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. 

342- ] English Literature -- B. S. Johnson

342- ]English Literature

B. S. Johnson

 In Search of a New Fiction – B.S. Johnson

 A random encounter in a second hand book shop in London introduced me to the work of the late English writer B. S. Johnson in around 1980. I was a quiet teenager shuffling through the dusty literary tomes when I chanced upon a capacious guide to modern literature, crammed with glossy facsimiles of book covers, interviews, and essays. One image in particular caught my eye. A box, with papers streaming out of it, with a blurry scientific image on the cover, ‘ The Unfortunates.’

I devoured the short text about the author – …born in London…evacuee in the war…wrote Travelling People, House Mother Normal… poetry editor of Transatlantic Review…film and television director…praised by Beckett…committed suicide in 1973.” I was intrigued. Nothing was in print by the author, having instructed his publishing houses never to reprint his novels, so I engaged the services of a Book Finder Service who located most of his books over a matter of months, each taking me further into the intriguing depths of a writer who focused on a key issue : how to represent the random workings of the mind within the enforced consecutiveness of a book. Then one day, a small miracle occurred: a copy of the legendary book in a box ‘The Unfortunates’ was found.

The bound book superimposed a structure in its very manufacture – the binding imposing an order, fixing the page, the word. Here was a unique object – 27 loose leaf sections, temporarily held together with a removable wrapper with only the first and last sections to be read in order. One could shuffle the remaining 25 passages into any order one wished. The ability to be able to re-order the co-ordinates of the narrative was a “physical tangible metaphor” for the random workings of the mind according to the writer.

A chance invitation to the city of Nottingham as a sports critic for a football match had reminded Johnson of the death of a great friend who had lived there, one who had diligently supported him and died of cancer only two years previous. Wanting to capture the essence of this living presence and his pointless death led him to the dilemma of how to construct such a piece of writing. The problem for Johnson was the very randomness of the material, with the past and the present interweaving, with no chronology.

As far as possible he attempted to make the novel into an eight hour transcript of that Saturday afternoon as he pondered his friend’s death. Whether it was a solution or not, every choice is arbitrary, it was significantly a step marginally nearer. Johnson was a rare English writer in the twentieth century who resisted the conservatism of the British literary establishment. He wanted to force readers to question the form they are engaging in, often interrupting the narrative to alert the reader to the fact that what they were reading was ‘all lies, damned lies’, that you were engaged in a form of literary seduction, that the convention could only go so far. Addressing the reader directly in House Mother Normal (1971) the lead character states:

“And here you see, friends, I am about to step outside the convention, the framework…Thus you see I too am the puppet or concoction of a writer (you always knew there was a writer behind it all? Ah there’s no fooling you readers!)”

European literature had already been exploring new avenues of expression with the potent works of Stein, Joyce and Woolf in the earlier part of the century, followed more recently by the Oulipo group (Matthews, Perec, Calvino et al), Alain Robbe- Grillet, Ann Quinn, Natalie Saurraute and others. All of whom were attempting to break the form of a model but still within an identical framework, the bound structure of the physical novel. Johnson was attempting to take his work one stage further, creating a form of modern elegy, about the experience of writing (and the experience of death) and expressing this within a new form.

Johnson pre-empted our notion of the ‘cross discipline’ between the arts by not only being a prolific writer and editor but also a director and producer of films for television. You’re Human Like the Rest of Them won the Grand Prix at two International Film Festivals in 1968 and fueled by his almost arbitrary approach to narrative, works like Fat Man on a Beach (1973) for Welsh Television span between the comic with its english vulgarity and Carry On humour and a moving deconstructive examination of content and meaning. Set on a beach in Wales where he placed his first novel Travelling People, Johnson playfully reveals the ‘truth’ behind the deceitful editing and production of such a tv appearance with his constant asides to the camera and quips to the viewer, revealing the human condition as fragile and temporal, where “some things can only be said indirectly. One can only reflect the truth of what they were.”

Since I first wrote this piece in 2001 there have been several new editions of his works released, thereby allowing a wider audience to engage in his work. I’ve managed to pretty much complete my collection of publications of and relating to Johnson too. There’s even a Society dedicated to him, but sadly this hasn’t been updated in quite some time. Most recently I took delivery of this rather wonderful slim publication, Can I Come In and Talk About These and Other Ideas? which collects a selection of his previously unpublished proposals in a revelatory volume of creative hypnagogia that is also a visual record of Johnson’s abandoned work.

