337-] English Literature
B . S . Johnson
Born Bryan Stanley William Johnson
5 February 1933
Hammersmith, London,
England
Died 13 November 1973 (aged 40)
Islington, London,
England
Education King's College London
Occupations Novelist, poet and director
Writing career
Period Early 1960s to early 1970s
Genre Fictional prose
Notable works Albert Angelo (1964), Christie Malry's Own
Double-Entry (1973)
Movement Modernism
BS Johnson"
redirects here. For the Discworld character, see List of Discworld characters §
Bloody Stupid Johnson. For other people named Bryan Johnson, see Bryan Johnson
(disambiguation).
ryan Stanley William
Johnson (5 February 1933 – 13 November 1973] was an English experimental
novelist, poet and literary critic. He also produced television programmes and
made films.
Early life
Johnson was born into a
working-class family, the only child of a bookseller's stock-keeper, Stanley
Wilfred Johnson (1908–1973), and a waitress-cum-barmaid, Emily Jane (1908–1971,
née Lambird), of Hammersmith, LondonDuring the Second World War they moved to
nearby Barnes]
Johnson was evacuated
from London twice during the war. Having been educated at Flora Gardens Primary
School, Hammersmith, he and his mother were moved to Chobham, Surrey in 1939
for two years, and he attended the village school. After a brief return to
Hammersmith, he was sent alone in 1941 to High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, where
he attended a local school. Having failed the eleven plus examination, he was unable
to enter Latymer School at Hammersmith and spent the last year of the war at
Highfields Secondary Modern School. On his return home, he attended Barnes
County Secondary Modern School, before "passing some sort of simple
examination" allowing him to transfer to Kingston Day Commercial School,
where "they taught me shorthand, typing, and bookkeeping.
Johnson left school when
he was 16 years old to work variously as an accounting clerk for a building
company and for a baker, as a bank junior and as a clerk at Standard Oil, but
taught himself Latin in the evenings, attended a year's pre-university course
at Birkbeck College, and with this preparation, managed to pass the university
entrance exam for King's College London in 1956
In later life he settled
in Islington, north London, living in Claremont Square and Myddelton Square,
after which he bought a house in Dagmar Terrace, Islington, where he lived
until his death. On 31 March 1964 he married Virginia Ann Kimpton (b. 1938), a
teaching machine programmer; she figures as Ginnie in his novel Trawl. They had
two children
Career
After graduating with a
2:2 degree in 1959, he worked as a private tutor and supply teacher in Surrey,
while writing increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels. In
his early years he collaborated on several projects with a close friend and
fellow writer, Zulfikar Ghose, with whom he produced a joint collection of
stories, Statement Against Corpses. Like Johnson's early stories, at least
superficially, his first two novels, Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo
(1964) initially appear relatively conventional in plot terms. However, the
first uses several innovative devices and includes a section set out as a film
script. The second includes famously cut-through pages to enable the reader to
skip forward. His work became progressively even more experimental. The
Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could
assemble the book any way they liked, apart from the chapters marked
"First" and "Last", which indicated preferred terminal
points. BBC producer Lorna Pegram employed him to talk about this creation for
the TV series Release. With barely any negotiation, the interview was complete
months before the book was ready for publication House Mother Normal (1971) was
written in purely chronological order such that various characters' thoughts
and experiences would cross each other and intertwine, not just page by page,
but sentence by sentence.[citation needed] He won the Eric Gregory Award in
1962 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 1967.
Johnson led and
associated with a loose circle of experimental authors in 1960s Britain, who
included Alan Burns, Eva Figes, Rayner Heppenstall, Ann Quin, Stefan Themerson,
Wilson Harris and others. Many contributed to London Consequences, a novel
consisting of a palimpsest of chapters passed between a range of participating
authors, edited by Margaret Drabble and Johnson. Johnson also made numerous
experimental films, published poetry, and wrote reviews, short stories and
plays. For some years he was poetry editor of Transatlantic Review
He is mentioned several
times in Paul Theroux's account of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul, Sir
Vidia's Shadow (1998.
Death and legacy
Johnson became depressed
by his failure to succeed commercially and by mounting family problems. On 13
November 1973, aged 40, he took his own life by slitting his wrists at 9,
Dagmar Terrace, Islington, London N1. He left an estate valued at £9,621 The day
before his death he had told his agent: "I shall be much more famous once
I'm dead."
