat and what attracted you to this particular abode? I myself once lived in a converted garage for three years...

No, the boat thing was short-term. I was only ever planning on passing through Nottingham but once it became clear we were staying put it seemed daft to live in what was essentially a very small and very wobbly caravan. What was the garage like?

Like a very small but static caravan… Your first novel was a tremendous success and certainly my book of the year. How did you find the added attention?

The attention was fun, and mercifully short-lived. You could win the Nobel Prize for literature and still not get recognised on the bus. Obviously it changed my life in that I was able to quit the day-job, write full-time, and develop a massively over-inflated sense of my abilities.

I found If nobody similar to Amélie. Both treat Princess Diana’s death as peripheral within the narrative and in doing so inverse societal norms by championing the ‘ordinary’ over celebrity. What are your feelings on this comparison?

Hey that's funny. I never really thought of that, but it's a neat (and flattering) comparison. I guess me and Jean-Pierre Jeunet had the same kind of idea; didn't any other sad stuff happen that day? That month? But yes, I love that film (and anyone who accuses it of being over-sentimental has a rusting tin can for a heart). Thinking about it actually, I probably found that intricate attention to detail - the following through of unforeseen consequences and coincidences, the tiny moments which turn a life round - quite an inspiration.

…and celebrity culture?

There's nothing much left to say is there? Other than that the rotting decadence of late-stage capitalism is laid bare every time some talentless nark steps out on a red carpet or grimaces for the camera.

Given the themes in your books, can human beings ever really fully connect?

Yes, but it's hard though don't you think? And sometimes it feels like people aren't trying so much to make those connections, or they can't imagine how much sweeter life might be if they did.

Both books, despite the events that go on, seem to foster hope. Would you describe yourself as a positive thirty-year-old?

I've always felt that when you're in one of those moments where life clicks into place - sunrise, first beer garden pint of the year, cycling downhill, Peter Crouch and his robot dance - then how can you be anything but positive about the world? Life can suck a lot, but there are always the bits in between. Mind you, when I'm not being such a sunny optimist I'm usually engulfed by fury and despair about the avoidable environmental catastrophe which everyone seems to be doing their best not to avoid...

‘If nobody…’ is set nowhere in particular whilst ‘So many...’ is set across numerous cities. Was this change of setting difficult to make?

It was difficult in that it forced me to make some fact/fiction decisions I'd not had to make before: just how true to life should a fictional location be? If I'm inventing characters who live in a real city, am I allowed to invent the name of the street they live on? It was tricky to know when to let the research stop and the creativity begin.

Two of the cities used in ‘So many…’ were Aberdeen and Coventry which through their industrial/ manufacturing roots are quite similar. Does this particular environment interest you?

I was definitely interested in their parallels (ship-building; car-building; oil). I think a British novel set in the mid to late twentieth century would find it hard to avoid at least an allusion to industry and manufacturing. Britain was built on industry and manufacturing - its urban culture developed as a result, and the painful social upheavals of the last thirty years have been a direct consequence of the collapse of the industrial economy. So yes, that kind of environment interests me.

Truth is very important to David. How important are your roots?

I left Bermuda at the heady age of five months. I did go back there once, when I was nineteen, and was surprised by the emotional reaction I felt; it might have just been projection though, it's kind of cool to go and find your roots somewhere, isn't it?

The use of artefacts was a novel way of introducing chapters, when did this idea come about?

Very early on. It seemed like a convenient way to structure the book, and obviously it fitted with the main character being a museum curator; it also gave me a direction for the story, that he was assembling this collection in order to take it to someone.

If you were to take an artefact to represent Nottingham , what would you choose and why?

Hey, good question. Actually, I went to meet my Japanese translator a couple of years ago, and since the Japanese are big on gifts I thought I should take him something to represent Nottingham; rather pathetically the best I could come up with was a lace placemat. Right now I think the best thing would be a copy of LeftLion..... 

349- ] English Literature - Jon McGregor

349-] English Literature

Jon McGregor

 Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and So Many Ways to Begin. He is the winner of the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has been twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham. Even the Dogs, published by Bloomsbury in February 2010 and in paperback in February 2011, is his third novel.

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, published by Bloomsbury in February 2012, is the fourth novel from Jon McGregor, which tells the tales of the sorts of things you don’t imagine happening to someone like you. But sometimes they do

Jon McGregor is a British author who has written three novels. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize and was the winner of both the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2003. So Many Ways to Begin was published in 2006 and was on the Booker prize long list. Even the Dogs was published in 2010, and his newest work, Reservoir 13, was published in April 2017.

Jon McGregor is the winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Costa Book Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, and has been long-listed three times for the Man Booker Prize, most recently for his last novel, Reservoir 13. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Nottingham, England, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters. 

348- ] English Literature - Jon McGregor

348- ] English Literature

Jon McGregor

 Biography

I have been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham since 2012. Prior to this, I spent a decade developing a professional career as a writer of fiction, and continue to develop that practice alongside my university research and teaching.