Johnson’s work and the ‘The Unfortunates’ in particular enhances our participation in the truth of experience and the fragility of the ‘real’ and for myself acted as a key inspiration within sound to leave the formal structures of rhythm, melody and composition behind and seek solutions in new methods of explication and exploration, wherever they may lie.

341- ] English Literature - B. S. Johnson

341- ] English Literature

B. S. Johnson 

  Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson’

‘Like a Fiery Elephant’ is a magnificent, wonderfully complex beast. This is a novelist writing about a novelist who thought writing novels could save him but didn’t and the novelist wants to know why and, by the end, so do we.

‘Like a Fiery Elephant’ is Jonathan Coe’s incredible biography of British poet, author, playwright, reporter and filmmaker Bryan Stanley (B.S.) Johnson, someone once described as England’s “one man avant-garde”. Obsessively innovative, inventive and determined to tell the truth at all costs, in his brief career he left behind a varied, and fascinating, body of work until his untimely death by suicide at the age of 40.

I was actually concerned about reading ‘Like a Fiery Elephant’ as what drew me to Johnson — his fascination with death, honesty, an allergic reaction to ‘plot’ and “what happens next”, the curiosity of form and embrace of chaos and the pathological urge for full disclosure — are all subjects and stances that resonate and appeal to me. But there’s only so much stark nihilism I can take and was worried this book might illicit unwanted “dark ruminations”. Eek!

Fortunately Coe’s book is so relentlessly fascinating, and Johnson’s observations about death so savagely funny, that “morbid” is the last word you’d use to describe this biography (well, most of the time). It is also more, much more, than the life story of a writer: it is an examination of the perils of the creative act, the art and process of writing and the limitations of literature as well as an incredible insight into the world of the British and European post-war cultural scene of the fifties and sixties. It is a book that has appearances (either “on screen” or “off”) by such luminaries as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Chris Marker, Walerian Borowczyk, Humphrey Lyttleton. Even Jacques Tati pops up for a somewhat funny and rather irritating cameo (which, for this reader, was fitting as, I’m afraid to confess, I’ve always found Tati’s movies only somewhat funny and, most certainly, irritating). This was a time when, in some circles, you weren’t quite sure what event caused the most shock in Britain — WW II or the publication of ‘Ulysses’. It is truly, and wildly, fascinating.

And into this post-war, burgeoning counter-culture scene comes B.S. Johnson; a young writer/poet from a modest working-class background and determined to continue the work Joyce and Beckett had started and to prove the form of the novel need not be purely for “fiction”. Stating that “telling stories is telling lies” Johnson would write books mercilessly based only on events he had experienced first-hand and with a savagely obsessive need to constantly re-invent the form of the novel. So he wrote books with holes cut in certain pages allowing the reader to glimpse into the future along with a novel where all the chapters are loose and contained within a box so the reader can experience the randomness of life.

But this, pretty much necessarily, meant abandoning the “Victorian” idea of story, of traditional narrative and saying goodbye to large and lucrative book sales. And this is part of what makes ‘Fiery Elephant’ work and become so revealing as Coe’s self-declared stance of being a “traditional novelist” means this difference between the two allows for literary contrasts, and hence insights, to be revealed.

It is this tension between Coe and Johnson, the marked differences of styles, which makes ‘Fiery Elephant’ vibrate and reveal so much about the writing process. This tension simmers until Coe’s anger and frustration, not only towards some of Johnson’s beliefs and ideals but, most importantly, his suicide (which hums like background radiation throughout) becomes explicit and Coe cannot help but be constantly drawn back to the question of “Why?” or, at least, preparing us to consider asking that question. The love, admiration and respect towards Johnson are there but also, and this seems a common response to the man, the hair-pulling exasperation at a lot of his stances and fights and, ultimately, his final decision.

So it’s more than just a straight bio, although we do get all the pertinent details and events of Johnson’s life-story: graduating with a 2:2; grudgingly taking a teaching position; becoming a sports journalist; winning writing competitions; having his first novel published; friendships made and lost; arguments with publishers; marriage and kids; professional successes and failures etc. But Coe, as a nod to B.S., allows himself with play with form, so prose sections cut to extracts from letters or to a short film script all keeping the style varied. There are footnotes a plenty providing informative and comic asides and the end (spoilers!) functions as a sort of fragmented roll-call of the various people from Johnson’s life recollecting and summarising their thoughts, both good and bad, about the man.

