Re-Reading B.S. Johnson

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Re-reading B.S. Johnson Edited by

Philip Tew and Glyn White

10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Re-reading B. S. Johnson

Also by Philip Tew

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION (co-edited with Richard Lane and Rod Mengham) THE CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVEL BRITISH FICTION TODAY (co-edited with Rod Mengham) JIM CRACE

Also by Glyn White READING THE GRAPHIC SURFACE: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction



B. S. JOHNSON: A Critical Reading

Edited by

Philip Tew and

Glyn White



Re-reading B. S. Johnson

Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Philip Tew and Glyn White 2007; Prefatory essay © Jonathan Coe 2007; Individual chapters © contributors 2007

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–52492–7 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–52492–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Re-reading B.S. Johnson / edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–52492–7 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0–230–52492–3 (cloth) 1. Johnson, B. S. (Bryan Stanley), 1933–1973––Criticism and interpretation. I. Tew, Philip. II. White, Glyn. PR6060.O3Z85 2007 823’.914—dc22 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.



For Virginia Johnson



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List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

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Notes on Contributors

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A Note on Primary Texts and Their Citation

xv

Prefatory Essay: B. S. Johnson and Academia Jonathan Coe

xvi

Introduction Introduction: Re-reading B. S. Johnson Glyn White and Philip Tew Chronology: Concerning Bryan Stanley Johnson Philip Tew

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Section One: Re-reading the Novels The (W)hole Affect: Creative Reading and Typographic Immersion in Albert Angelo David James

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Pentonville Modernism: Fate and Resentment in Albert Angelo Robert Bond

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The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading Kaye Mitchell

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‘From Embryo to Embryan’: See the Old Lady Decently— A Problematic Birth? Richard Leigh Harris ‘The Mind Has Fuses’: Detonating B. S. Johnson Carol Watts

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Section Two: Re-reading the Author In the Net: B. S. Johnson, the Biography and Trawl Rod Mengham Strange Intercessions: Contraventions of the Muse in the Writings of B. S. Johnson Gerard Barrett vii 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White

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Contents

viii Contents

B. S. Johnson’s ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?: The Memoir between Life and Literature Jared McGeough ‘An Evacuee for ever’: B. S. Johnson versus Ego Psychology Nick Hubble

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132 143

Section Three: Re-reading: New Perspectives Exemplary B. S.: B. S. Johnson and the Toronto Research Group Bradley Buchanan

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B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo and the Consequences of London Lawrence Phillips

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‘He Would be Working at the Welsh Books’: B. S. Johnson and the Two Literatures of Wales Nicholas Jones

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Otherness, Post-Coloniality and Pedagogy in B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo (1964) and See the Old Lady Decently (1975) Philip Tew

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Annotated Bibliography Annotated Bibliography of Johnson Studies Glyn White

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Index

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Institutional Negotiations: B. S. Johnson and the BBC (1959–73) Valerie Butler

Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5

Inscribing the text From word to abstraction Slowing down reading Opening of the TRG’s photo-narrative Subverting conventional sequence

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164 166 167 170 171


List of Illustrations

The editors extend their thanks to all of the contributors and wish to acknowledge alphabetically the various contributions of the following people and institutions: Steve Barfield and the University of Westminster for hosting the original event, and everyone involved on that day; Bartha Ágnes for her understanding; British Library staff in Humanities Two Reading Room; Jonathan Coe; Kate Johnson; Steve Johnson; Virginia Johnson; Helen Jones, University of Central Lancashire, for her patience; Paula Kennedy and editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan; staff at Picador for supplying books for sale at the original conference; the long-suffering Micaela Schoop for her support; George A. Tew for finding first editions; and all members of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies throughout the world. Material in ‘B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo and the Consequences of London’ has previously appeared in London Narratives: Post-War Fiction and the City by Lawrence Phillips (Continuum, 2006). Reproduced here by kind permission of Continuum.

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Acknowledgements

Gerard Barrett is Director of Studies for English at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where he is completing a doctorate on the American novelist John Hawkes. He has published essays on Joseph Conrad and Henry Green and other essays are forthcoming on James Hanley and Patrick Hamilton. He organizes an annual symposium on modernist fiction, the most recent of which focussed on Rex Warner. Robert Bond grew up on London’s South Bank, and has been a visiting lecturer at South Bank and Westminster universities. His doctoral thesis was the first comprehensive study of the work of Iain Sinclair, published as Iain Sinclair by Salt (2005). He co-edited a Special Issue of the Literary London Journal on Sinclair. Other outlets for his writing include the Guardian, Historical Materialism, Naked Punch and Jacket. He is currently co-editing City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair with Jenny Bavidge, for Cambridge Scholars Press and is writing a book about the contemporary reverberations of vorticism: Albion Island Vortex. Bradley Buchanan is Assistant Professor of English at Sacramento State University in California. His dissertation (Stanford University, 2001) was entitled: ‘Oedipus Disfigured: Myth, Humanism and Hybridity in Modernist Anglo-American and Postcolonial Literature’. His scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature and Twentieth Century Literature; he is currently writing a book-length study of Hanif Kureishi’s fiction. Valerie Butler gained her PhD from the University of Kent at Canterbury under their funded studentship programme with a thesis entitled ‘“Debit Them: Credit Me” B. S. Johnson’s Experiments with Truth’. She has presented papers on B. S. Johnson at conferences and postgraduate seminars, and has taught on a range of undergraduate courses at Canterbury Christ Church University College. Jonathan Coe was born and educated in Birmingham. An awardwinning novelist, biographer and critic, his novels include What a Carve Up! (which won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger), The House of Sleep (which won the Writers’ Guild Best xi 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White



xii


Richard Leigh Harris was born in Bristol. A professional musician (composer, harpsichordist and pianist), he has lived and worked in Oxford for the past twenty-five years. He was an Associate Lecturer in Music at Oxford Polytechnic and, since 1990, has been a Visiting Tutor in Composition at Birmingham Conservatoire (University of Central England). He has contributed various articles and reviews to periodicals such as The Musical Times, Tempo, Avant, etc. His interest in B. S. Johnson dates back to his years as a student in the mid-1970s. Nick Hubble is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Suburban Studies, Kingston University. He has previously published articles about George Orwell, Charles Madge, Christopher Priest, Englishness, working-class writing and postwar science fiction. His book Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005. David James is currently Lecturer in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature in the School of English at the University of Nottingham. His most recently published articles are on Pat Barker, Iain Sinclair, Graham Swift and Sylvia Townsend Warner. While co-editing, with Steven Barfield and Philip Tew, a collection tracing the evolution of the pastoral tradition from the nineteenth century to the present day, he is also preparing a study of Carol Shields and a project entitled Inheriting Modernism. Nicholas Jones gained a PhD from the University of Wales, Swansea on Welsh nationalist poet Harri Webb. He has also published on Welsh Writing in English. Jared McGeough is beginning his third year of a Doctorate at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, at the Centre for Theory and Criticism. His thesis work concentrates on Romantic theories of anarchism (William Godwin) and the Absolute (Friedrich Schelling), within writers such as William Blake and Novalis. He is also interested in how Romanticism intersects with contemporary thinkers like Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. One of his short stories has been published in The Wascana Review (University of Regina).



Fiction Award) and The Rotters’ Club (which was dramatised for BBC television in 2005). His biography of B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004) won the Samuel Johnson prize for biography. He lives in London.

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Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College. He is the author of books on Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte and Henry Green, as well as of The Descent of Language (1993). He has edited collections of essays on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde art, and the fiction of the 1940s. He is co-editor and co-translator of Altered State: the New Polish Poetry (Arc 2003). Kaye Mitchell is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster, where she teaches BA and MA modules on postmodernist literature, critical theory, gender and sexuality. She has published articles on critical theory, techno-culture and the gendered body, and Alan Hollinghurst and the construction of homosexual identity, and is currently working on a book on A. L. Kennedy for Palgrave (due for publication in 2007), and an edited collection on ‘radical criticism’. She is a reviewer for Radical Philosophy and British Journal of Aesthetics. Lawrence Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in and Head of English in the School of Arts at the University of Northampton. He is editor of the peer-reviewed academic e-journal Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London (www.literarylondon.org), director of their annual conference, and secretary of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies. His most recent publication is an edited collection entitled The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London (Rodopi, 2004). He is currently working on a book entitled ReWriting London: Post-War and Contemporary Representations of the City, and a further edited collection A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Nineteenth-Century Representations of London. Philip Tew is Professor of English at Brunel University, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Founding Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies. Additional to his works on B. S. Johnson [listed in the Annotated Bibliography] he has published The Contemporary British Novel (Continuum 2004) subsequently translated into Serbian (2006) and issued in a revised edition (2007), and, most recently, Jim Crace (Manchester 2006). Other publications include contributions to Contemporary British Fiction (Polity 2003), After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism (Athlone 2001), After Postmodernism (de Gruyter: Berlin 2003), and British Fiction Today (Continuum 2006). Currently he is co-editing a series The New British Novel for Palgrave Macmillan.




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Glyn White is Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture at the University of Salford. He has published articles on Alasdair Gray, Christine Brooke-Rose and B. S. Johnson and his monograph Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction was published in 2005 by Manchester University Press.



Carol Watts lectures in the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Dorothy Richardson, and numerous articles contemporary fiction and poetry, film and eighteenthcentury culture. Her book on The Cultural Work of Empire: Laurence Sterne and The Seven Year’s War and the Shandean State is forthcoming.

In this volume when the major prose works of B. S. Johnson are quoted or referenced an abbreviated form of the title is used; the shortened form appears in parentheses. The list below provides full bibliographical information for the first editions of these works. TP – (1963) Travelling People, London: Constable. AA – (1964) Albert Angelo, London: Constable. SAC – (1964) Statement Against Corpses, London: Constable. (With Zulfikar Ghose) T – (1966) Trawl, London: Secker & Warburg. U – (1969) The Unfortunates, London: Panther Books in association with Secker & Warburg. HMN – (1971) House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy, London: Collins. CMODE – (1973) Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, London: Collins. AYRY – (1973) Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?, London: Hutchinson. STOLD – (1975) See the Old Lady Decently, London: Hutchinson. Please note that the B. S. Johnson Omnibus edition published by Picador in 2004, containing Albert Angelo, Trawl and House Mother Normal, retains both the pagination and the settings in each case of the original publications above. This is also true of the 1999 edition of The Unfortunates, and the 1984 and 2001 editions of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. The references used in this volume therefore apply to all English editions currently in print.