I have published five novels and two short story collections, and won awards including the Dublin Literature Prize and Costa Novel Award. I have also participated in several residencies, writing workshops, mentorships, and prize juries.

I regularly participate in literary festivals and conferences, and have a particular interest in exploring new forms of literary performance and live audience engagement.

Expertise Summary

My main areas of research and teaching are in the forms, practices, and critical reception of contemporary literary fiction. I am regularly invited to participate in the judging of major literary prizes, which gives me access to and influence over contemporary literary debate:

2021 Rathbones Folio Prize

2019 David Cohen Prize for Literature

2017 BBC National Short Story Award

2015 The Goldsmiths Prize 

347- ] English Literature - B. S. Johnson

347- ] Enlish Literature

B. S. Johnson

5. House Mother Normal

1971 brought an apparent breach of the strict Johnsonian code. Not only is House Mother Normal not autobiography as its predecessors were, it comprises the internal monologues of characters whose condition Johnson could not possibly have experienced. This is a novel narrated almost entirely by the aged, the infirm, the disoriented, the senile, the dying. Its author never reached the age of even its youngest player. It never leaves the confines of a rest home; in fact, it never leaves the confines of one hour in that rest home.

Each of first eight chapters, all of them exactly 21 pages, interprets this hour through the mind of one of the home’s residents. The first, 74-year-old Sarah Lamson, is perfectly lucid, if creaky; the last, moribund 94-year-old Rosetta Stanton, thinks mainly in individual Welsh words scattered haphazardly across the page. Between them lies a continuum of mental and physical decrepitude, each brain and body worse than the last. This comes through not just qualitatively in Johnson’s unexpectedly protean prose — this was a man, recall, who claimed to write only himself — but quantitatively as well, in a set of statistics preceding each oldster’s chapter. The tabletop role-playing games that would appear later in the decade (and their video game descendants) have rendered readings like “sight 30%” and “movement 85%” old hat, but they were no doubt strikingly alien at the time.

Johnson reportedly feared decay and death, and boy, does it show in House Mother Normal. Yet scarier still, in its way, is his depiction of the titular house mother, the cruel, self-regarding overseer of this aged bunch. Her perception of the hour comes as the final chapter, and it does much to clarify what the previous eight have only partially described. The house mother uses her charges as free labor in some sort of bottle-washing operation, forces them to play a game involving a giftwrapped dog turd, and finally — I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around this bit — demands they all watch as she employs that same loyal pooch for, er, cunnilingual purposes.

I fear that Johnson, who for all his writerly virtues had an unpleasant didactic streak, intended this: we consider these old folks, their faculties ever-disintegrating faculties, “abnormal.” But look how this (relatively) young woman behaves! Who’s normal now? I couldn’t bring myself to believe this was Johnson’s aim, except that he all but states it in Like a Fiery Elephant’s relevant quotes. But can’t we overlook it for technical virtuosity? Not only does Johnson orchestrate the text so that each 21-page section covers the same hour, he has each line of every character’s chapter correspond to the same moment. Doesn’t exactly write itself, does it?

6. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry

coverJohnson’s last widely available novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, turns out to be his most accessible by a decent stretch, though Albert Angelo isn’t too terribly far behind. Published in 1973, the writer’s last year alive, it stars a “simple” young man who, aggrieved by his entry-level bank job (“this atmosphere was acrid with frustration, boredom and jealousy, black with acrimony, pettiness and bureaucracy”) and the countless indignities inflicted by society in general, starts keeping score.

In the “aggravation” column of Christie Malry’s own double-entry are such items as “Injury to left knee at school,” “General diminution of Christie’s life caused by advertising,” and “Socialism not given a chance.” In the “recompense” column, he takes his revenge: ”General removal of small items of stationery,” “Aldwych Theatre bomb hoax,” “Death of 20,479 innocent west Londoners.” The book has been called an examination of the terrorist’s mindset, not without good cause: working within a self-serving framework that with each step seems basically logical, Christie works his way from part-time petty vandal to would-be modern-day Guy Fawkes.

Those who read Johnson’s other novels first will be surprised by how much like a “regular” British comic novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry feels. It bears some of the goofiness of the genre’s lightest offerings: “It did not take him long to realise he had not been born into money,” Johnson writes, “and that the course most likely to benefit him would be to place himself next to the money, or at least next to those who were making it. He therefore decided that he should become a bank employee. I did tell you Christie was a simple person.”

But Johnson nevertheless manages to smuggle no small volume of metafictional conceits into these 20,000-ish words. The narrator and all the characters know full well that this is a novel, and they don’t hesitate to discuss that fact. In one late chapter, Christie and the narrator — who is, naturally, B.S. Johnson himself — discuss how to end the story. “The novel should now try to be Funny, Brutalist, and Short,” Christie asserts. “I could hardly have expressed it better myself,” Johnson replies. This goes down with startling smoothness, though Brechtian fourth-wall-breaking has, I suppose, always played better with the general public when couched in comedy. That Christie Malry’s comedy is charcoal black — to put it mildly — makes little difference.