It is easy to understand that frustration and anger. Johnson was a man of contradictions. Left wing but oddly conservative. Self-proclaimed member of the avant-garde but dismissive of the sixties counter-culture and, especially, hippies. At one time a materialist who couldn’t not help but look at life, mortality and decay in a fetishticly unflinchingly way, yet a man who claims to have seen the physical manifestation of The White Goddess. Wait, the what?! I thought B.S. was a rational atheist? But this is just one of the contradictions that becomes a clue in the final analysis. And the White Goddess will return later.

Until she does, ‘Fiery Elephant’ is the best insight into the life, and struggles, of the British literary set I’ve read as Johnson stamps his way round the publishing houses of sixties London, trumpeting flames from his trunk, as he demands why his novels haven’t been picked-up in Europe or America or why the printers can’t meet his exacting demands. Then there are the furious letters to anybody who rejects him or fails to see his genius.

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This is some of the best vain-glorious invective ever as Johnson is, at times, almost continuously firing off letters, memos or articles tearing people new ones all over the place for not seeing his greatness. Johnson provides some of the most hilarious pieces of rabid self-aggrandising I’ve ever read. Nearly every letter to a publisher, reviewer or literary journal would invariably include the lines “Do you know I have been compared to both Joyce and Beckett?!’ over and over again. Any piece of praise he has garnered seems to have been memorised and repeated ad infinitum. The most desperate point comes when Johnson includes a quotation of praise by his hero Samuel Beckett that is used on a cover to his latest book. However, these words of praise came from Beckett in a private correspondence to Johnson so, understandably, ol’ Sammy was furious.

However, I do find Johnson’s author egotism direct and honest. When he breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience or writes himself into his own novel he does so explicitly unlike, for example, John Fowles (now THERE’S a massive walking ego for you) who sneaked himself into ‘The French Lieutenants Woman’ like some sort of surreptitious god admiring his own creation. I mean, come on! Even Vivian Darkbloom would roll his eyes at that!

This ego also highlights the solipsism in Johnson’s work. As opposed to a writer such as Alain Robbe-Grillet who’s gaze was focused purely outward on the geometry of surfaces, Johnson’s gaze, however, seemed turned aggressively inward, to map the “geography of the inside of his own skull”. It is easy to imagine Johnson getting lost inside his own internal landscape.

But I love writers and performers who talk straight from unadulterated personal experience. It’s one of the reasons I was a massive fan of the monologist Spalding Gray who, like Johnson, would lay his life bare in front of an audience, almost as a form of therapy until his untimely death by suicide at the age of… hmm, you know, I think I’m starting to see a morbid pattern with these striving for honesty writers.

And although I admire his view to write only what has happened to the author, I would be lying if I said I found this obsession to truth preferable to the escapist invention of someone like Thomas Pynchon and his joyous demonstration of the imagination. Johnson had a fierce imagination but, like his taste in architecture, it sometimes seemed of a brutalist design. Besides, we are creatures of pattern recognition and when there are no patterns we provide them. Projecting structure onto external reality isn’t a lie as such but more of a survival mechanism; a cognitive prosthetic that helps us navigate, and tolerate, our environment. And as we will see, if your world is collapsing or spiralling out of control then these stories can become a matter of life or death. And as Coe points out — stories do matter because we share them. Even Robbe-Grillet for all his experimentalism, ultimately, went back to the Greeks.

So again, there are contradictions. B.S. Johnson might have declared all is chaos but it is striking how much he needed structure — family, work, society itself and, most of all, his superstitions. He approached writing in an almost religious sense which could explain why his method of writing was so ritualistic, almost sacramental as he attempted to transubstantiate experience into art for his muse, the White Goddess.

Ah, the White Goddess, that moonscaped muse that drives many poets to inspiration but also destruction. An inspiration to writers including Sylvia Plath who, until her untimely suicide at the early age of… fuck me, another one! This White Goddess seems somewhat bloody dangerous!

And as Johnson enters into the most dangerous time in his life so he is seemingly drawn back into the infantile, narcissistic, paranoid, illusionary world of the occult and paranormal. The refuge of people obviously in pain and suffering from trauma and easily exploitable. It does seem it is at times of stress that The White Goddess returns.