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A Note on Primary Texts and Their Citation

Jonathan Coe

During the research of my biography of B. S. Johnson, it was a great privilege to be given access to so many of his papers and unpublished writings. One of the most moving items I saw was a notebook containing ideas for the second and third volumes of his projected trilogy, left uncompleted at the time of his death. Johnson was not in a happy frame of mind when he made these notes. Fragmentary childhood memories alternate with anguished reflections on the recent death of his mother. You can see him grappling with a wealth of difficult autobiographical and historical material, trying to wrest it into some sort of shape, perhaps daunted by the sheer scale of the enterprise. And then one sentence in particular leaps out, as if Johnson is confronting himself with the very worst that might happen to this most fragile and personal of projects: ‘Some academic cunt will produce a study on it’. It’s hard to imagine anyone’s hostility to the whole ethos of academic writing being expressed more directly. But, as so often with B. S. Johnson, scratch beneath the surface of his most doctrinaire opinions, and you will usually find something more complicated and self-doubting. His fourth novel, The Unfortunates, is a sustained elegy for his friend Tony Tillinghast, who had fallen victim to cancer and died in his early thirties, following a long decline witnessed by Johnson in all its painful detail. Tillinghast had been an outstandingly promising Boswell scholar, and an academic to his very core. The novel records his friendship with Johnson as playful, sparring and – when it came to the subject of Tillinghast’s chosen profession – only mock-antagonistic. As in this passage recalling a visit to Newstead Abbey: And our attitude towards Byron, one of the poets Tony and I both admired very much, but towards his dead relics affected unconcern, made jokes about them, as circumstance afforded, as I remember, cannot recollect any of them now, but there was an easy atmosphere, Tony could at least joke about academicism, what a pity that I only heard after his death that exact definition of academicism as xvi 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Prefatory Essay: B. S. Johnson and Academia

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Yesterday’s answers to today’s problems! I think he would have enjoyed it, not openly laughed at it, perhaps, he not often did laugh outright, with me, at any rate, as I remember, but he might then have pointed out the absurdity of all generalizations, and that my own work owed much to study of the past. (U ‘Again the house’, 5) It is one of the (many) paradoxes of B. S. Johnson’s writing that you sometimes feel yourself getting closer to the ‘real’ person when reading his novels than when trawling through his notebooks and private writings. In the treacherous privacy of self-communion, with no one around to challenge his dogmatism, Johnson would probably never have acknowledged to himself ‘the absurdity of all generalizations’ about academia. Yet his warm friendship with Tony Tillinghast, and the rigorous honesty with which he struggles to record it in The Unfortunates, obliges him to adopt an attitude which is more generous and open-minded. And when he points out that ‘my own work owed much to study of the past’, we are seeing not just a nod to Johnson’s obvious forebears – Sterne, Joyce, Beckett and so on – but an implicit recognition that his three-years’ study of English literature in an academic environment (an environment to which he had struggled long and hard to gain access) played a crucial part in shaping him as a writer. To Johnson’s mind, academia was intrinsically bound up with the study of (bordering on obsession with) the past. He challenged Tony Tillinghast to comment upon the manuscript of his first novel Travelling People as it was being written, so that he would ‘have a chance of influencing, of making better, a piece of what set out to be literature, for the sake of argument, rather than expend himself on dead men’s work’. Given Johnson’s highly developed sense of heroic antagonism towards death (cf. You’re Human Life the Rest of Them), and horror of physical decay (House Mother Normal ), we can easily see why he tried to put as much distance as possible between himself and an academy whose motto, as far as he was concerned, was ‘Let the dead live with the dead’ (U ‘The Opera Singer’, 2; ‘Last’, 4). And yet this attitude, of course, is reductive: there is no reason why discussion of dead men’s (or women’s) work needs to be dead too. And the notion that the work itself might survive the author, bubbling over with posthumous life, seems to have been one Johnson would not allow himself to entertain: perhaps because he was so fearful that it would not happen in his own case. Luckily, history has – so far – proved him wrong. Thirty-three years after his death, forty-three years after the publication of his first novel



Prefatory Essay

(and these are long periods of time, in a culture which manifests an ever-shorter literary attention span) engagement with his work seems to be livelier, and more prevalent, than ever before. I’m writing these words in September 2006, just a few weeks after an event in central London dedicated to B. S. Johnson, hosted by the influential literary blog 3AM Magazine. Speakers from the worlds of film (Paul Tickell), entertainment (David Quantick), academia (Philip Tew) and books (myself) talked briefly about Johnson’s legacy before handing over to contributors from the floor, who mostly seemed to be in their twenties. The discussion they kicked off came at Johnson from an impressive variety of angles, covering issues of class, experimentalism, politics, poetics and of course – perhaps most important of all – football. In the benign chaos of contrary viewpoints, the only thing that seemed to unite these readers was a passionate enthusiasm for B. S. Johnson and his work. A similar diversity of approaches is to be found in this present volume, a collection of papers delivered at an academic conference devoted to Johnson in November 2004. Here are essays on Johnson the novelist, playwright, polemicist, evacuee and ‘Welshman’. He might (in fact certainly would) have disagreed violently with much that is written about him here; he might have believed (or at least professed to believe) that these writers were wasting their time ‘expending themselves on dead men’s work’; some of it he might not even have understood. But as a tribute to the enduring vitality and relevance of his writing, the existence of this book could hardly have failed to please and, probably, astound him. On top of which, he might even have learned a thing or two from it. Not bad – as Johnson himself might well have declared, loudly and delightedly – for a bunch of academic cunts.



xviii Prefatory Essay



Introduction




Glyn White and Philip Tew

In 2006 writing about B. S. Johnson and his work is a much different matter to so doing a decade ago when both editors were first undertaking projects concerned with his oeuvre and life. At that point in time Johnson’s work was out of print in his home country. He remained a marginal figure, virtually forgotten, and only occasionally referred to by those writing about British literature of the 1960s and 70s, very much in passing, as a representative of ‘the experimental novel’. Since the publication of Jonathan Coe’s award-winning biography, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (2004), and the republication of the majority of Johnson’s novels by Picador, there is now a much greater awareness of both the author and his work and its significance. To memorialise a new era in critical interpretation of this intriguing author we entitle this present volume Re-reading B. S. Johnson. As Glyn White says in his chapter on Johnson in Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction: ‘That a revived awareness of Johnson depends on a biography is ironic since if there is one thing that distracts critics from Johnson’s texts . . . it is Johnson himself’ (2005: 86). Coe, of course, uses Johnson’s works as both justification for the biography and evidence in support of his proper concern with the author. Ultimately the biography reveals that, not least through its own revisions of our understanding of the life, a number of obstacles barring the way to a clear reassessment of Johnson’s work simply no longer apply. Attitudes to literature and its study have altered quite dramatically since the early 1970s. It is now possible to study genre fiction and popular, best-selling books rather than just the literary canon. Creative writing is now part of many university programmes and where there are modules on ‘Writing Innovative Fiction’ it makes no sense at all to exclude Johnson (who argued that ‘the only use of criticism was if it 3 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Introduction: Re-reading B. S. Johnson


helped people write better books’ U, ‘The opera singer’: 1). In the 1960s and 70s, however, literary criticism, like the nation, was less diverse, less willing to countenance difference, and B. S. Johnson’s work offered a strong challenge to this cultural hegemony. In order to give a context for a brief overview of Johnson’s critical fortunes a brief survey of his prose work is in order. Johnson’s major prose work consists of seven novels published over approximately ten years. The first was Travelling People (London, Constable, 1963), which employs a variety of styles to tell the story of Henry Henry, fresh out of university, and his adventures in North Wales, and features a playfully omniscient author figure who does not forget to remind his readers that it is a fictional narrative. Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo (London, Constable, 1964), is even more formally inventive but slightly less playful in that its similarly economically named protagonist, Albert Albert, a supply teacher and architect manqué in the Angel district of London, does not survive, and neither does his narrative, as an argumentative author figure angrily interrupts threequarters of the way through the book to disown the fictionalising of his own life in the person of Albert. Trawl (London, Secker & Warburg, 1966) regurgitates authorial reminiscences about childhood and his sexual past during a queasy but ultimately restorative observational trip on a trawler into the Barents Sea. The Unfortunates (London, Panther, 1969), the famous ‘book-in-a-box’ that Johnson is perhaps still most known for, is a personal memoir of friend and academic, Tony Tillinghast, who died of cancer in 1964. It is presented in 27 sections, First, Last and 25 others of varying lengths (from part of a page to 12-pages long) to be read in random order or, more accurately, in whatever order the reader chooses. Johnson’s fifth novel, House Mother Normal (London, Trigram Press, 1971), shows a slight change of tack as it follows nine streams of consciousness through the same evening in an old people’s home. Each section occupies 21 pages and each line represents a chronological unit. The sequence is brought together by the final (longer) section in which the title character, hand in hand with the author, explicates the bizarre activities that the internal monologues of her varyingly senile charges have only been able to suggest. The last novel published in Johnson’s lifetime, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (London, Collins, 1973), fulfils its own recipe for the modern novel—‘Funny, Brutalist and Short’ (CMODE, 165)— being the narrative of a London clerk turning urban terrorist as he tries to balance the book in which he records the indignities heaped upon him by society and the revenges, from minor to psychotic, he can score in return. See the Old Lady Decently (London, Hutchinson, 1975),



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published posthumously in the form that Johnson left it, is a tribute to his recently deceased mother and a condemnation of Britain’s decay during the twentieth century. It is fragmentary both formally and in its place in the planned ‘Matrix trilogy’, of which it is the only volume, yet remains distinctive and provocative (as more than one contributor to this volume argues). There is also an early joint collection of short stories with Zulfikar Ghose Statement against Corpses (London, Constable, 1964); a section of Penguin Modern Stories 7 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971); two collections of poems and various pieces of uncollected drama and review work, and the influential prose collection Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (London, Hutchison, 1973), most remembered for its semi-theoretical ‘Introduction’, sometimes referred to as the ‘Memoir’. Having five of these novels back in print finally allows scope for a wide-ranging re-evaluation of the author’s work. Johnson’s literary reputation was initially, and for far too long, overshadowed by the hostile and grudging critical reaction that was entrenched by the time of his death. This came about because, during his career, Johnson was a controversial figure whose forceful presence on the literary scene problematised a number of assumptions that underlay its far-from-natural landscape. From a working class background, with a non-Oxbridge degree gained as a mature student, Johnson was an enterprising, dynamic and talented writer with new ideas and was soon published. His work was received with a combination of enthusiasm and wariness that praised his capabilities but sought to shape them into something more resembling the conventional realist forms of the time. Over the course of his first three novels he was courted by the literary establishment (first and third won awards) and in some ways the class and aesthetic hegemony went out of its way to welcome him aboard. Johnson either rejected the offer or didn’t understand it. A key early manifestation of his falling out of favour with critics can be seen in Johnson’s interview with Christopher Ricks in 1964 (recounted in Butler’s essay in this volume). Shocked that his unconventional devices are treated as flaws rather than innovations, Johnson becomes angry and obdurate. Dialogue is not what occurs. Bernard Bergonzi was better able to handle Johnson, as his radio interview of 1968 indicates, but Johnson still maintained his contentious rejection of fiction. This intransigence leads to Bergonzi’s comment in The Situation of the Novel that Johnson’s ‘considerable talents seem unnecessarily limited by his doctrinaire attitudes’ (1970: 204) and this became a refrain for both critics and colleagues who (legitimately) wanted to do other things than Johnson. Looked at from outside the



Glyn White and Philip Tew 5


period, however, it becomes increasingly clear that this is how literarycritical hegemony works; Johnson is being prodded to do what everyone else does, write novels like other novelists and stop trying to move the goalposts. In other words, to stop doing what makes him unique. Wittingly or unwittingly, Johnson occupied a nexus of issues around class, politics, realism and aesthetic form and he was constitutionally incapable of shifting his position. An all or nothing man, he could not accept compromise. His continuing experimentation with literary form had, by the late 1960s, became an affront to those who had cautiously nurtured him and from this point those who had disliked him and/or his work from the start were in the ascendant. Johnson’s continued allegiance to working class issues (that made him what he was), to the state of inner city schools, to the plight of the elderly and infirm, to the young and disaffected, to trade union causes and his treatment of literature as a job rather than an art did not help his cause. Hostility to Johnson (often personally provoked) manifested as hostility to his work, which was labelled as ‘experimental’ and scorned.1 Following Johnson’s death, there were a series of intentional and psychoanalytical critiques (Parrinder, Ryf and Levitt) giving an overview of his work which tended to confirm what had gone before. Underneath, however, the conventional realists’ critical hegemony was under strain as post-structuralist theory and self-reflexive literary practice became increasingly hard to ignore. In the shake-up popular realists like C. P. Snow disappeared and academic authors like David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury survived as campus novelists while the kingdom was inherited by literal and literary offspring like Martin Amis prepared to adopt sufficient formal experimentation (by this point known as postmodernism) not to become fossilised. In this climate, as Johnson began to fade from view, with his work largely out of print except for small presses in Britain and America (Bloodaxe and New Directions) after the spark of a mid-1980s mainstream revival (Christie Malry was republished in King Penguin, 1984) failed to kindle. Johnson, or his work, was worth mentioning in surveys such as McHale (1987), Stevenson (1986), Waugh (1984, 1995), for example, but not apparently worthy of more sustained work. In America fragmentary, cult appreciation survived (Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1985) with Johnson somewhat awkwardly becoming a postmodernist or, at least, a harbinger of postmodernity. There was always a difficulty in this when it was clear that Johnson prized truth in his writing above everything else, and so, awkward as ever, Johnson was in some danger of being forgotten as a postmodernist who wasn’t postmodern, and a realist who had rejected (conventional) realism.