7. The books that are out of print, U.K. only, cost $200 or some combination thereof

Three of Johnson’s novels, all of which sound at least intriguing as the more or less available ones, are tricky to come by. Travelling People, his first and longest published effort, is by all accounts an entertainingly inventive fictionalization of the author’s youthful experiences working at a country club and trying to make it with a particularly attractive co-worker. But by Johnson’s own diktat, it hasn’t had a printing since 1963. Because of what he came to consider its immoral mixture of real life and invention, he ultimately branded it a “disaster.”

The reason copies of 1968’s Trawl are still scarce enough to command a price of nearly $150 on the open market is unclear, since Johnson didn’t disown it. You can find it as one-third of something called The B.S. Johnson Omnibus, but the lack of a reprint remains a mystery. The backstory of its creation would be enough to raise anyone’s curiosity: feeling the need to get away and confront his innermost emotional and psychological depths, Johnson secured a place on a fishing boat. He rode queasily along for three weeks, mentally composing the material for a lengthy, all-revealing trawl, as it were, of his own psyche. The result is Johnson’s most probing but least (to use Geoff Dyer’s term) novelly novel.

Intended as the opener of a trilogy, See the Old Lady Decently would have been followed by two volumes with titles to complete the sentence, Buried, Although and Amongst those Left are You. Johnson decided to make what he called his “Matrix trilogy” his most ambitious project ever, an epic chronicle of the rise, decline, and fall of two “old ladies”: both his recently deceased mother and nothing less grand than England itself. Despite his ostensibly forward-looking literary tendencies, he was nonetheless a nostalgic man who romanticized the working-class 1950s experience while loathing the hippified late-60s/early-70s milieu by which he found himself surrounded. Some of his peers would have pejoratively labeled him retrograde. Would the Matrices have explained his position to their satisfaction?

8. Was it our fault?

We’ll never know, since, swarmed by professional, familial, and artistic troubles, Johnson took his own life at the age of 40, two books in the trilogy still to go. Having displayed a host of paranoid, depressive tendencies since youth — and this is something Jonathan Coe describes much, much more engagingly than I ever will — Johnson came to his end in perhaps the only way that he could have: on precisely his own terms.

But despite whatever dark delusions, self-inflicted marginalization, or chemical imbalance he suffered in isolation, part of me still indicts the rest of humanity. We could have done better by B.S. Johnson, couldn’t we? For all the tendencies he indulged toward insecure dogmatism and the biting of the hands that fed him, he clearly had the goods. He pointed the way forward for fiction at least as often as he plowed into dead ends. When literary people didn’t listen to him then, it was as much their loss as it is ours when we don’t read him now. No matter how much they succeed or don’t, in commercial or artistic terms, we now need more, not fewer, books in boxes. More psychology-reflecting typesetting. More trawling of the depths. More holes in the pages. More double-entries.

 

346- ] English Literaure - B. S. Johnson

346- ] English Literature

B. S. Johnson

 No More Lying: a Primer on the Novels of B.S. Johnson

EssaysColin Marshall July 16, 2010 |

1. No (easy) place to turn

coverThere already exists a book called Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson. Painstakingly written over a decade by esteemed novelist Jonathan Coe, it reconstructs and examines the working and personal lives of this complex, troubled creator of poetry, novels, stories, film, theater. Rich with detail and inventiveness, it screams, whatever the subject’s remaining loose ends, “finality.”By its very existence, it dares one — taunts one — to write a single further word about Bryan Stanley Johnson.

Yet here we are. Even if Coe’s book were the greatest literary biography ever written — and having just finished it moments ago, I can assure you that it’s in the running — asking somebody to tuck into a nearly 500-page tome about on a still-obscure English experimentalist remains a tall order. Coe notes several times that Johnson himself bristled at the E-word, feeling it not only marginalized his work but missed its point besides. But for good or ill, it’s how history has anointed him, and it’s the best concise description we have. Whether with form, content, sensibility, or even printing processes, Johnson performed literary experiments. The difference from so many others’ literary experiments? Johnson’s usually succeeded.

While Like a Fiery Elephant might be daunting in its scope, then, Johnson’s novels themselves might be daunting in their unconventionality (not to mention the rarity and consequently forbidding price of a few of them). Where, then, should a curious reader stuck between this rock and this hard place turn? What will lessen the confusion rather than worsen it? Leaving aside issues of avant-garde importance, formal soil-tilling, and the man’s turbulent life/grim death, why should the average novel-reader take on B.S. Johnson’s? In those questions lies the the aim of this primer.

2. Against the what-happened-next brigade

I myself came relatively late to B.S. Johnson’s party. Nick Hornby gave his ill-fated colleague a mention in one if the “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns he writes in the Believer. The context was Hornby’s review of the aforementioned biography by his other, seemingly less ill-fated brother in U.K. letters. I speak with some confidence about Coe’s fate, because Like a Fiery Elephant alone has won greater sales and accolades than his subject’s entire oeuvre put together. There are thus more people, possibly many more, who have read about B.S. Johnson than have read B.S. Johnson.