This combination of superstition, paranoia and dangerous characters in his final days is mirrored in the real world by the manifestation of a certain Michael Bannard — a sort of bogus Alaister Crowley (if that’s not a tautology) whom we first meet relatively early on. It is a relationship that, at first, we feel will be one of relative youth, of young men experimenting in various ways. But Coe leaves this period not with closure but with what feels like a subtle threat — that Bannard will return again at a later date into Johnson’s life. When this happens it feels like the tale has taken on the qualities of a nightmarish dream and just as Johnson “saw” The White Goddess become physically manifest so, almost like an inversion of her, Bannard’s physicality dissolves and haunts Johnson like a spectre, sometimes even from the other side of the world. There are no accounts of Johnson’s last hours but Coe, and we, know enough to speculate and there are many unsettling intimations.

Towards the end Johnson’s paranoia and superstitions spiral rapidly out of control. There is a sequence that would be funny if it wasn’t so indicative of his state of mind where he is outraged at the Apollo Moon landings which he declares as faked. The idea of his Moon Goddess being violated by man (and in the name of a Sun god too for added irony) is too much to bear. He refuses the truth so he invents a story, a lie.

What is also interesting is how the word “puritanical” is declared in the first few pages of ‘Fiery Elephant’. It is a word Coe uses to describe both Johnson and himself. It is used in reference to literary beliefs but I think it resonates a little deeper too because in responding to Johnson a lot is also revealed about Coe. Just as Johnson was happy to say anything and everything (“exeleutherostomise — to speak out freely, especially in an inappropriate moment”) so Coe is revealed to be, in contrast, a bit of a prude at times declaring at one point, like a teenager feigning moral outrage, that Johnson has provided “too much information” after B.S. admits to wanking quite a bit during a prolonged period of singledom. Not, exactly, a shocking revelation.

Yet wisely, and sensitively, Coe doesn’t describe (yet makes it obvious) how Johnson took his own life. The respect is there and it is deeply moving. But what would Johnson himself have thought of how Coe writes his suicide? Should Coe have told the “truth” and provided the unpleasant details with the same morbid fascination that Johnson describes the motorcyclist being sliced like “cheese cutter cutting through cheese” in “Fat Man On a Beach”? Of course not and the balance swings back to Coe; there is such a thing as too much information after all and this is information we do not, and should not, really want to know. This is a moment in which we want to see, and remember, Johnson decently.

 ‘Like a Fiery Elephant’ lives up to its title. It has heft and weight and blazes with a burning intelligence. Jonathan Coe as written a biography, an insight into literature, a detective story and a history of a period of time in Britain. It is a remarkable achievement. What is also remarkable is that for all his railing against “narrative” is how B.S. Johnson seemed to see so much unavoidable dramatic and narrative beats and themes in his own life — to be dead by the age of 29 or to go without love as sacrifice to the muse etc.

“Telling stories is telling lies”. Could it be that, in the end, it was a story that killed B.S. Johnson? A narrative of his own making?

 

340 - ] English Literature - B. S. Johnson

340- ] English Literature

B. S. Johnson

House Mother Normal

Fiction by B.S. Johnson

 House Mother Normal, subtitled “A Geriatric Comedy,” is the English writer B. S. Johnson’s fifth novel. Unusual in both its subject and structure, this novel is a remarkable study of old age, stripped of sentimentality and spiked with bizarre language and perceptions. Made up of eight monologues describing a single day at a nursing home, House Mother Normal explores the failing minds of the elderly with precision, humor, and unflagging compassion, and Johnson achieves, with inventiveness and escalating absurdity, a vivid multidimensional effect.

The Unfortunates

Fiction by B.S. Johnson

Now back in print in a limited quantity, B.S. Johnson’s lost classic has been showered with praise: New York Magazine named The Unfortunates one of their Ten Best Books of 2008, listed in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2008, and The L.A. Times declared it to be “his most daring work.” A legendary 1960s experiment in form, The Unfortunates is B. S. Johnson’s famous “book in a box,” in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses. A sportswriter, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the train station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a soccer match.

 Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry

Fiction by B.S. Johnson

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.