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By the mid-1990s, however, work was underway on two fronts to cast new light on Johnson’s work and reputation. Academically, Philip Tew (2001) was able to articulate the critical ideas underlying Johnson’s novels and to fundamentally reject any idea that Johnson sought a detachment from reality in his work. Tew was also able to highlight class as an aspect of Johnson’s exclusion from the British literary canon. Subsequent writers such as Ferrebe (2005) and White (2005) have been able to build on this start. The former looks at Johnson’s construction of masculinity in the context of male-authored fiction in the latter half of the twentieth century and the latter shows how some of Johnson’s unique formal devices, often seen as rejections of realism, actually seek to embrace and extend mimesis in his novels. These were some of the fruits of the academic side of a gradual increase of interest in Johnson. The other—essential—side of the revival came through commercial publishing company Picador. Coe reveals (2004: 476) that his biography of Johnson was commissioned by Peter Straus in 1995, yet the first concrete indication of a renewed interest in Johnson in publishing circles was Picador’s reprint of The Unfortunates (1999), a bold statement of intent which eventually culminated in Coe’s biography and the Omnibus. Though some reviews, usually by those of Johnson’s generation (Figes, Thwaite), praise the biography at the expense of the novels, attempting to keep Johnson unread, in this collection we return to the novels, and Johnson’s work generally, in the new light of the biography. In the post-Coe environment we are liberated from past cycles of criticism, old squabbles and sour grapes, and inspired to visit Johnson’s work anew. The way is clear for new readings, new thoughts and reactions as we read and re-read Johnson’s work seeking to explore its lively diversity and the contemporaneity of his concerns. The essays in this collection are split into three sections. The first section focuses on the process of reading (and re-reading) Johnson’s texts. The second section focuses on the interplay between biographical material and the evidence of the texts. The third section attempts to open new perspectives on Johnson’s work including his reception abroad and his postcolonial concerns. Each essay has its own list of works cited, and an ‘Annotated Bibliography of Johnson Studies’ concludes the collection with reviews of significant works in the field to assist further research. The first section begins with David James’s essay, ‘The (w)hole affect: creative reading and typographic immersion in Albert Angelo’, which draws on Derek Attridge’s concept of ‘creative reading’, the work of





Wolfgang Iser and the recent ‘cognitive turn’ in literary criticism, focusing on reader engagement with texts and asking what type of active reader Johnson’s work requires. By looking at Johnson’s dialogue with readers through the novel and his public debates with critics after publication, James is able to reveal, beneath what appear to be belligerent prescriptions of how to read his work, Johnson’s ongoing concern to challenge his readers and to defend their freedom to respond to his books directly rather than to critical paraphrases of them. In his essay, ‘Pentonville modernism: Fate and resentment in Albert Angelo’, Robert Bond focuses on the traps laid for its protagonist by the society in which he lives and works. Using Adorno’s writing on the modernist novel and Hannah Arendt on ‘the human condition’ (certainly a reference point for Johnson), Bond shows how by resenting the existence he is condemned to Albert is able to ‘serve freedom’. By also drawing on the religious thought of Simone Weil, Bond is able to return to Patrick Parrinder’s influential analysis of the ‘Puritan’ mindset expressed in Johnson’s work and show how fully interpreting the novels demands a combined spiritual and material approach. In ‘The Unfortunates: Hypertext, linearity and the act of reading’, Kaye Mitchell responds to Johnson’s infamous novel-in-a-box, and studies the effect of the fragmentation of the book on the traditionally linear experience of reading as described by Iser and Roman Ingarden. This approach is supplemented by an analysis of how this text prefigures some of the innovations of hypertext, how it partly overlaps with that digital form and helps expose some of the grander claims made by hypertext’s advocates. Mitchell goes on to analyse Johnson’s text asking what, in particular, the reader’s extra agency in ordering the core of the novel provides and how that sense of a personal and subjective imposition of order coincides with its central themes. Richard Leigh Harris’s ‘“From embryo to embryan”: See the Old Lady Decently—a problematic birth?’ argues for the republication of Johnson’s final, posthumously published novel, identifying it as a distillation of Johnson’s lifelong concerns and as a marvellous life-confirming piece of writing in its own right. Harris adumbrates the novel’s contents including family history, World War One, the Empire and the great mother and, sampling Johnson’s notes for the novel revealed by Coe, looks at how the author orchestrated his interests towards a great, albeit unfinished, masterwork. Harris also considers reviews and reactions to this novel, showing how dominant the view of Johnson as potentially great but hamstrung by his own theories and/or experimentation was in the years after his death.



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Carol Watts’s essay ‘“The mind has fuses”: Detonating B. S. Johnson’ surveys the republished novels, and picks out the ways in which they exhibit sympathy, engagement and the ability to affect readers. Drawing on Deleuze, Adorno and Barthes, Watts draws out the inseparability of the personal and the political in Johnson’s work and finds his ability to confront painful realities and take his writing to the limit of endurance, compulsively risking the mind’s fuses, has continued relevance in the age of Bush and Blair. The second section of this book begins with a piece that is essentially a re-reading of one of the novels, but one conducted in the light of Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant and similarly oriented towards biographical knowledge. Rod Mengham’s ‘In the net: B. S. Johnson, the biography and Trawl’ is an exemplary close reading of the largely autobiographical third novel, which shows how evidence for the revelations about Johnson’s life and the development of his sexual identity in Coe (2004) can be seen to be embedded within the author’s published work. Focusing on Trawl’s implicit sexual symbolism of trawler, net and catch, and explicit accounts of the author’s sex life, Mengham draws out the uniquely candid and intimate negotiations of Johnson’s masculine identity through which the author appears able to return refreshed and reinvigorated by his sea voyage. Gerard Barrett’s essay ‘Strange intercessions: contraventions of the muse in the writings of B. S. Johnson’ develops Mengham’s reading of Trawl’s symbolic imagery of dissemination through close reading across several of Johnson’s other works, including Travelling People, Statement Against Corpses, Albert Angelo, The Unfortunates and examples of his poetry. Identifying the recurrent mention of condoms and contraception in jokes, plot and authorial recollection, Barrett is able to synthesise these obsessive themes to uncover Johnson’s sublimated relationship to his obscure, yet deeply felt, female muse. In ‘Institutional negotiations: B. S. Johnson and the BBC (1959–73)’ Valerie Butler uses in-depth research into Johnson’s correspondence held at the BBC archive at Caversham to extend Tew (2005) and further illustrate the tussle between radical novelist and conservative institution. Butler shows that, while initially contacting the BBC as another avenue in his attempt to make a living as a writer, Johnson struck on the idea of bringing a wider audience to so-called experimental fiction such as his own work through the educational aspect of the BBC’s remit. The arguments, for and against, show another aspect of Johnson’s struggle to find acceptance for his contentious brand of literature and consultation of the scripts for a number of Johnson’s radio appearances (to which we





have already referred) illustrate exactly how his frustrations in getting his message across manifested at different moments in his career. In ‘B. S. Johnson’s “Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?: the memoir between life and literature’, Jared McGeough studies this short but significant document that continues to exert a strong fascination for any writer on Johnson. Using Foucault, Kristeva and Deleuze in his analysis McGeough questions Tew’s (2001) new reading of the author as critical realist and focuses on how the ‘Introduction’ supports interpretations of Johnson’s writing career and life being inextricably bound together. Nick Hubble’s revelatory ‘“An evacuee for ever”: B. S. Johnson versus ego psychology’ offers an illuminating analysis of Johnson’s development as a person and a novelist through engaging with the discipline of psychology while editing the collection, The Evacuees (1968). Undertaking this task after writing Trawl and The Unfortunates, and having used a passage of the former novel as his contribution to the collection, Johnson discovered his negative experience of evacuation to be at odds with the verdicts of both Kleinian and Freudian psychological approaches. Hubble is therefore able to show how Johnson’s often-dismissed role as editor caused a change in direction for Johnson as a writer with the novels that followed, House Mother Normal and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, which reintroduce fiction to Johnson’s armoury to directly challenge social conventions and normative discourse. The third section of this collection looks at extending the critical frame of reference within which Johnson is read. In his essay, ‘Exemplary B. S.: B. S. Johnson and the Toronto Research Group’, Bradley Buchanan introduces a Canadian reaction to Johnson’s work in the form of the Toronto Research Group (TRG) whose manifesto, Rational Geomancy (1992), took much from both Johnson’s public statements and his approach to literature. By analysing the TRG’s professed beliefs about textual space and returning to Johnson’s later novels House Mother Normal and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, Buchanan is able to show how the Canadians’ post-Derridean take on Johnson generated a peculiarly apposite—though unintentional—hoax whereby many of its readers chose to believe B. S. Johnson was purely an invention of the manifesto’s playful authors. Lawrence Phillips’s essay ‘B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo and the consequences of London’ offers an architectural perspective, analysing the significant presence of postwar London in this key novel and interrogating the conservative architectural pretensions of its architect-manqué hero.



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Considering the Capital’s architectural history and its human migrations, Phillips attempts to show how the novel’s violent transition from fiction to authorial confession, a metaphorical Blitz in the cause of drastic urban/literary renewal, turns on Johnson’s recognition of the disjunction between the aesthetic and the real. In ‘“He would be working at the Welsh books”: B. S. Johnson and the two literatures of Wales’ Nicholas Jones discusses Johnson’s appreciation of the status of the writer in Welsh society during his visits there, particularly in terms of a lack of marginalisation and a natural and expected involvement in politics. The influence of Wales can be clearly seen in Johnson’s long poetic work, ‘Hafod a Hendref ’, and through specific references in House Mother Normal. The impetus of this work shows how Johnson recognised larger, postcolonial concerns in his Welsh experience. Johnson’s own contribution to Welsh writing in English came in the form of his collaborative translations (with Ned Thomas) of the Welsh language poet, Gwenallt. Though listed as unpublished and five in number by Coe (2004: 463) Jones draws attention to the posthumous 1975 publication in Planet of eight translations, and reproduces and analyses one of their number in his essay. Philip Tew’s ‘Otherness, post-coloniality and pedagogy in B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo (1964) and See the Old Lady Decently (1975)’ teases out the postcolonial concerns of two seldom combined works in a critical context provided by Homi K. Bhabha, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jürgen Habermas. As Tew argues, Johnson lived through a period of great transition for Britain in terms of both its status as a world power and its relations towards the formerly ruled colonial territories, and those about to break away from the ‘mother country’ (STOLD, 1). Johnson seems acutely aware of the practical tensions in the collapse of Empire. Tew shows how Johnson implicates everyday practices in the processes of racism, of social exclusion and of a general cultural misunderstanding while, unusually, centring the accounts in the culturally ambivalent persona of white working class males who inhabit hybrid positions themselves, achieved through education, new employment opportunities and a rejection by middle-class colleagues. Johnson blames the middle-classes and their institutions, and he challenges the myths concerned with the neutrality of liberal concern. His were not socio-critical positions that gained critical fashion among academics although, with the currently increasing interest in theories of masculinities, it might seem germane to recover Johnson’s work at least to pluralise and extend an understanding of that field. These hybrid white working class narrators are representations of Johnson himself and yet





serve as critiques (often sharp and incisive) of his own political and ideological positioning. Taking Johnson as a writer in the process of an overdue reclamation, Tew suggests that one strand of the work of this white, working-class, football-supporting intellectual was an awareness of the realities, issues and aesthetic implications of imperialism and the postcolonial period where we can recognise a precursor to Homi K. Bhabha’s idea that “Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively” (1994: 2) played out in his work.2 Johnson argued vehemently: “The novelist cannot legitimately or successfully embody present-day reality in exhausted forms,” (AYRY, 16). It is that very insistence on the incorporation of the present-day reality at every level that provides his work with its capacity to reflect what Paulo Freire describes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970): “Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for man as an uncompleted being conscious of his incompletion” (27). In attempting to unravel what happens in Johnson’s texts, Freire offers us both a contemporaneous source and, more importantly, a methodologically relevant early postcolonial stance and, like Johnson in Albert Angelo and See the Old Lady Decently, Freire understands both pedagogy and the process of naming as central factors in both oppression and in understanding (and disrupting) its hegemony. Johnson’s posthumous exclusion in terms of literary presence and reputation may confirm Freire’s observation that “the dominant class . . . [in] its distribution of benefits to some and penalties to others: all these are ways of dividing in order to preserve the system that favours the elite” (140–1). In a curious fashion Freire’s general analysis indicates a broad explanation of the effacement of the very specific type of voice with its radical perceptions that publishing and the academy in particular have formerly neglected in rejecting Johnson. In this collection, by drawing together a range of insightful new work, we hope to develop and encourage a thorough re-reading of Johnson’s texts and his presence in (and former absence from) academia, the classroom and broader literary culture.