Johnson's following at
the time of his death was small, but enthusiastic; he quickly acquired a
posthumous cult following, helped by a critically acclaimed film adaptation in
2000 of the last novel of his to appear in his lifetime, Christie Malry's Own
Double-Entry (1973). Singer-songwriter Joe Pernice paid tribute to Johnson on
the 2006 Pernice Brothers album Live a Little. Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography
Like a Fiery Elephant (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize) again led to a
renewal of interest in Johnson's work. Coe himself is now a president of the B.
S. Johnson Society ,which aims "to bring closer Johnson scholars, readers
and aficionados alike in their various approaches to the author's life and
work."
In April 2013, the
British Film Institute released You're Human Like the Rest of Them, a
collection of Johnson's films, as part of the BFI Flipside DVD series.
In 2015, the Nottingham
Five Leaves Bookshop held an event called "But I Know This City!"
focused on Johnson's novel The Unfortunates, which is set there. It took
participants round the city to listen to live readings of the novel's sections
in whatever order they chose.
Indie pop band Los
Campesinos! has cited the literature of B. S. Johnson among their non-musical
influences, praising Coe's biography, with Johnson's work inspiring titles and
lyrics of their music.
There is a collection of
B. S. Johnson's literary papers and correspondence in the British Library (Add
MS 89001).
In 2020, Matthew Harle
compiled a selection of proposals of Johnson's abandoned work, titled Can I
Come In and Talk About These and Other Ideas? 13 Proposals from B.S. Johnson.
Harle writes: "B.S. Johnson's proposals should provide consolation,
encouragement, despair and disbelief for anyone who has ever tried to get an
idea realised."
Bibliography
Novels
Travelling People (1963)
Albert Angelo (1964)
Trawl (1966)
The Unfortunates (1969)
House Mother Normal
(1971)
Christie Malry's Own
Double-Entry (1973)
See the Old Lady Decently
(1975, posthumous publication)
Poetry and anthologies,
including those edited by Johnson
Poems (1964)
The Evacuees (1968)
Poems Two (1972)
London Consequences: A
Novel (1972). A novel with each chapter composed by a different author
including Johnson, Margaret Drabble, Paul Ableman and others
All Bull: The National
Servicemen (1973)
Aren't You Rather Young
to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973). A collection of Johnson's shorter prose
written between 1960 and 1973
You Always Remember the
First Time (1975)
Well Done God! Selected
Prose and Drama of B.S.Johnson (2013). A collection edited by Jonathan Coe,
Philip Tew and Julia Jordan.
Can I Come In and Talk
About These and Other Ideas? (2021). A collection of Johnson's previously
unpublished proposals to commissioning editors, TV producers, and literary
agents. Edited by Matthew Harle.
Selected filmography
You're Human Like the
Rest of Them (1967)
The Unfortunates (1969)
The Smithsons on Housing
(1970)
Paradigm (1969)
B. S. Johnson on Dr.
Samuel Johnson (1971)
Unfair! (1970)
Fat Man On A Beach (1973)
Biography
Jonathan Coe. (2004) Like
A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson. Picador
Academic studies
Philip Tew (2001), B. S.
Johnson: A Critical Reading. Manchester University Press, ISBN 978-0719056260
Krystyna Stamirowska
(2006), B. S. Johnson's Novels: A Paradigm of Truth. Kraków: Universitas, ISBN
8324207457
Philip Tew and Glyn White
(2007), Re-reading B. S. Johnson. Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-0230524927
Vanessa Guignery (2009),
Ceci n'est pas une fiction. Les romans vrais de B.S. Johnson. Presses de
l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, ISBN 978-2840506430
Nicolas Tredell (2010),
Fighting Fictions: The Novels of B. S. Johnson. Paupers' Press, ISBN
978-0946650996
Vanessa Guignery, ed.
(2015), The B.S. Johnson / Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence Archived 29 May 2015
at the Wayback Machine. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ISBN 978-1443872669
Sebastian Groes (2016),
"English Anti-Novels", in: British Fictions of the Sixties. New York
and London: Bloomsbury, ISBN 978-0826495570