 Albert Angelo

Fiction by B.S. Johnson

Why don’t you take a permanent job, Albert? You’re twenty-eight now, you know," his mother remarks when he goes on his weekend duty visit home. Albert Angelo is by vocation an architect and only by economic necessity working as a substitute teacher. He had thought he was, if not dedicated, at least competent. But now, on temporary assignments in schools located in the tough neighborhoods of London, Albert feels ineffectual. He is failing as a teacher and failing to fulfill himself as an architect. And then, too, he is pained by the memory of a failed love affair. “I’m trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth,” Johnson insists in the penultimate section of the book when his authorial voice intervenes. Or, as Johan Thielman writes in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, “Johnson is trying to use fiction to reproduce life as closely as possible and, in his inevitable failure to succeed, he extends our notion of the possibilities of the novel…he made a body of work which remains fascinating, not in the least because he achieved one of his main ambitions: to be totally honest…His novels are the moving traces of a passionate devotion to and pursuit of his truth.”

  

339 - ] English Literature - B. S. Johnson

339- ] English Literature

B. S. Johnson

 B. S. Johnson

at the complete review:

Name:         Bryan Stanley JOHNSON

Nationality: English

Born: 5 February 1933

Died: 13 November 1973

Awards:      Gregory Award (1962)

Somerset Maugham Award (1967)

 B.A. from King's College, London

Was poetry editor of the Transatlantic Review

Also worked in film and TV

Committed suicide

Bibliography

Travelling People - novel, 1962

Albert Angelo - novel, 1964

Statement Against Corpses - poetry (with Zulfikar Ghose), 1964

Trawl - novel, 1967

The Unfortunates - novel, 1969

B. S. Johnson v. God - play, 1971

House Mother Normal - novel, 1971

Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry - novel, 1973

Aren't you a Bit Young to be Writing your Memoirs ? - non-fiction, 1973

See the Old Lady Decently - novel, (1975)

Please note that this bibliography is not necessarily complete.

Quotes

What others have to say about B. S. Johnson:

"Johnson, at least, saw much of his work into print. He went through four publishers in six novels and even more if we throw in the collections of stories, poetry. If he were alive today he would be unpublished. I'd bet on it." - Thomas McGonigle, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer, 1985)

"Johnson made experimental writing seem not only natural but inevitable." - James Marcus, The New York Times (29/6/1986)

"(I)nstead of being forgotten Johnson has been consigned to what some might regard as an even worse fate: that of being endlessly invoked as a reference point in a sporadic and none too fruitful argument about something called 'experimental' fiction. It is high time his other novels were made available again, so that we can all be reminded of what he was really up to. (...) What strikes me most forcibly now, looking back over his work as a whole, is its consistent accessibility." - Jonathan Coe, The Spectator (24/8/1991)

"When Malcolm Bradbury edited The Novel Today in 1977 B. S. Johnson's contribution rubbed shoulders with Philip Roth, John Fowles and Doris Lessing. Two decades on, his work is out of print, and his name means little to all but a few somewhat jealous admirers." - Henry Hitchings, New Statesman (11/8/1999)

"Back in his late Sixties heyday B. S. Johnson was, if not exactly a household name, then a figure of some consequence in any analysis of what were then called 'developments' in the novel. Of all that tribe of spiky experimentalists who clogged up space in the review pages of 30 years ago -- Alan Burns, Eva Figes, Ann Quin and others -- he was the spikiest of all." - D.J.Taylor, The Spectator (16/10/1999)

"While Calvino and Perec have had huge influence on the mainstream (...) their contemporary B. S. Johnson, the supreme British experimentalist of his day, has barely survived even as cult. Despite the fact that Anthony Burgess compared him to Sterne and Joyce, and Samuel Beckett declared himself a fan, the attitude of the literary establishment was best exemplified by Peter Ackroyd, who in 1975 wrote, in The Spectator, of Johnson's "lamentably archaic 'experimentation'...an anachronism masquerading as something different and new"." - Giles Coren, The Times (21/10/1999)

"Johnson ist keiner dieser Kandidaten, die das Experimentieren als mühsame Suche nach dem Originellen verstehen. Im Grunde ist seine antirealistische Schreibweise eine Art Realismus. Und das Wichtigste: Er langweilt uns nie – weil er, uns zum Vergnügen, sich selbst aushebelt. (...) Verfremdungseffekte finden sich bei Johnson zuhauf, eigentlich tut er alles, um sein Publikum vor den Kopf zu stoßen, zieht es aber dadurch gerade an, wie in der modernen Werbung." - Peter Urban-Halle, Die Zeit (25/2002)