Count no less a man of letters than Hornby in that group. He admitted that, while gripped by Johnson’s story, he’d never felt the compulsion to actually read his books. Johnson himself would perhaps have taken perverse pleasure in this, since it clusters him with two of his idols, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. All three seem to draw more engagement on the meta level than the regular one, though the earlier men attained the popularity that Johnson, increasingly embittered through his short career, felt he was denied.

More to the point, Joyce, Beckett and Johnson all tried to move the novel forward, to shove it out of the 19th-century ditch its spinning wheels seemed only to dig deeper. Johnson was particularly outspoken about this, in his prime evidently never having missed an opportunity to condemn the dull complacency of his English contemporaries. To tell a story, he thought (and often said), was to tell a lie, to futilely pretend away the chaos of modern existence and pander to humanity’s base, vulgar desire to find out what happened next. He thought the author’s personal experience the only “honest” material for novels, material he believed would dictate its own most suitable form.

Though they get conflated, Johnson’s novelistic Weltanschauung has two planks. The first is that the novelistic form has ossified, thus preventing closer alignment with substance. The second is that fiction is by its very nature dishonest, and to that extent immoral. While the latter seems a function of personal ethical cosmology and is thus difficult to comment on, the former rings a little true. It’s a distant ring, but a lingering, plaintive one nonetheless; once you’ve heard it, it doesn’t fade. The suspicion that he may well be at least half-right brought me to B.S. Johnson’s work.

coverBut Hornby didn’t buy Johnson’s package, even in part. Comparing Johnson and his quest to separate himself from the “what-happened-next brigade” to the school inspector in Hard Times, he writes, “Like communists and fascists, Johnson and the dismal inspector wander off in opposite directions, only to discover that the world is round. I’m glad that they both lost cultural Cold War.” But I’ve felt so often that novels do still, in the main, clutch for dear life to the forms of plodding, pandering relics. I’ve wondered if our compulsion to find out the next step in some made-up causal chain at least a little juvenile, a little squirrely, a little intellectually atrophic. Haven’t you?

3. Albert Angelo

coverIt’s a rare shelf that would offer all of Johnson’s novels side-by side. But if you came across one, you’d notice that none of the books are particularly thick. Johnson never put out a Ulysses. Chalk one point, then, in the “accessibility” column; people read embossed-cover airport novels thrice the length of the average Johnson novel. Indeed, the author strove to (and once believed he could) win the hearts and minds of that very mainstream. He didn’t, but sitting down with a brisk, blackly hilarious book like Albert Angelo makes you think that it couldn’t have been the work’s fault.

Break out the chalk again and scrape it under the “funny” heading. I’m the first to claim that some, if not most literary modernists really did have senses of humor, but Johnson’s comes through so much more plainly. It feels like a difference not just in degree but in kind. When Joyce and Beckett crack an in-work joke, it’s half the time funny in the same way that an orchestra’s unconventional chord change might be considered funny. That is to say, they’re insider funny; sometimes way insider funny. Freighting his protagonist Albert with a series of dreary substitute teaching jobs, Johnson indulges in broader humor. “Well, Jeanette Parsons and Lily Stanley,” goes one of Albert’s many admonishments, “I shall report this affair to the Headmaster.” “Who will do fuck-all about it,” silently says his brain.

Johnson makes these lines not just narratively but textually simultaneous by bisecting the page, the spoken words on the left and the unspoken on the right. This is but one of the book’s unusual formal techniques, each of which Johnson judged most effective to express the events they do. Certainly, it would be hard to top that double-column in the classroom. Others, like the odd punctuation marks that bracket physical descriptions or the theatrical script format that pops up, hold some fascination but aren’t clearly the best tool for the job. (Then again, they aren’t clearly not the best tool for the job.)

But if you already knew the name B.S. Johnson when you started reading this, you more than likely knew Albert Angelo as “the book with the holes in the pages,” as I did, before I read it. I assumed the thing would be literary Swiss cheese, but no; there’s only one hole in the book — well, two, to be precise, but they’re cut in the same position on adjacent pages. This enables the reader to see five pages ahead to a fragment about the violent death of Christopher Marlowe, the 16th-century dramatist with whom Johnson identified since encountering his work early in life. So parallel did he feel to Marlowe that he became convinced that he, too, would die at 29, by the sort of stabbing seen through Albert Angelo’s hole or otherwise. Though the implicit statement about prophecy is perhaps interesting, I can’t entirely dismiss the book’s contemporary reviewers who deemed the cutouts gimmicky.

More important is Albert Angelo’s final section, titled “Disintegration”, in which Johnson shatters the facade he’s built over the past 161 pages. A primal scream sweeps away the construction of Albert, his home in London’s Angel district (hence the title), and his demoralizing day job replacing for a teacher who put himself out of his Sisyphean educational misery: “OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING!” The remainder of the novel, which dissolves into punctuation-free a-grammaticality before gradually reconstructing itself, serves up Johnson’s statement of purpose: no more of this roman à clef nonsense. No more stand-ins. No more invention. No more objective correlatives. No more lying.