Notes 1. Consider the contrast with the career of the late John Fowles whose experimentation pastiched the nineteenth century beloved of the postwar literary hegemony, rather than outrightly rejecting it as Johnson did, and who retreated from the public eye to craft his novels (expect a dull biography soon).



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Works cited Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Coe, Jonathan (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador. Ferrebe, Alice (2005) Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000: Keeping it Up, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. McHale, Brian (1987) Postmodern Fiction, London: Routledge. Stevenson, Randall (1986) The British Novel Since the Thirties: An Introduction, London: B. T. Batsford. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ——— (2005) ‘B. S. Johnson and the BBC: The Initial Contacts’ in Reading Without Maps: Cultural Landmarks in a Post-Canonical Age, Christophe Den Tandt (ed.), Brussels: Peter Lang, 119–33. Waugh, Patricia (1984) Metafiction: A Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London: Methuen. ——— (1995) Harvest of the Sixties, Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, Glyn (2005) Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction, Manchester: Manchester University Press.



2. By football, of course, we mean what Americans insist on calling soccer! Johnson was a lifelong fan of Chelsea Football Club about which he wrote in both Albert Angelo and The Unfortunates. This latter novel in part records his freelance job of a professional sports reporter for a national Sunday newspaper, The Observer.

Philip Tew

1933 5th February: Bryan Stanley William Johnson born; he lives with both parents, Stanley and Emily, in Hammersmith until his first wartime evacuation with his mother. 1937 Johnson attends Flora Gardens Primary School, Hammersmith. 1939 Johnson attends the village school in Chobham, Surrey, during twoyear unofficial evacuation with mother (described in Trawl ). 1941 Brief return to Hammersmith before evacuation to High Wycombe (described in Trawl ); he attends local school in Sands. 1944 Johnson attends Highfields Secondary Modern School; he fails his eleven-plus examination, therefore unable to attend his intended grammar school, Latymer. 1945 July: Johnson returns from evacuation to London to his parent’s new home in Barnes. 1947 He transfers to Kingston Day Commercial School. 14 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Chronology: Concerning Bryan Stanley Johnson

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1950 Johnson completes the School Certificate and graduates from school. Summer: a cycling holiday in France with school-friend Trev Leggett. December: he works as a junior trainee at a local National and Provincial Bank (an experience drawn upon in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry). 1951 June: he starts work as accounts clerk at Barnes Modern Builders. 1952 May: Johnson leaves Barnes Modern Builders. 1954 He works in wages department at Fullers Bakery in Hammersmith. September: he commences Latin classes with a private tutor as a preliminary to university entrance. 1955 January: Johnson sees a vision of the White Goddess, whom he believes was his muse and spirit. 21st March: Johnson commences a clerical post at Standard-Vacuum Oil Company (later Exxon/Mobil) on Kingsway, Holborn; here he meets Michael Bannard whose occultism and artistic and intellectual enthusiasms influenced Johnson. Summer: he visits Rome for a holiday. Autumn: Johnson commences foundation course for university entry at Birkbeck College where he meets Joyce Yates. 1956 He completes the Birkbeck Course. September: Johnson leaves his post at Standard-Vacuum Oil and enrols for a degree in English at King’s College London; during his time he contributes to and subsequently edits five editions of Lucifer, the arts magazine. 1957 Summer: Johnson undertakes a tour with King’s Drama Society. Autumn: he becomes editor of Lucifer; directs Jean Genet’s The Maids at King’s and for a national student drama festival.



Philip Tew

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1959 June/July: his girlfriend Muriel Starkey jilts him prior to finals, returning to previous boyfriend; Johnson graduates with a 2:2 (Lower Second) Class Honours degree in English from King’s College London. Summer: he travels and stays in Dublin with Richard Knight and John Holden; subsequently works as a barman and factotum at the Glyn Club, owned and run by James Martland, on the Lleyn peninsula, Wales. Winter (1959–60): he encounters Zulfikar Ghose through Universities Poetry and they meet frequently, becoming lifelong friends. Boxing Day (26th December): he commences Travelling People. 1960 Johnson works briefly as a private tutor and subsequently as a supply (substitute) teacher for Surrey County Council. He works with Zulfikar Ghose on Prepar-a-tory, an unpublished satire of British class-based society. Summer: he works as the manager of the Glyn Club, falling out with James Martland; these and the previous summer’s experiences form the basis of Travelling People. 1961 April: Johnson takes over Michael Bannard’s flat in Claremont Square, Islington; works subsequently as a supply teacher in the borough, which experiences form the basis of Albert Angelo. Summer: Johnson spends in Wales on Lleyn peninsula at Dwylan purportedly searching for the wreck of the Santa Cruz. Autumn: his friend from King’s, Stuart Crampin, almost dies after a climbing accident; Johnson’s Irish girlfriend, Kate, rejects him; Johnson increasingly obsessed with prophesy that he will die aged twenty-nine. October: he visits the home of Michael Bannard’s parents in a curious kind of pilgrimage. He completes Travelling People. 4th December: his first commissioned journalism published in Western Daily Press; Johnson continues work on journalistic commissions, reviews and sports reports variously until his death.



1958 Summer: he undertakes another King’s College Drama Society tour with Much Ado About Nothing, as described in Trawl.

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1962 Johnson undertakes a trip with Anthony Smith to the chateau Blauvac in Vaucluse, Provence. He commences Albert Angelo. He prepares Travelling People for publication. 1963 July: he meets Virginia Kimpton (later Johnson) at a party in Soho. July: he finishes writing Albert Angelo. Constable publishes Travelling People. 16th September: his first piece as sports reporter for the Observer appears. October: his first proposal of marriage to Virginia Kimpton, which she rejects. 14th October: Johnson commences a voyage on a trawler, the Northern Jewel, from Grimsby, which would form the basis of much of Trawl. November: the contract for Statement Against Corpses is signed. 1964 31st March: Johnson marries Virginia at registry office in Finsbury Town Hall. Albert Angelo is published by Constable. Poems is published by Constable in London and Chilmark Press in New York. Street Children with the text by Johnson and photographs by Julia Trevelyan Oman is published by Hodder & Stoughton. Travelling People: paperback edition is published by Corgi. August: two-week trip to the chateau at Blauvac, with Virginia, Zulfikar and Helena Ghose. Autumn: Johnson moves with Virginia from Claremont Square to nearby Myddleton Square. 14th November: Tony Tillinghast dies after a long struggle with cancer. 1965 June: Johnson commences Trawl. 20th July: a son, Steven, is born at St. Bartholomew’s [Bart’s] Hospital; after a request to the Chief Obstetrician, unusually for this period, Johnson is present at the birth. December: he completes Trawl.



Philip Tew


1966 Secker & Warburg publish Trawl. April: Johnson has a three-week holiday driving with Zulfikar and Helena Ghose to the Costa del Sol, Spain. July: he reports on the World Cup, including the final, for the Times of India. November: he shoots a test sequence of You’re Human Like the Rest of Them at Hugh Myddleton School in Islington. November–December: Johnson’s trip to Paris with Virginia, during which time they met Samuel Beckett. 1967 January: You’re Human Like the Rest of Them is shot, starring William Hoyland as Haakon. March: Johnson wins Somerset Maugham Award. Spring: he starts writing The Unfortunates. One Sodding Thing After Another and Whose Dog Are You? produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London. Travelling People and Albert Angelo: paperback editions published by Panther. September: Johnson completes The Unfortunates. Winter: for over three months until 1968 he lives in Paris as recipient of Somerset Maugham Award, meeting Samuel Beckett a number of times; Johnson writes script of film about The Unfortunates during his stay in France. 1968 22nd January: he meets Beckett for whom he privately screens You’re Human Like the Rest of Them; the film is shown at Tours Short Film Festival on 24th and awarded Grand Prix presented by Jean Arp; famously at dinner Jacques Tati playfully hits him. February: Johnson and Virginia pack up and leave flat; he returns briefly to London to deliver The Evacuees; subsequently the couple travel around France, visiting Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe in Aix-en-Provence. The Evacuees a collection of essays recollecting personal experiences edited by Johnson is published by Gollancz. Trawl: paperback edition is published by Panther. 16th April: a recording at Johnson’s flat of scenes for a BBC film about the conception and writing of The Unfortunates. May: filming of other scenes for the BBC film of The Unfortunates in Nottingham.



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June: he attends with (pregnant) Virginia short film festival in Cracow. November: Johnson and Virginia move from Myddleton Square to Dagmar Terrace; over the next few years his mother-in-law lives in the building’s self-contained basement flat. 12th December: Kate, a daughter, is born. 1969 March: Johnson is awarded £2,000 Arts Council bursary. February: Panther in association with Secker & Warburg publishes The Unfortunates. 22nd February: The Unfortunates broadcast on Release, BBC Two. 10th September: Johnson applies for the newly established Gregynog Arts Fellowship. 6–20th November: he undertakes a British Council trip to Hungary, visiting Budapest and Pécs. 1970 February: he commences House Mother Normal; he travels with family to Wales to take up the Gregynog six-month fellowship (sponsored by Welsh Arts Council and the University of Wales) during which time he prepares and finishes Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? 16th March: his appointment is attacked by the Daily Mail in an attack on the Arts Council for supporting ‘hippy’ art. 1st June: the Daily Mail publishes an apology. July: Johnson completes House Mother Normal. You’re Human Like the Rest of Them is published by Penguin in New English Dramatists Vol. 14. September: Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? rejected by Collins. December: Johnson commences Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. 1971 Trigram Press publishes 126 numbered copies of House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy, simultaneously to Collins produced a generally available hardback edition. 18–29th January: B. S. Johnson vs God runs at Basement Theatre 49 Greek Street, Soho, a programme featuring a stage version of You’re Human Like the Rest of Them between two lessons from Whose Dog Are You? directed by Michael Bakewell. Penguin Modern Stories 7 ( Johnson with Anthony Burgess, Susan Hill and Yehuda Amichai) is published by Penguin.



Philip Tew


5th December: Not Counting the Savages recorded for television by BBC, starring Hugh Burden and William Hoyland, directed by Mike Newell. 14th December: his mother (Emily) dies after a battle with cancer; Johnson is inconsolable, although he focuses his energies on his next novel from 31st January 1972. 1972 3rd January: Not Counting the Savages is broadcast by BBC television; Johnson regards it as a disaster. 6th January: the funeral and spreading of ashes of his mother takes place. End of January: the filming of ‘Hafod a Hendref ’’ read by Johnson as a short film near Gregynog. 31st January: an intense (almost manic) period of writing to complete Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry to fulfil his deadline. February–March: ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ is published in Planet. March: he completes Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. May: he undertakes a trip to Hungary as part of ACCT fact-finding delegation. A print-run of 250 copies of A Dublin Unicorn no. 5 of their Pamphlet Series is published in Nottingham by Byron Press. A limited edition of 126 copies and both a hardback and paperback editions of Poems Two is published simultaneously by Trigram Press. London Consequences, a collection of interlinked essays by writers featured anonymously and edited by Johnson and Margaret Drabble is published by the Greater London Arts Association. There is a competition to identify the writers. December: Johnson commences See the Old Lady Decently. 1973 30th January: BBC Radio London version of Christie Malry’s Own DoubleEntry is broadcast (with a repeat on 4th February), produced by Tom Vernon, read by Johnson with the voices of Michael Bakewell, Virginia and Diana Tyler. April: Johnson commences two-week British Council tour of Czechoslovakia, meeting Miroslav Holub. Collins publishes Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? published by Hutchinson. Not Counting the Savages and You’re Human Like the Rest of Them are published in Transatlantic Review, 45.