"Johnson saw each of his novels as a problem to be solved. The specific problem varied slightly with every book, but the deeper, underlying problem was always the same: how, using the poor, inadequate, blunt instrument of language, can you capture anything of the simultaneity and multiplicity of modern life ? " - Jonathan Coe, Prospect (2/2003)

"Rebelling against that cramped tradition, and embracing the implications of Joyce's epistemology, Johnson burst the seams of narrative convention; in seven novels, which he wrote between the ages of twenty-six and forty, he developed a uniquely engaging brand of estrangement, discursive but compact, formally challenging yet often viscerally funny and -- in his own words -- "desperate in its seriousness". " - Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement (18/6/2004)

"Johnson's plan to revolutionise the novel came down to the use of 'devices' intended to disrupt ordinary forms of attention by involving the physical book itself, the material base of writing, in unusual ways, as if to take revenge on it for a long history of tyranny. (...) Johnson was very serious about these innovations, but they kidnap the notion of experiment or estrangement by making it appear that the violation of narrative order in the interests of what he thought of as truth must be blatant. In fact these tricks simply prompt one to ask what the point of this sort of innovation really is." - Frank Kermode, London Review of Books (5/8/2004)

 

"B.S. Johnson brought to all his endeavors, in whatever medium, a personal zeal and forcefulness that sometimes crossed over into the boorish, and yet it's plain that he wasn't a writer because it was fun or would bring in buckets of cash, or somehow turn him into a celebrity. Worthwhile imaginative prose, he felt, needed to push hard against the limits, to extend and challenge the achievements of Joyce -- above all, to scorn the facile, commercial and false." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post (5/6/2005)

Pros and Cons

of the author's work:

 Pros:

Experimental, in the best sense of the word, and willing to see what can be done with fiction, without ever becoming daunting

     B.S.Johnson's name still rings fairly familiar, but he is much less of a presence than he once was. His perhaps most famous book, The Unfortunates, which comes not bound neatly in one volume but in nearly thirty smaller booklets that can be read in any order, was recently republished, and an Omnibus of several of the novels seems close to publication, but generally his works are hard to come by. In 1985 American publisher New Directions initiated "its plan to bring the work of the late English author (...) to the attention of American readers over the next few years", but the project seems to have petered out by 1987, after only three volumes. Jonathan Coe, who has long maintained that it was important that Johnson's work should once again be made available, has written a biography, scheduled for publication in late-2001. Perhaps that will help stir interest.

     Johnson is too often seen as an experimentalist, and thus thought of as someone whose work is too hard to bother with (and, often, simply boring). But Johnson is a more complex case -- and a simpler one. Most of his work is readily approachable. Readers can put as much effort into it as they care. There are depths here too explore but they can also enjoy it with an absolute minimum of effort. The stories are fairly straightforward, and while the telling may be formally unusual at time, none of his experiments should scare off any but the laziest of readers. Other than the danger of literally losing a portion of The Unfortunates Johnson's work should pose few problems. But most readers never get that far, it seems, never becoming actual readers of Johnson's work. It's a vicious circle.

     Johnson is also a very funny writer -- and it is not the kind of humour where the reader feels that s/he is being laughed at. And there are stories here too, real stories, worth telling -- and worth telling the way Johnson chooses to tell them. Here is a man who understands how form and content must go together, a surprisingly rare gift. There are few authors since who have pulled it off with similar success.

     Certainly, Johnson is a writer's writer, carrying on about the art, popping up at the most unexpected places within the fictions, but these too should (or at least can) be seen as welcome asides and insights. There is social commentary too, and wondering about the world. Throughout there is novelty: Johnson doesn't get stuck in ruts, he constantly tries something new. So if one novel doesn't please, for whatever reason, turn to the next: it will, at the very least, hold something different.

     A complex man, and apparently not the nicest of people (at least in some circumstances), his personality does not seem to have helped his lasting image (though friends speak and write warmly of him). He published a solid shelf worth of books, despite a career cut very short: he was a young suicide. It is unfortunate: it would have been fascinating to see what else he might have done. It is unfortunate, too, that young writers are not familiar with his work, and not using it as a springboard for future fictions.

     An author who should be better known, better appreciated, and better understood. And an author that writers could learn from.