4. The Unfortunates

Albert Angelo, Johnson’s second novel (we’ll get to the first later), was published in 1964. Five years later, his fourth (we’ll get to the third later) would offer a production hook so radical as to make any number of cuttings-out seem conventional. This is the infamous “book in a box,” so called because it had to ship in one. How else to package not a sheaf of bound pages, put a pile of 27 individually stapled pamphlets, essentially?

Johnson’s idea here was to emulate the all-over-the-place non-linearity of human memory. We don’t actually recall our lives as narratives, he thought, so why dishonestly write about them as if we did? Why not write the fragments, then offer them to the reader as fragments, rather than committing the fraud of lining them up in a rigid, linear sequence? Calling upon two episodes of his life, one drearily routine and another prolonged and tragic, Johnson combines and reconstituted them in a way that lets you read them — and thus experience them for yourself — in any order your shuffling happens to produce.

Johnson paid the bills with sports reporting gigs. (As Coe revealed, paying the bills was even more of a burden for Johnson than for most writers, morphing from inconvenience into unyielding existential assault.) The Unfortunates chronicles, in its distinctive manner, his internal monologue during one such job. Sent to write up a distant football match he finds himself in Nottingham, the city where his best friend died of cancer. This flood of memories mixes with his concrete journey through the streets, his meals, his journalistic observation of the unremarkable game, and his composition and (literal) phoning-in of his copy.

The most credible objection to Johnson’s chosen form here is that even the most linear novels wind up, by way of our mental food processor, a jumble of discrete moments, images, turns of phrase. Isn’t writing it that way in the first place tantamount to serving a fine meal as a decomposed slurry because that’s how it winds up when we’ve digested it? Yet this is not an objection I share. It wouldn’t work if every story were told in the same way, but it works hauntingly well as an exception. Something about the task of reading the novel made it, at least for me, a quietly epic, dizzyingly elegiac experience. Now, some would say it’s just dizzying, but were I pressed to name Johnson’s masterpiece, The Unfortunates would be it. 

345- ] English Literature - B. S. Johnson

345- ] English Literature

B. S. Johnson

  

One alum discovers the extraordinary life of a largely unsung King's hero

Mike Shephard (Ancient History, 2005)

Class Notes

Working on a BBC Radio 4 documentary led writer and performer Mike Shephard to discover the extraordinary work of another King's alum, the novelist, poet and literary critic, BS Johnson (English Literature, 1959).

How did you find out about BS Johnson?

'I'd been working on the brilliantly surreal Beef & Dairy Network podcast created by Ben Partridge. He asked me if I'd heard of the novelist BS Johnson. To my shame, I hadn't, although I was vaguely aware of his novel, The Unfortunates, remembering there was a book from the 1960s where the chapters came loose in a box, with the potential to be read in any order. I didn't know anything of the vigorous and vehement individual behind it.

'Ben was producing a documentary about The Unfortunates with comedian Rob Auton for Radio 4's The Exploding Library series. He thought I'd be a good choice to voice different extracts of Johnson's words. He seemed to think that I possessed a kind of "Johnson-ish" quality. On reflection, I hope it means that he sees me as a visionary genius and not, as BS could also be, difficult to work with.'

What did you discover about BS Johnson?

'Once I had the job, I looked Johnson up. I was surprised to find that, not only did we share a birthday, but he also studied at King's. He chose King's over UCL because he preferred the sound of the name. 

'He came to university relatively late, at the age of 23, and he might have cut something of an odd figure with his suit and briefcase, even in the 1950s. Usually you can count on any notable King's alumni to be commemorated in a large portrait on the Strand, so it was great to discover someone new.'

What was he like as a writer?

'He had the potential to be as passionate about a plate of chips as he was the life and works of Dr Samuel Johnson. He displayed the same meticulous flair in the reporting of a football match as he gave to his experimental novels. He's a cult figure who deserves to be more widely known. I'm a particular fan of his film Fat Man on a Beach, where he speaks with intelligence on a stretch of Pembrokeshire coastline before striding triumphantly into the sea.'

Where can we find out more about BS Johnson?

'Jonathan Coe has written an excellent biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, and Johnson's short films that he made for television can be bought as a DVD collection from the British Film Institute. But, as you might imagine, I'm going to suggest that the best starting point might be the episode of The Exploding Library about The Unfortunates, which is still available to listen to on BBC Sounds.'

Is there anything else you would like to add?

'Only my apologies to the spirit of BS Johnson, who would be furious that I have blandly answered these questions in the conventional order that they were asked.'

344- ] English Literature B. S. Johnson

344- ] English Literature

B. S. Johnson

  he Unfortunates

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."