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Quartet publishes paperback edition of House Mother Normal. May: All Bull: The National Servicemen, edited by Johnson, is published in paperback by Quartet Books and hardback by Allison & Busby. May–June: with his family Johnson drives to France, Switzerland, Hungary and Czech Republic. A Hungarian translation of The Unfortunates, entitled Szerencsétlenek, is published in Budapest by Európa Konyvkiad, translated by Bart István. July: Johnson commences legal proceedings against BBC for stealing his concept for a programme about National Service; the corporation settles out of court. Johnson works on the collection, You Always Remember the First Time. Everybody Knows Somebody Who’s Dead, No. 9 in Covent Garden Stories series edited by Ronald Hayman is published in London by Covent Garden Press. Johnson learns that Secker & Warburg has pulped all unsold copies of The Unfortunates. September: completes See the Old Lady Decently. 19–27th October: he works on the shooting of Fat Man on a Beach. Johnson returns to London to increasing discord with Virginia. November: after violence towards her, Virginia flees with the children from the marital home to friends who live in Little Tew, Oxfordshire. 13th November: Johnson commits suicide in Dagmar Terrace, the marital home in Islington. His body is discovered on Virginia’s return from Little Tew. December: Stanley Johnson, Johnson’s father, dies. 1974 Quartet publishes paperback edition of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. Down Red Lane is published in Stand magazine. 12th November: Fat Man on a Beach is broadcast on ITV. 1975 Hutchison in London and Viking in New York publish posthumously See the Old Lady Decently. You Always Remember the First Time, edited by Johnson, Michael Bakewell and Giles Gordon is published by Quartet Books. Penguin Modern Poets 25 ( Johnson with Gavin Ewart and Zulfikar Ghose) is published by Penguin.



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1986 Bloodaxe publishes paperback edition of House Mother Normal. 1987 Paperback edition of Albert Angelo is published in New York by New Directions. 1997 The first PhD entirely concerned with Johnson, entitled Accepting the Known? Dialectical Thematics in B. S. Johnson, was successfully completed by Philip Tew at the University of Westminster. 1999 Picador republishes a revised edition of The Unfortunates in an amended format, edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Coe. 2000 A film version of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is shot, directed by Paul Tickell and starring Nick Moran. 2001 Manchester University Press publishes the first monograph on the author, B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading by Philip Tew. Picador publishes paperback edition of Christie Malry’s Own DoubleEntry, with a foreword by John Lanchester. 2002 The film version of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is released after post-9/11 hesitations by distributors. 2004 Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe is published by Picador. B. S. Johnson Omnibus edition published by Picador, containing Albert Angelo, Trawl and House Mother Normal.



1984 Penguin publishes paperback edition of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

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24th November: the first international academic conference on Johnson, entitled ‘B. S. Johnson and British Literature from the Late 1950s to the Early 1970s,’ is organised by the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies; the event is hosted by the University of Westminster, Regents Street, London. 2005 Coe’s biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, wins the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.



Philip Tew




Re-reading the Novels



Section One




David James

How, and why, readers behave in the ways they do towards the novel as a form prompted B. S. Johnson into some of his most resolute contentions about writing and response, creativity and cognition. Such contentions are brought instantly to the fore in his parodic attempt at writing his ‘memoirs’: For readers it is often said that they will go on reading the novel because it enables them [. . .] to exercise their imaginations, that that is one of its chief attractions for them, that they may imagine the characters and so on for themselves. Not with my novels [. . .]; I want my ideas to be expressed so precisely that the very minimum of room for interpretation is left. Indeed I would go further and say that to the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure. I want him to see my (vision), not something conjured out of his own imagination. How is he supposed to grow unless he will admit others’ ideas? If he wants to impose his imagination, let him write his own books. That may be thought to be anti-reader; but think a little further, and what I am really doing is challenging the reader to prove his own existence as palpably as I am proving mine by the act of writing. (AYRY 28) For Johnson, reading is an empathic activity only insofar as it is also critically interactive, self-scrutinising, foregoing all habits and predispositions. A recent ‘cognitive turn’ in literary studies, prioritising the reader’s reciprocal relationship with the text, lends a compelling prescience to Johnson’s assertions.1 But if he anticipates this pragmatic notion of criticism as circulation between text, reader and methodology, he does so in ways that 27 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


The (W)hole Affect: Creative Reading and Typographic Immersion in Albert Angelo

The (W)hole Affect

contradict a purely schematic model of interpretation. What I want to chart here is the extent to which Johnson self-consciously formulates a model of creative reading, a model that highlights his use of typographical layout itself as the vehicle for challenging his readers to ‘prove’ their ‘existence’ as they interact with the variability and volatility of his words in type. Because of the journalistic response it provoked with its infamous hole beginning page 149, Albert Angelo (1964) offers a superb test case. The novel’s graphic design exemplifies Johnson’s effort to coerce his readers to ‘think a little further’ about the cognitive roles they assume when reading narrative fiction, coercing them to scrutinise interpretation itself as a provisional practice replete with cherished methodological habits. Johnson’s strategies for contesting the critical tendencies of his readers offer not so much a prescription than a request. His plea certainly chimes with Derek Attridge’s recent idea that ‘creative reading is not one that overrides the work’s conventionally determined meanings in the name of imaginative freedom but rather one that, in its striving to do full justice to the work, is obliged to go beyond existing conventions’ (2004: 80). This is well in tune with Johnson’s call for his putative readers to ‘think a little further’ and challenge their own hermeneutic preconceptions. And Attridge notes that to ‘read creatively [. . .] involves a suspension of habits, a willingness to rethink old positions in order to apprehend the work’s inaugural power’ (80). For Johnson, the site generating that inaugural power was the page itself. Coming to a close in Albert Angelo’s ‘Disintegration’ episode, he declares that ‘[a] page is an area on which I may place any signs I consider to communicate most nearly what I have to convey’ (AA 176). Conceived as an ‘area’, each printed ‘page’ occasions a typographical correlative to the reader’s progress from event to event. Each narrator in House Mother Normal (1971) oscillates between occasional dialogue and inner reminiscence, and the placement of words on every page synchronises these sudden lapses from speech to contemplation. Clipped phrases serve to segment the layout of sentences, accumulating into smattered paragraphs that visually record the narrators’ cerebrations. Gleaming with shards of silent remembrance and snatches of conversation, every new paragraph resounds with the residue of interior thoughts while typographically embodying their swell and subsidence. Over successive chapters in House Mother Normal, each stand-alone monologue offers an evocative temporal-typographic mapping, as it were, of an interrupted and often horrifically chaotic sequence of events for speakers who oscillate vulnerably between observation and selfreflection. Albert Angelo is equally absorbing in this visual respect, and



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certainly qualifies Jonathan Coe’s assertion that ‘if Johnson’s work stands up better today than most of the writing of his “experimental” peers, this has everything to do with the fact that he refused—or was unable—to sacrifice intensity of feeling on the altar of formal ingenuity’ (2004: 22). What is so immersing in the case of Albert Angelo is the extent to which Albert’s interior reflections emanate from that same formal reciprocity, demonstrated in stricter terms by House Mother Normal, between sectionalised page-layout and sensory perception. Both novels are pre-eminent in Johnson’s corpus for epitomising the capacity of ‘moveable type’, as Christopher Collins puts it, to ‘create a new advance in phantasia, which we might term “typographic imaging”’ (quoted in Schwenger, 1999: 14). Moreover, as I will attempt to show, Johnson is also being fundamentally self-reflexive. For typography also becomes a means of directing questions back upon the author’s own ability to provoke his audience into reading creatively. As we shall see, Albert Angelo is the scene of an interrogation of its author’s capacity to enlist the reader in a campaign to transform the novel as a genre for conveying experiential truth. It’s a campaign to which Johnson committed without reservation to pursue what Christie Malry calls a ‘continuous dialogue with form’ (CMODE 166). Johnson affirms his singular attention to the page’s visual arrangement in a postscript ‘note on metre’ to his first collection of Poems (1964). In pointing out that ‘[m]any of the poems in this book are written in syllabic metres’, his compulsion is to make the reading public more aware of how they might customarily negotiate between lyric and blank verse. ‘Since most poetry reaches its audience in printed form, a metre which is easily apprehended visually, as any syllabic one is, would seem to be more appropriate than those metres which depend upon sound, like stress or quantitative ones’. The guiding imperative here, shaping his poetic decisions as in his narrative fiction, is the concern with how best to use any one literary mode as a vehicle for getting as close as possible to the true experience of human action, perception and speech. ‘Syllabic metres’, insists Johnson, ‘enable a poet to use rhythms (particularly those of colloquial speech) which are very difficult to accommodate without strain in stress metres’ (Poems 53). The primacy of visible form for Johnson raises the question of how typography can be refashioned and arranged to intensify the reader’s engagement with, and eventual immersion in, depicted events and emotions—a question also posed to the writer’s ability to visibly encapsulate in graphic style the complex undulations and ‘rhythms’ of even the most ‘colloquial speech’.



David James 29

The (W)hole Affect

With this same twin trajectory of provocation and innovation, Albert Angelo leads us some distance from Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘implied reader’. For Iser, the reader ‘actually causes the text to reveal its potential multiplicity of connections. These connections are the product of the reader’s mind working on the raw material of the text, though they are not of the text itself—for this consists just of sentences, statements, information, etc’ (1974: 278). Johnson would no doubt abhor the pejorative use of the word ‘just’ here, when Iser solicits the dismissal of the physical page as somehow inert, its text only impassive ‘raw material’. Iser would later revise this kind of notional separation of reader and page, of sense perception and printed typesetting, by appreciating how readerly emotion circulates with aesthetic form. But in his early framework the text very much appears as the product of its audience’s conceptual apparatus—at once the destination of heuristic conjecture and the sounding board for critical theory’s ancillary concerns. For Johnson, however, as Albert Angelo so vividly demonstrates, typography was not simply a blank canvas of typeset symbols awaiting the efforts of an agile reader, poised to exercise their imagination. On the contrary, graphic techniques should be deployed purposefully, with affective consequences for the observer: Thus a specifically-designed type-character draws attention to physical descriptions which I believe tend to be skipped, do not usually penetrate. To convey what a particular lesson is like, the thoughts of a teacher are given on the righthand side of a page in italic, with his pupils’ speech on the left in roman, so that, though the reader obviously cannot read both at once, when he has read both he will have seen that they are simultaneous and have enacted such simultaneity for himself. (AYRY 23) Characteristically, Johnson sounds prescriptive, when in fact he is passing on advice. He emphasises that a reader’s engagement with the tangible layout of Albert Angelo can, and should be, immanently performative. That is to say, our reflexive interaction with aspects of its typography should be enacted across the text as a whole. Johnson is clearly insistent upon the power of visible form in mediating his reader’s emotional and pragmatic transactions with the text. In the passage quoted above, he proffers a set of programme notes about how, in the first half of its ‘Development’ section, Albert Angelo’s dual columns should ideally be entertained. His glacial commentary shifts into self-assured oratory; its rather dry methodological instructions resound in their future-anterior



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tense as infallible predictions, predicting the ‘simultaneity’ the reader ‘will and have seen’ and ‘have enacted . . . for himself’. Yet his insistence here is discursive rather than prescriptive: in critical terms, a more heuristic than systematic set of prerogatives emerges. For Johnson is not inimical to the belief in comprehension as a highly itinerant activity—receptive, if not liable, to unforeseen resolutions. Indeed, he would use one of the many self-parodically paranoid interjections in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) to confess: ‘What writer can compete with the reader’s imagination!’ (CMODE 51). Occurring in the last novel published in his lifetime, this rhetorical question/declaration can be inferred as an elegy to the method of authorial self-scrutiny Johnson pursued from the outset. He concedes that his imperative has a potentially manic aspect, admitting late in Albert Angelo’s incisive climax that ‘since each reader brings to each word his own however slightly different idiosyncratic meaning, how can I be expected to make my own’ (AA 170). With this self-satiric gesture of being unable to compete with an imaginatively creative reader, Albert Angelo offers a knowing exhibition of form’s inability to crystallise meaning, its inability to stabilise signification in the face of that interpretive autonomy which every new audience ‘brings to each word’. Thereby Johnson not only turns dissonance into a formal attribute, but also implies that such an approach to the novel as a form can advertise the artistry from which it is fashioned and embrace the ethos of self-exposition to which Johnson so candidly subscribes. Mid-point in his lesson, Albert waxes introspective to concur that ‘form should be honest, should be honestly exposed’ (AA 81). For readers today, Johnson’s bequest is that we remain cognizant of this interaction between soma and graphic symbol, touch and typeface. ‘Disintegration’ compels us to think about how reading has less to do with witnessing events unfold than with interpretation as an event in its own right. To Johnson, readers should ideally aspire to the acute selfconsciousness which he himself achieves: —–look, I’m trying to tell you something of what I feel about being a poet in a world where only poets care anything real about poetry, through the objective correlative of an architect who has to earn his living as a teacher. this device you cannot have failed to see creaking, ill-fitting at many places, many places, for architects manqués can earn livings very nearly connected with their art, and no poet has ever lived by his poetry, and architecture has a functional aspect quite lacking in poetry, and, simply, architecture is just not poetry. (AA 168)