More recent reviews have reevaluated The Unfortunates. Reviews of the 1999 Picador praised Johnson's writing, commenting that the emotion that he wrote with made the random nature of the story work and also comparing him to other writers at the time, with one review in The Daily Telegraph suggesting that when Johnson wrote about misery, in comparison Philip Larkin and Samuel Beckett "seem wry and quipping Following the 2008 New Directions version of the novel, some critics referenced Johnson's eventual suicide in 1973 at the age of 40, with a review in The New York Times suggesting it is hard to imagine a novel that is less solipsistic although other reviews claim that in the context of Johnson's death, that reading The Unfortunates is akin to reading a diagram on his suicide 

343- ] English Literature - B. S. Johnson

343- ] English Literature

B. S. Johnson

 Abstract

The conventional wisdom around working-class writing often presupposes a realist aesthetic form, a hero employed in manual labour and, in the British context, a setting somewhere in its former industrial heartlands, certainly no further south than the Midlands (South Wales Valleys excluded). The writing of B.S. Johnson conforms to precisely none of these assumptions. As a result, it has consistently been overlooked within the field of working-class literary studies. This article attempts to address this absence, not just by noting Johnson’s biographical claim to inclusion within the field, but also the ways in which his novels are firmly rooted in a form of class politics. Indeed, the class nature of Johnson’s novels is in no way diminished through his depiction of white-collar characters, but instead allows us to read the essential nature of alienated labour and class antagonism to capitalist society, even within the context of Britain’s postwar welfare state. Johnson’s avant-garde aesthetics and recurring motif of white-collar employment, then, serve to mobilise the political themes in what must finally be understood as distinctly working-class novels.

B.S. Johnson: 'Albert Angelo' - 1964

=Andy Wimbush=

I’m afraid I’ve told you a fib. I’ve led you here with the understanding that you’re going to read all about how B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo is a London fiction. As it turns out, that’s not really the case. You’ve been had. The truth is, Albert Angelo isn’t really a London fiction at all.

Perhaps you’d like to turn on your heels now, and leave, disgusted and betrayed. But before you go, I should perhaps say that I wasn’t fibbing about the London part.

Albert Angelo really is a book about this city and not any of the other ones. It even mentions the A to Z. Twice! How many novels can you say that about?

No, the fib was, appropriately enough, in the fiction part. This is because although Albert Angelo is a novel, it’s more than a little uneasy about being one. It certainly doesn’t want to be a mere story, at least in the usual sense of that word. It wants to be truth. We know this because after 163 pages of what seems like a novel, albeit a rather unconventional one, the narrator breaks down mid-sentence and cries ‘oh, fuck all this LYING!’.

The book doesn’t end there, of course. It enters a section called ‘Disintegration’ in which someone who sounds a lot like B.S. Johnson emerges from behind the curtain of fiction to tell us what he was trying to do. Johnson, who published seven novels between 1963 and 1973 and then killed himself at the age of forty, was a disciple of novelists who had pushed their medium to its very limit: writers like James Joyce, Laurence Sterne and Samuel Beckett. Johnson felt that most novelists of his generation hadn’t really come to terms with the discoveries that these writers had made, and continued to spin stories as if Ulysses or The Unnamable had never been written. Johnson wanted to do something different: ‘telling stories is telling lies’ opines the Johnson-like persona in the penultimate chapter of Albert Angelo. ‘Im [sic] trying to say something not tell a story’.

The trouble was that Johnson was actually very good at telling stories, even if (or perhaps especially if) those stories were barely veiled accounts of his own life experiences. Before Albert Angelo starts to unravel, it is a marvellously readable yarn about a man in the early 1960s who aspires to be an architect, but through lack of work must settle for making a living as a substitute teacher in a string of struggling inner city London schools. ‘It’s a tough area, mate,’ says his father as he learns about Albert’s latest assignment, ‘I shouldn’t think they get many teachers to stay’.

Although Albert says he feels ‘fairly confident’, Johnson shifts the burden of that confidence onto YOU, dear reader, by switching from the third person narration at the start of the novel to a rather discomforting second person narration as Albert arrives at the school:

The Headmaster is formal, apart, preoccupied. [...] As he takes you along square stonefloored tunnels to your classroom he expresses his dislike, oh so politely, by finding out why you are not in a permanent teaching post when he hears you are trained and qualified.

Albert reels off jokes he has told many times before, in an attempt to win each class over and keep them quiet. He struggles to communicate with pupils who speak languages other than his own. He can’t quite keep his lessons on geology from straying into to architecture. He sometimes loses his rag and hits a child. And all of his failings are related accusingly at you.

Johnson switches grammatical persons again later on, opting for the chummy unity of the first person plural to narrate Albert’s trip down the pub with his old friend and fellow ‘London kid’ Terry: ‘we stop there at Aldgate for cockles or prawns at Tubby Isaacs’, but more often we will go straight on down to Cable street’. Albert’s memory of a dismal camping trip to Ireland with his ex-girlfriend Jenny is told through a distancing ‘they’. But Johnson’s best innovation comes in a transcript of one of Albert’s doomed geology lessons. On the left hand side of the page is the dialogue between Albert and his inattentive students, while on the right hand side we get Albert’s thoughts: his snap judgments and self-critical commentary, his sarcastic asides and his lengthy daydreams. ‘Ooh,’ says a pupil, after Albert gets angry with them, ‘and he’s supposed to be a teacher too.’ In the opposite column is Albert’s reflection: ‘Not supposed to be human if you’re a teacher’. The chapter makes you realise just how rarely fiction has granted an internal world to teachers, and how often – think Nicholas Nickleby, Molesworth, Mathilda, Harry Potter – the pupil’s perspective alone is presented to the reader. Johnson, like Evelyn Waugh and Charlotte Brontë before him, describes a teacher in all his all-too-human glory.

Of course, Albert wants to be doing something other than teaching, and retreats to the staff room to sketch the skyline during his lunch break. As he criss-crosses London from home to school and school to pub and back again, Albert sees the city with an architect’s eye. He admires the ‘great squat stock-brick arches’ of Kings Cross station, the ‘miraculous’ proportions of St. Paul’s Hammersmith, the ‘graceful’ curves of the Hammersmith flyover and the ‘beautifully-kept’ Georgian houses on Cable Street. He’s less convinced by the ‘cantilevered shell’ of Stamford Bridge, and some ‘uncomely flats’ in Myddleton Square, but, like most of his contemporaries, reserves his deepest scorn for the ‘pseudo-Gothic excresences of Scott’s St Pancras’. In 1969, just five years after Albert Angelo was published, the building was very nearly torn down, such was the public loathing for Victoriana. Euston’s Victorian Doric columns had already met the wrecking ball in 1962. Albert wonders whether ‘it is fatal to live so near to St. Pancras for an architect’. ‘Certainly,’ he concludes, ‘it would be to bring up children here: their aesthetic would be blighted.’

Even if today’s Londoners have rehabilitated some of the buildings that Albert scorns, his irritation with ‘non-Londoners’ on the tube is still keenly felt: ‘foreigners, who do not know their ways,’ and ‘upfortheweekenders who stand on both sides of the escalator’. It’s mundane flotsam like this, as well as the nod to the A to Z and to numbered bus routes that make this a Londoner’s novel. Albert is even named after his place in the city: ‘Angelo’ becomes his nickname after some of his unruly pupils find out that he lives in Percy Circus, in Islington, an address that, needless to say, was far less desirable in 1964 than 2013. Johnson’s slavish attention to London’s geography is yet another reason why the label of ‘fiction’ fails us. When the curtain falls in the penultimate chapter and Johnson starts to reveal the inner workings of his novel to the reader, he explains that he had so misremembered the real holiday behind Jenny and Albert’s ill-fated camping trip that he had to ‘pinch the scenery’ from North Wales. No pinching is necessary when it comes to London: the capital is there, in stucco, stone and concrete, still recognisable fifty years later.

For all its architectural marvels, however, London is still a place of yawning gulfs between rich and poor, and of political strife. Albert dubs Cable Street the ‘Cablestrasse’, no doubt alluding to the ‘Battle’ of 1936 which saw trade unionists, anarchists, and Jewish and Irish groups face down Oswald Mosley and his army of black shirted fascists as they marched through the ethnically diverse East End. In another of Johnson’s novels, the protagonist lists ‘Socialism not being given a chance’ as his main grievance against life, and Johnson felt himself ‘enlisted’ to the proletariat side of the class war. Politics seeps into Albert Angelo too: the Disintegration chapter describes Johnson’s intention to provide ‘social comment on teaching, to draw attention, too, to improve’.

But for all these ambitions Albert can still seem a bit of a snobbish twit at times. Non-white and immigrant Londoners are never main characters in the narrative, and the language used to describe them often makes for uncomfortable reading. Albert’s taste for Georgian buildings in an age of concrete Brutalism betrays his bourgeois aspirations, and at times he seems only dimly aware of the gap between his own status as an upwardly mobile educated man of working class background and the deprivation of those he is paid to teach. This is most obvious when he makes the terrible mistake of calling his pupils ‘peasants’ in a moment of extreme frustration. Later on, he naïvely wonders whether it was the ‘country bumpkin associations’ of the word that so upset them. Johnson is, of course, indicting himself in all this: mining his own prejudices and failings, and turning that into a political act. In the end, Albert stands up for his class, defending the schoolchildren against another teacher who wants to reform their ‘bad and slovenly’ speech. Albert replies that such words cannot ‘be meaningfully used about speech’ and that ‘speech conventions’ are changeable. Working class children, he adds, are often at the frontline of such linguistic innovation, while the upper classes, and especially the Queen, lag behind.