David James 31

The (W)hole Affect

Reading turns into an estranging activity of recalling and dissecting what we ‘cannot have failed to see’, thereby confirming the ‘creaking’ techniques for whose imperfections Johnson upbraids himself. ‘Disintegration’ thus offers more than simply a reflection in print of its creator’s epistemological blitz; it modulates tonally as well, sliding from mimesis into confession, thereby revising the conditions under which we empathise with the brute penalties of Johnson’s self-laceration: —–Faced with the enormity of life, all I can do is to present a paradigm of truth to reality as I see it: and there’s the difficulty: for Albert defecates for instance only once during the whole of this book: what sort of a paradigm of the truth is that? (AA 170) A tensile relationship emerges here between a generic ‘reader’ and the book as the remnant of its own brittle ‘paradigm of truth’. Tipping the novel’s disposition towards despair, Johnson radically undercuts our prior evaluations of its previously authoritative narrator. Such changes in spoken sentiment, though, entail more than our reconsideration of narratorial veracity. It is not that we take Johnson’s intrusion simply as evidence of an untrustworthy commentator, but that we find ourselves participating in a forum debate. Issues of unreliability in the novel’s penultimate section hold conference with the corporeal presence of its author—an author conceding the difficulties of securing his own definitive meanings, since they circulate amid all those ‘slightly different’ inferences ‘each reader brings to each word’. That Albert Angelo is so mercilessly selfeviscerating at this late stage may alter the currency of our critical concerns. But such is the integrity of Johnson’s high-wire performance, when substituting his character’s literal actions with his own language of selfreproach, that his switch from Albert’s world into this mordant metafictional one is achieved without surrendering the grounds for empathic immersion as the novel draws to a close. Conscripting us in participative forms of engagement, Johnson thus compels us to reconsider the evolving nature of hermeneutic enticement. No longer is it productive for scholars to revisit Albert Angelo as a mere eccentric artefact ripe for inspection using the latest narratological tools; far from being a self-enclosed corral for eccentric literary experiments, the novel strenuously impels us to leave our most revered literary-critical terms open to unanticipated eventualities. Its narrative enriches what Iser has called the play of reading itself as a ‘to-and-fro movement’, that reciprocity of reader and semantic inference amid the ‘coexistence of the



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mutually exclusive’ (1989: 255). With his contrapuntal finale of social prosecution and uncompromising self-indictment, Johnson raises his vocal temper to one of simultaneous agitation and inducement. His closing refrain sanctions our absorption in the text on the condition that we remain alive to the estranging imposition of typography’s sudden, unforeseen rearrangements. ‘Unexpectedness, of course’, as I. A. Richards reasoned long ago, ‘is an obvious technical resource for the artist’ (1959: 167). And by the end of the ‘Disintegration’ section, surprise and interruption are what sustain our concentration. At the climax of Albert Angelo, we are drawn into a more collusive relationship with an obstreperous writer, one speaking in a confessional tenor at once forthright and vulnerable. This sudden switch of mode signifies an intensive kind of authorial self-exposure. Readers are now captivated less by impressions of a protagonist’s mind under duress as they are impressed upon by the novelist’s own selfincriminations. As Johnson recalls in Aren’t You Rather Young: ‘I really discovered what I should be doing with Albert Angelo where I broke through the English disease of the objective correlative to speak truth directly if solipsistically in the novel form, and heard my own small voice’ (AYRY 22). Pursuing the efficacy of typographic devices for conveying the subjectivity of that voice, Johnson deemed that certain visual devices could intensify his reader’s sense of involvement in events unfolding for character and writer alike: —–And another of my aims is didactic: the novel must be a vehicle for conveying truth, and to this end every device and technique of the printer’s art should be at the command of the writer: hence the future-seeing holes, for instance, as much to draw attention to the possibilities as to make my point about death and poetry. [. . .] To dismiss such techniques as gimmicks, or to refuse to take them seriously, is crassly to miss the point. (AA 175–6) What this incessant self-analysis on Johnson’s part serves to reveal is how far Albert Angelo problematises its own definition as a novel. Ruptured paragraphs and linguistic aphasia make the material text vividly palpable, visually and tonally ‘crystalliz[ing] genreness’, in Michael McKeon’s phrase, ‘self-consciously incorporating, as part of its form, the problem of its own categorical status’ (2000: 5). Johnson invites exactly this kind of hermeneutic circularity between categories that permeate and contest one another. This circulation stirs into action what Richards—speaking



David James 33

The (W)hole Affect

like the ancestor of Iser’s latest notions of play—identified as a reader’s ‘recondite interactions between what appear to be totally different activities of the nervous system’ (1989: 232). Johnson alerts his readers to their sentient transference with a printed page that embodies the very appeal that it voices, both occasioning and advertising the successful end-result of an author remaining in ‘command’ over his ‘printer’s art’. Rather than inviting consensual agreement, Johnson (playfully?) endangers our received literary values. Indeed, if Albert Angelo equates play with provocation, then the poetics of agitation is Johnson’s defining achievement. The novel deals in the explosive fusion of enticement and frustration, epitomising the sense that ‘Involvement and distance’, as Rita Felski has recently advised, ‘are not necessarily opposed but may fold into each other repeatedly as we read’ (2003: 45).2 Johnson elaborates upon this push-and-pull register of engagement but he does not allow the idea of comprehension as consensus to take root. The text’s finale is unrelenting in this agitating respect; denying summary conclusions, it spirals away from any ostensible plot by dissolving before our eyes into declarative autobiography. Readers encounter there an author-figure speaking retrospectively about the status of the narrative they’ve just read, and in such a way that highlights the kinds of hermeneutical preconceptions upon which they have relied when reading that narrative as fiction. I want to end by closely unpacking a telling aspect of Johnson’s selfdefence in the wake of Albert Angelo’s publication. It is a defence whose style is not entirely defensive; on the contrary, from its combative tone emerges a complex kind of concession, a concession delivered on behalf of the rigour and beneficence required when reading a novel creatively. Warding off charges of self-indulgence made against Albert Angelo, Johnson was insistent on the rationale behind his exploitation of what he called ‘the technological fact of the bound book’ (AYRY 25). He was all too mindful that the novel’s graphic inventions remained susceptible to the way ‘Many readers, I should not be surprised to learn if appropriate evidence were capable to being researched, do not read such descriptions at all but skip to the next dialogue or more readily assimilable section’ (CMODE 51). When responding in August 1964 to Anthony Smith’s worries about the novel’s inventions being received as merely eccentric or obscure, Johnson asserted that ‘no one else is in a position to know’ what his intentions were (quoted in Coe, 2004: 169). The implication is that critics should become aware of their tendency to presuppose Johnson’s intent at the novel’s climax, that is, when they attempt



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David James 35

It is a Brechtian device if you like: it poses this question, which I keep asking, but no one answers, least of all reviewers and critics, if you accept that serious literature is about some telling of truth believed in by the author, how does he convey that truth in a vehicle of fiction? The two terms are diametrically opposed. Why is there no need to make the theme of the book explicit? Who has done split-column before, which you say is not completely original? I have asked around, and there are people (the majority of those I have asked) who say they did not cheat over the holes. What evidence have you for saying that everyone without exception will? (Quoted in Coe, 2004: 169) Johnson points here to the agility of his audience. By questioning empirical, flesh-and-blood readers over the issue of whether they entertained the pretensions of Albert Angelo’s typography, Johnson highlights the propensity of literary journalists to reduce literary innovation to sarcasm and parody. In vulgarising experimentalism, such reviewers are damaging inasmuch as they pre-empt public response. By recycling unsympathetic views of novelistic experiment, they deny autonomy to the reading public addressed by a weekly press. Johnson’s defence, though, also reveals a more thoroughgoing concern. What the letter here demonstrates is a gesture of self-inspection, all but muffled by the forthright tone in which he denounces the charge of obscurantism against his aesthetic. He accepts the fact that there is precisely no way of measuring how far readers will respond to the page-holes as having their desired effect of stimulating our anticipation of forthcoming narrative events. Yet he points to this discrepancy between intention and outcome as a fact of life for any writer. The hermeneutic manoeuvres of his audience can never be wholly predicted, let alone prescribed. To this extent, Albert Angelo renders redundant the monolithic idea of a ‘model reader’; it again endorses a notion of reading as an inherently interactive undertaking. Johnson’s heated defence gives way to a compelling self-exposé. For what he is introducing into that transaction between reader and novel form is a certain contingency, neglected or ignored by journalists: he knowingly compromises his own certainty as to whether any of his readers are likely to respond to Albert Angelo in optimum ways. By envisaging the novel’s readership as a



to diagnose why he cracks open Albert Angelo’s fictional mould on the plinth of lived experience:

The (W)hole Affect

collective who, in their ‘majority’, might actively refuse to ‘cheat over the holes’, Johnson extends here the specific task of convincing sceptics into a more ongoing task of authorial self-interrogation. It’s as though the assertiveness with which he wants to convince others (like Anthony Smith) of his technical rationale reproduces the temper of his very own self-conviction. Hence, what Johnson called for in 1963, the need for reviewers to make an effort ‘to examine the validity of my reasons for a new approach, for the necessity of experiment’ (quoted in Coe, 2004: 144) was a demand directed outwards at his audience; but it was equally directed inwards, part of his own self-scrutinising sensibility. Johnson’s inventive approach to the novel as a form therefore braided two distinct processes, one about creation, the other concerning cognition: occasioning his intellectual hopes for the possibilities of narrative art, the page remained a site to be liberated from the uniformity of standard block-print. By lending a new plasticity to typesetting, he would continue in subsequent works to remain intolerant of intellectual laziness in his readers, ever denying their withdrawal into states of unreceptive passivity. In effect, this tactic of springing typographic surprises on the reader would allow him to traverse formal boundaries in a way that required his audience to renew their own tactics for keeping pace with his border-crossing approach. The profoundly dialogical nature of this exchange between form and response, and between technique and critical practice reminds us of the specificity of Johnson’s motivating position. Our evaluations today need to particularise this commitment to experimentation by retaining something of the distinctiveness of his impulse to transgress the edifice of genre, rather than simply aligning it with other avant-garde novelists of the 1960s and 70s, such as Christine Brooke-Rose or Alan Burns. Equally, is there any mileage to be had from continuing to highlight the inevitable affinities of Johnson’s style with innovators from an earlier paradigm stretching back to Beckett and Joyce?3 For part of the lacuna surrounding Johnson’s status is the paucity of attention given to such issues of aesthetic value and distinction so earnestly pronounced across his work. That Johnson is ever challenging us to ‘think a little further’ when responding creatively to his prose points to just one of the many reflexive processes of self-examination by which he challenged himself as an innovator. As he insisted when prefacing The Unfortunates, the page operates as nothing less than a ‘tangible metaphor for the random way the mind works’ (quoted in Coe, 1999: xii). By sustaining the affecting aspects of this visual principle through its most ludic episodes, Albert Angelo demonstrates that the ‘raw material’, as Iser called it, of such an argumentative text can gain a somatic purchase on the



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David James 37

Notes 1. See Stockwell’s account (2002: chaps. 1 and 11) of the ‘return of the reader’ in recent cognitive linguistic approaches to literary comprehension and emotional response. 2. Predicting Felski’s remarks, Susan Sontag had in mind one of Johnson’s most eminent admirers, Samuel Beckett, when discussing audience engagement as a twofold phenomenon infusing absorption and discomfiture: ‘Before a fully conscious work of art, one feels something like the mixture of anxiety, detachment, pruriency, and relief that a physically sound person feels when he glimpses an amputee’ (2001: 29–30). 3. On the need to reassert the singularity of Johnson’s aesthetic project, see Tew (2001: esp. chaps. 1, 2 and 5): ‘Remarks upon similarities to Joyce, Samuel Beckett and John Fowles most especially characterize Johnson criticism, or are even made in brief allusions to his work, and are made in a fashion that serves to cast doubt upon his originality’ (131). This tendency to ‘locat[e] Johnson as presenting a manner of inferior homology’ needs to be superseded by ‘more appropriate descriptions of Johnson’s creative adjacency to other writers, his incorporation of cultural and literary ideas, and his idiosyncratic development of theoretical ideas’ (132).

Works cited Attridge, Derek (2004) The Singularity of Literature, London: Routledge. Coe, Jonathan (1999) ‘Introduction’ to B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates, London: Picador. ——— (2004) Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Felski, Rita (2003) Literature After Feminism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Iser, Wolfgang (1974) The Implied Reader, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——— (1989) Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnson, B. S. (1964) Poems, London: Constable. McKeon, Michael, ed. (2000) Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Richards, I. A. (1959) [1924] Principle of Literary Criticism, London: Routledge. Schwenger, Peter (1999) Phantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sontag, Susan (2001) [1967] ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ in Styles of Radical Will, London: Vintage, 3–34. Stockwell, Peter (2002) Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.



reader, making every ‘tangible’ page a new stage in a reciprocal debate. Addressing its readers as an active, participatory audience, the novel places us today in the company of an authorial presence whose own critical legacy garners and incites a creative sense of irresolution.

Robert Bond

Commentators on B. S. Johnson’s semi-autobiographical 1964 novel Albert Angelo have returned repeatedly to Johnson’s investigation into the tension between lived urban experience and fictional constructions. Philip Tew, in B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (2001: 21), notes that the competing claims of autobiographical ‘authenticity’ and fictional ‘artifice’ are raised most explicitly, and explosively, within the novel’s fourth section, ‘Disintegration’. Here the writer intrudes into the narrative in vivid vernacular, asserting ‘im my hero’ even while metafictionally ‘trying to say something about writing’. —–fuck all this lying look what im really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture trying to say something about writing about my writing im my hero though what a useless appellation my first character then im trying to say something about me through him albert an architect when whats the point in covering up covering up covering over pretending pretending. (AA 167) The fictive conversion of Bryan Johnson into Albert Albert is held up as a depersonalising veil; a mirage of ‘lies’ (167) which is soon rent, further on in ‘Disintegration’, by the inclusion of personal family details: ‘my parents used to live in Hammersmith but now live in Barnes’ (172). Johnson’s demand that ‘the novel must be a vehicle for conveying truth’ (175)—the truth of his own experience—can be seen to represent the biography of the native Londoner as a form of predetermination: this is how things are, Johnson maintains, as if in defence against contingency or change. Fictional constructs are 38 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Pentonville Modernism: Fate and Resentment in Albert Angelo

Robert Bond

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—–Faced with the enormous detail, vitality, size, of this complexity, of life, there is a great temptation for a writer to impose his own pattern, an arbitrary pattern which must falsify, cannot do anything other than falsify; or he invents, which is pure lying. Looking back and imposing a pattern to come to terms with the past must be avoided. Lies, lies, lies. (AA 170) For Johnson fictional form is inauthentic because it supplies us with a contingent or arbitrary means of coming to terms with our past experience. A fictional ‘pattern’ is suggested to be a lie precisely insofar as it reconciles us to the past, and stills ongoing conflicts and tensions within a pristine aesthetic form. The traditional novel, Johnson argues, must be avoided because it legitimises acceptance of the past, and pretends that we can grasp its significance confidently. Hence even while it holds up ‘authentic’ London experience as a form of fate, Johnson’s novel, in its modernist experimentalism, also echoes Theodor Adorno’s critique of the traditional realist novel’s submission to fate—to the ‘epic precept of objectivity or material concreteness’— in his talk on ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’ (1954). Nowadays, anyone who continued to dwell on concrete reality the way [Adalbert] Stifter, for instance, did, and wanted to derive his impact from the fullness and plasticity of a material reality contemplated and humbly accepted, would be forced into an imitative stance that would smack of arts and crafts. He would be guilty of a lie: the lie of delivering himself over to the world with a love that presupposes that the world is meaningful; and he would end up with insufferable kitsch along the lines of a local-colour commercialism. (Adorno, 1991: 30) Johnson’s wariness of imposing a fictional ‘arbitrary pattern’ matches Adorno’s wariness of a realist novel’s lying ‘artistic treatment of mere existence’ (Ibid.), which would deliver us to an unquestioned capitalist reality. Adorno proposed that because the modernist novel’s ‘new reflection takes a stand against the lie of representation’ (1991: 34), it can refuse to accept the seeming fatedness of commercialised existence. Modernist



accused of reshaping biographical detail—‘truth’—into an ‘arbitrary pattern’, falsity:

Pentonville Modernism

subjectivism is the crucial element: Adorno’s talk lauds that ‘subjectivism that leaves no material untransformed and thereby undermines the epic precept of objectivity or material concreteness’ (Adorno, 1991: 30). In what follows, I want to look more closely at the modernist subjectivism of Albert Angelo, and show how Johnson’s foregrounding of Albert’s north Londoner’s resentment, in particular, is closely related to the way in which his novel questions the seeming predetermination of our capitalist experience.

Resentment as fate/ Resentment of fate Johnson himself was notoriously awkward, and among his novels Albert Angelo especially is packed with disaffection, disappointment and resentment. Johnson’s personal experience of working in north London schools coloured his presentations of a hopeless teaching environment, which anticipate James Kelman’s in A Disaffection (1989). They sit, large and awkward at the aluminium-framed tables and chairs, men and women, physically, whom you are for today trying to help to teach to take places in a society you do not believe in, in which their values already prevail rather than yours. Most will be wives and husbands, some will be whores and ponces: it’s all the same; any who think will be unhappy, all who don’t think will die. (AA 47) Perhaps in an attempt to balance these cruel and pessimistic portraits Johnson also includes ‘verbatim transcripts’ of what his students have written about him (see Coe, 2004: 142). As a result, as Tew notes, Albert Angelo offers ‘a collage of perspectives and forms surrounding his [Albert’s] career uncertainties, the vicissitudes of temporary teaching and Albert’s feelings of isolation and betrayal’ (2001: 21). Regular trips to the multi-ethnic all-night cafés of Cable Street offer intimations of hopeful rebellion, of change: ‘in revolt, in desperation almost, we become like delinquent teachers in going to places like the Strasse and doing various other things (or thinking about doing them) which would blight our laughable teaching careers if they were known’ (AA 52). But the novel combines such nocturnal potential freedoms, sparked by a sense of alliance with immigrant ‘outcasts, misfits’ (Ibid.), with a daytime creed of conformism and acceptance. Long tracts of postExistentialism, echoing Hannah Arendt’s title The Human Condition



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Robert Bond

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This is what is called the human predicament, or the human condition, or the human situation. ‘Predicament’, ‘condition’, and ‘situation’, in this case are all words which mean something like ‘fix’, ‘jam’, ‘awkward position’. And being human as you all are means that you are in this ‘awkward fix’ of enjoying the good things whilst at the same time having to suffer the bad things, whether or not anyone or any God created it. (AA 56) Albert continues to ideologise on behalf of what Adorno called ‘a material reality contemplated and humbly accepted’, when he tells his class to ‘face up to being human, to being in the human predicament, and accept with dignity everything, but everything, that happens to you in any way whatsoever’ (AA 58). Albert’s sermonising to his pupils, I would suggest, couples an illusory dispersal of social resentment and disaffection—through the application of an ethos of acceptance—with a proto-Thatcherite emphasis on individual responsibility and selfreliance. Albert advises his class that ‘you can accept responsibility for everything, but absolutely everything, that happens to you: for who else is there to do so?’ (AA 57). This sort of individualist moralism, which works to abstract the subject from the social determinants of his or her resentment, is just one of the problematic effects of the novel’s subjectivism. Within this context there is also the issue of authenticity which is promoted by the text’s foregrounding of autobiographical material. In ‘Disintegration’ Johnson defines his writing as the authentic experiential expression of his own lived disappointment: ‘It is about frustration. —– The poetry comes from the suffering. [. . .] For the poetry any suffering is endurable’ (AA 169). But if his writing is conceived of as an expression of his lack of fulfilment, which represents for him ‘truth’ or authenticity, how could he continue to write if the frustration should stop? Johnson’s commitment to relaying his London autobiography can thus work simply to assert the supposed fatedness of deprived experience. Indeed in Albert Angelo urban experience itself can be presented as a confirmation of fatedness, or of the belief (anticipating Iain Sinclair who claims to be ‘congenitally incapable of accepting the notion of “accident”’ [1997: 104]) that there are ‘no coincidences’ in the city. Bus routes become provocations for numerological analysis and hence



(1958), are washed over Albert’s resentment, as he attempts to convince himself that his misery is necessary and fated.

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I catch with my father a number twenty-seven bus several minutes after arriving at the bus-stop in Hammersmith Road at the end of North End Road. [. . .] We could have caught a number nine or a number seventy-three, to place them in numerical order, had either of these splendid numbers been opportune. [. . .] The numbers are related: the square root of nine, three, multiplied by nine gives you twentyseven; and seven added to three brings you back to nine again, if you take one off. Furthermore, there is a three in seventy-three. The numbers of these three (again!) buses running along the Hammersmith Road are not related by accident, these things are no coincidences. (AA 26)

Albert’s ‘vocation’ Albert’s local neo-Gothic architecture—‘the pseudo-Gothic excrescences of Scott’s St. Pancras’—prompts some additional resentful self-commentary on his diminished experience, concerning his recently failed relationship. I wonder shall I come to accept St. Pancras station, living so near? Or even to like it? Perhaps it is fatal to live so near to St. Pancras for an architect? Certainly it would be to bring up children here: their aesthetic would be blighted. But it seems unlikely that I shall be allowed to bring up children here. (AA 20) Again the novel’s subjectivism—here, the expression of the belief that he is forbidden to raise a family—works to assert the supposed fatedness of reduced experience; Albert is forbidding his own fatherhood, in order to assert his social marginality and singularity once again. The text later stresses that Albert’s disaffected and marginal perspective is utterly singular: his very outcast’s position is not identical to that of his friend Terry. ‘I don’t quite know what he [Terry] means by this, as with a number of his remarks: they, like himself, are sort of offset to reality, as mine are, too, but it’s a different offset’ (AA 53). The novel also sustains Albert’s claim to singularity through its foregrounding of the specialised architectural knowledge in which he was trained, before he found himself unable to practice as an architect. Albert is singular, the text asserts, because he (still) has a vocation. The novel’s fragmentary presentation



another confirmation of the diminishment of experience—in this case to the number three:

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of Albert’s architectural expertise itself draws attention to precisely qualities of immanence and inwardness, and so to Albert’s own subjective specialisation and individuation. Spliced into the ‘Development’ section of the novel is a lengthy extract from Paul Frankl’s 1962 study Gothic Architecture, which opens with the section heading ‘The Development of the Gothic Style seen as an Immanent Process’ (AA 66) as if also describing the subjectivism of Albert Angelo. On one (anti-modernist) level this offers an internal map of a given, supposedly fated subjectivity. Frankl defines Gothic architecture as an improvisational response to a building’s immanent, existing condition: ‘The architects were intent simply upon making necessary improvements. As far as can be reconstructed, this was a process of trial and error which led to the replacement of diagonal, wooden centering arches by the stone cintre permanent, that is the rib’ (AA 67). Frankl’s account of the process of improvisational Gothic development—‘an immanent, or an internal one’—grounds this architectural process in the specialisation of labour: ‘Just as mastermasons did not determine the form of the liturgy or indulge in metaphysics, so the clergy did not build scaffolding’ (AA 67–8). In ‘Disintegration’, Johnson similarly roots his novel’s improvisational modernist subjectivism in its determination by the division of labour: ‘So it’s nothing to you that I am rabbeting on about being a poet and having to earn a living in other ways: but what about your own sector of the human condition then?’ (AA 169). Importantly, Johnson’s own vocation as a poet or novelist is contrasted with the procedure of earning a living within a capitalist economy, just as is Albert’s architectural vocation: Today I can spend at my board, working, how marvellous, a whole day free to work, to do real work, my work, real work, vocation. I can put in a really hard day on the arts centre design. [. . .] . . . the real satisfaction, even with success, whatever that means, would be in the work itself, as it is now, the real satisfaction, in the work. When I’ve done something, hewn it from my mind, then when it’s actually built does not seem to matter, really, it’s an accident, a commercial or economic accident, quite beyond my control. (AA 103) When Albert feels he has really ‘done something’, fulfilled his vocation, he knows the self-realisation achievable by free self-activity. His authentic product, his design, is only that which he hews from his own mind. If it should be put on the market and built, his design becomes no longer his product but a commodity: accidental like any other commodity, subject to