Literary experimentation and political didacticism might make for a turgid read in the hands of anyone less gifted than B.S. Johnson, who was also a master humorist. Like his masters, Joyce and Beckett, Johnson blended bleakness with comedy in almost all his work. While the biggest laughs are to be had elsewhere, notably in Johnson’s very funny Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, Albert Angelo has some priceless moments. Much of the best comes in the dual-column geology lesson, particularly when Albert has to stifle his own guffaws when the kids says something funny: ‘—Albert’s got new suedes on. — Cor! dig them broffel-creepers!’ And when Johnson does eventually channel Nigel Molesworth in a section consisting of the pupils’ poorly spelt verdicts on ‘flabby Chops Albert’, there are some inspired insults to be had: ‘ON THE WHOLE YOUR STUPID AND YOU ARE A FAT FOMF OXEN NIT LOLOP RABBI FART-FACE’ or ‘Evry time he gets on the scals the scals say one at a time. or no elephant alowd.’ That most of the children think Albert should get a haircut is a nice touch too. And Johnson is not so po-faced that he can’t poke fun at his pretensions towards a non-fiction novel: ‘Albert defecates only once during the whole of this book: what sort of a paradigm of the truth is that?’

If you have heard anything about B.S. Johnson before forgiving my fib and continuing to read the scrawl that is now before you, you were probably told that he liked to do strange things with the pages of his books. The Unfortunates, for instance, comes in a box so that you can read the chapters between the first and the last in any order you choose. Albert Angelo is similarly notorious for having a hole cut into a few of its pages, so that you can peer through and read the pages ahead. This is fun, but it’s hardly the most innovative or interesting thing about the novel. It makes nowhere near as much of a difference as the switching between persons and the dual-columns. But for any ‘London kids’ who might be reading the book today, the holes in the page confer a particular advantage: they make Albert Angelo completely incompatible with Kindles, Kobos and iPads. It has to be read in its paper form. Why should you care? Because it means that when you are, like Albert, facing down the disenchanting slog to work and dodging all those clueless non-Londoners on the tube, you can, thanks to the garish yellow spine and bright blue and purple cover of Picador’s new edition, advertise this novel to your fellow commuters as you giggle and gasp your way through its perforated pages, and hopefully make Albert Angelo a book that is widely read, shared, and loved. Just don’t call it fiction.

Andy Wimbush is a writing a PhD on the novels of Samuel Beckett at Darwin College, University of Cambridge.

'The first thing you see about Percy Circus is that it stands most of the way up a hill, sideways, leaning upright against the slope like a practised seaman. And then the next thing is that half of it is not there. ...'

Very early on in Albert Angelo, B.S. Johnson introduces the reader to Percy Circus, where Albert lives in a ground-floor south-facing  flat in no. 29. It's described in loving detail, as befits a would-be architect:

'There is stucco channelled jointing up to the bottom of the first-floor windows, which have liitle cast-iron balconies swelling enceintly. Each house is subtly different in its detail from each of its neighbours. The paintwork is everywhere brown and old and peeling.'

Not any longer. In the past half-century, Percy Circus has prospered - the early Victorian houses now go for up to £3 million. It's on the edges of Amwell, an elegant, rather hidden away locality within ten minutes walk of both King's Cross and The Angel. And yes, the first thing a passer-by notices is the lop-sided angle at which the Circus leans.

B.S. Johnson knew the area well - in the late 1960s he lived in a flat close at hand in Myddelton Square. A socialist such as Johnson would would have relished the area's  left-wing connections - and in the novel, passing mention is made of the blue plaque for Lenin who once stayed at no. 16, in the side of the Circus demolished by war time bombs and later clearances.

Percy Circus was built in the 1840s and early 1850s by several different developers - hence the variations in design that Johnson mentions. 'Uniquely complex', in the judgement of the Survey of London, 'it has five unevenly spaced entry points, and is laid out on the side of a steep hill', and it has been described (by Christopher Hussey in 1939) as 'one of the most delightful bits of town planning in London'.

Percy Circus, Great Percy Street and the 'Percy Arms' (alas now closed) all took their name from Robert Percy Smith, a Governor of the New River Company, which once was a major local landowner.

Initially smart town houses, by the early years of the twentieth century the area had fallen into disrepair, as reflected in Arnold Bennett's Riceyman Steps (1923), which is set nearby.

Towards the close of Albert Angelo, Johnson muses on the manner in which Percy Circus is reflected in Albert's life and more widely:

'there were some pretty parallels to be drawn between built-on-the-skew, tatty half-complete, comically-called Percy Circus, and Albert, and London, and England, and the human condition.'

Andy Wimbush & Andrew Whitehead

The B.S. Johnson Society has been established to to 'honour the life and work of Bryan Stanley Johnson (1933-1973)' - http://bsjohnson.org/

The entry on B.S. Johnson in Wikipedia includes a full bibliography, and Albert Angelo has its own Wikipedia entry

On the eightieth anniversary of Johnson's birth and the fortieth of his death, Picador is reissuing some of his work, including Albert Angelo

The British Film Insititute has released Your Human Like the Rest of Them: the films of B.S. Johnson

Percy Circus is covered in the Survey of London vol XLVII: Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville, published in 2008.