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Albert and Adorno Why indeed should the products of human labour become the playthings of arbitrary mercantile whim, or of the irrational rationality of an inequitable market system? For Albert, at least, it has become irrelevant when, or if, his designs should be fated to be economically thrown into the random category marked ‘success’. Albert is himself most appealing when he forgets his resentment, remembers his vocation, and lets us see that fundamentally he just doesn’t care. Albert’s alienated experience of the city has removed him from any notion of collective or collaborative labour. As we have seen, his vocationalism—his attachment to the particular specialism of architecture—is related to the novel’s ideology of inwardness and individuation. On one, biographical, level the subjectivism of Albert Angelo is anti-modernist, because Johnson clings to a concept of integral, authentic subjective experience. According to Adorno: ‘the identity of experience in the form of a life that is articulated and possesses internal continuity – and that life was the only thing that made the narrator’s stance possible – has disintegrated’ (1991: 31). Albert Angelo’s subjectivism registers this, and we have the section of the narrative explicitly titled ‘Disintegration’. This is why the novel can challenge its own ideology of individuation, which sets up Albert’s architectural vocation as another form of fate—‘faith in a concept, in a particular virtue which must of absolute necessity be its own reward’ (AA 125)—a privatised fate which, Adorno hints, is no more than the mirror-image of individualist capitalist experience: The narrator’s implicit claim that the course of the world is still essentially one of individuation, that the individual with his impulses and his feelings is still the equal of fate, that the inner person is still directly capable of something, is ideological in itself; the cheap biographical literature one finds everywhere is a by product of the disintegration of the novel form itself. (Adorno 1991: 31) Adorno’s talk suggests that the resentful, critique-loaded authenticity, which Johnson’s novel seeks so determinedly to relay, is best accommodated not within an outmoded, post-Existentialist biographical realism, but within modernist subjectivist technique. For Adorno, a traditional



the vagaries of capitalist chance. The narrative’s elevation of Albert’s sense of vocation can enable Albert Angelo to interrogate the seeming predetermination of our experience under capitalism.

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realist novel’s ‘artistic treatment of mere existence’ delivers us to an unquestioned capitalist reality, because it fails to question the seeming inevitability of capitalism when it simply reproduces capitalism’s own cover-up of material social relations: ‘If the novel wants to remain true to its realistic heritage and tell how things really are, it must abandon a realism that only aids the façade in its work of camouflage by reproducing it’ (1991: 32). To begin to dismantle the work of camouflage, or the lie that we are fated to conform to existing capitalist conditions, the ‘true subject matter’ of the novel now, Adorno argued, can become again ‘the conflict between human beings and rigidified conditions. In this process, alienation itself becomes an aesthetic device for the novel’ (1991: 32). Modernist subjectivist technique, such as Johnson’s conveying the self-dissolution of the vocational subject, operates as social critique. This is why Johnson’s foregrounding of Albert’s resentment is closely related to the way in which his novel questions the seeming fatedness of our capitalist experience. Johnson’s stress on the sheer tattiness of Albert’s London, his foregrounding of social disaffection and disappointment, invokes the modernist fictional principle of subjective self-negation. Adorno observed that the contemporary novel’s practice of subjectivist ‘dissonance and release’, enables it to ‘serve freedom’ in that it bears witness to ‘what has befallen the individual in the age of liberalism’—the destruction of individual character (1991: 35). Johnson’s description of his novel’s fragmentary subjectivism, in ‘Disintegration’, confirms Adorno’s insight that ‘the contemporary novels that count, those in which an unleashed subjectivity turns into its opposite through its own momentum, are negative epics’ (1991: 35). For Johnson Albert Angelo: —–Is about the fragmentariness of life, too, attempts to reproduce the moment-to-moment fragmentariness of life, my life, and to echo it in technique, the fragmentariness, a collage made of the fragments of my own life, the poor odds and sods, the bric-à-brac, a thing composed of, then. (AA 169) Experimentally ‘built-on-the-skew’, and written both out of and for the poor odds and sods—actual Londoners—Johnson’s fictional reconstruction of the city self-consciously identifies its fragments of urban experience as concrete materials: ‘the bric-à-brac’. As Adorno hinted, in itself asserting ‘the superior power of reality’, modernist narrative fragmentation also asserts our power to transform that ‘reality that cannot be transfigured in an image but only altered concretely, in reality’ (1991: 36).



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To draw towards my conclusion, I now want to turn briefly to the religious thought of Simone Weil, in order to reconsider in a little further the complex status of fate in Albert Angelo—and in particular, the import and significance of Albert’s injunction to his pupils, to ‘face up to being human, to being in the human predicament, and accept with dignity everything, but everything, that happens to you in any way whatsoever’ previously cited. At first sight the invocation of Weil’s religious thinking within the context of an article so reliant upon the application of Adorno’s cultural Marxism may appear a little strange. It could be argued that Johnson’s sense of the meaning of the phrase ‘the human condition’ was a strongly materialist one, for instance, when he remarked in Albert Angelo, ‘so it’s nothing to you that I am rabbeting on about being a poet and having to earn a living in other ways: but what about your own sector of the human condition then?’ Yet, interestingly, it is precisely the paragraph in which Albert addresses the matter of ‘the human predicament, or the human condition, or the human situation’, which ends, as if only semi-atheistically, with the phrase ‘whether or not anyone or any God created it’ (AA 56). Johnson’s position within Albert Angelo in fact seems poised between a more materialist take on the idea of ‘the human condition’—which reduces it to a matter of employment sectors—and an emphatically more spiritual perspective on ‘the human condition’, which enables—as I have noted already—Albert’s ‘sermonizing’ mode of address to his pupils on the issue. Precisely this ambivalent position chimes with Weil’s own dual articulation of materialism with supernaturalism. She commented in her notebooks that ‘the object of my research is not the supernatural, but this world’ (Weil in Doering and Springsted 2004: 74), and David Tracy has noted that ‘she is often as materialist as Lucretius and as dialectically materialist as Marx and the later revisionist Marxists of Frankfurt’ (Doering and Springsted 2004: 231). Of course, Adorno’s deep suspicion of the idea of ‘a material reality contemplated and humbly accepted’ is countered by the emphasis laid in Weil’s 1953 Letter to a Priest on ‘the acceptance of necessity’: It is only possible for resignation to arise in the soul at the affliction of the innocent through the contemplation and the acceptance of necessity, which is the inflexible concatenation of second causes. Otherwise, one is forced to have recourse to expedients which all end up by denying the very fact of the affliction of the innocent, and



Johnson, Weil: Making the human condition real

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Weil’s recommendation of the acceptance of necessity, in order that we genuinely appreciate ‘the human condition’, recalls Albert’s injunction to his pupils. Moreover, Johnson’s ferocious puritan accusation that fictional constructions reshape given—as if fated—biographical detail (‘truth’) into the falsity of an ‘arbitrary pattern’ (‘lies, lies, lies’) seems to correspond to Weil’s Christian Platonist suspicion that products of the imagination distract us from the necessity of divine love. Cyril O’ Regan has noted how evil, ‘which has its ultimate source in chronic inattention, and its proximate source in imagination and desire, Plato judges, neither connects with nor reveals reality as such’ (Doering and Springsted 2004: 188). For Weil in Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, as Eric O. Springsted has summarised, the problem with Plato’s cave is that it constitutes ‘“an artefact”, by which she means it is a world that we construct, and that it does not “emanate from the supreme Good”’ (Weil in Doering and Springsted 2004: 217). The following comment of Springsted is as relevant to the developing academic division of intellectual labour as it is to Johnson’s view of the novel: ‘the problem is that in constructing a world for ourselves, a world in which we are protected from the outside and in which we set out our own space, we lose both the world and ourselves’ (Doering and Springsted 2004: 217). This means that we can be said to lose sight of the human condition in the sense of becoming: ‘unaware of being under punishment, of being in falsehood, of being passive, and, of course, of being unconscious’ (Weil in Doering and Springsted 2004: 217). As we have seen, Johnson similarly suggested that an arbitrary fictional ‘pattern’—another ‘artefact’—is a lie precisely to the extent that it reconciles us to the past, and calms ongoing conflicts and miseries within a selfsufficient aesthetic form. It is by registering his novel’s elevation of pain, such as its foregrounding of the miseries of resentment (‘the poetry comes from the suffering’), that we can locate the most visible area of convergence between Johnson’s, Adorno’s and Weil’s various perspectives on the concept of ‘the human condition’. All three writers formulate what we could call ontologies of pain; Johnson’s ‘suffering’, Adorno’s ‘alienation’, Weil’s ‘affliction’. I have argued that Albert Angelo shows that, as Adorno claimed, the ‘true subject matter’ of the novel is now ‘a society in which human beings have been torn from one another and from themselves’. Adorno valued the operation of alienation on an aesthetic level, for



consequently by falsifying all understanding of the human condition and the core itself of the Christian conception. (2002: 32–3)


instance via the experimental, modernist fictional principle of subjective self-negation—a principle which is now perhaps particularly strikingly manifest in contemporary London fiction, from Albert Angelo to Sinclair’s Radon Daughters (1994). Further, just as for Adorno the expression of subjective alienation through aesthetic fragmentation or dissonance prefigures social transformation and reconstruction of our condition—a rebuilding of the ‘odds and sods’—Weil intimates that a more positive form of world-construction, a construction of a real world to replace the artificial or imaginary one we typically inhabit, can emerge out of precisely the contemplative confrontation of affliction: ‘The effect of constructing a world, particularly when the construction is all-embracing,’ Springsted wrote, ‘is to lose the sense that it is constructed’. The only way out, of course, is some sense of otherness that can either break the walls of or somehow limn the artificial world so that we can see it for what it is. Without such an other, one might well think the world perfect. As Weil notes, affliction often plays this role: ‘If there were no affliction in this world, we should be able to believe ourselves in Paradise. Horrid possibility [.]’ (Doering and Springsted 2004: 217)

Conclusion: Albert’s pilgrimage revisited Particularly to nonreligious readers (or happy ones), the austerity and extremity of these last comments taken from Weil’s notebooks may well be evocative of the ‘lurid, isolated and self-punishing Puritan imagination’ to which Patrick Parrinder—in his influential 1977 article ‘Pilgrim’s Progress: The Novels of B. S. Johnson (1933–73)’—famously aligned Johnson (Parrinder 1977: 59). As I have done, Parrinder stresses the privileged, subjective, ontological status of suffering within Johnson’s production: ‘suffering in Johnson’s writing is both intensely personal and a general experience’ (1977: 53). This emphasis on Johnson’s courageous commitment to reproducing the lived quality of experience—‘the sterility and tedium are felt by him as a private burden or obsession’—enabled Parrinder to draw a valuable and important distinction between a resentful working-class, London ‘humanist’, Johnson, and his more detached, ‘impersonal’, high modernist heroes of suffering: Beckett and Joyce (1977: 57). Parrinder took Johnson’s novels to exemplify a ‘peculiarly British form of self-punishment’ (1977: 45).



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For instance, Albert Angelo was noticed to feature ‘an extraordinary exercise in self-abasement when the hero [. . .] sets his secondary-modern class an essay on “What I think of teacher”’ (1977: 49) which Coe (2004: 142) tells us, as we have noted above, comes directly from Johnson’s supply teaching experience. Parrinder’s article argued that Johnson’s puritanism was crucially constitutive of his significance as a novelist: ‘if Johnson’s reputation as a minor novelist continues to survive it will owe as much to his revival and exploration of the Puritan conscience as to his membership of the contemporary avant-garde’ (1977: 59). Parrinder recognises that Johnson was ‘an aggressively anti-religious writer’ (47), but maintains that ‘despite his anti-religious obsession Johnson succeeded in reviving the characteristic religious form which British individualist consciousness has taken’ (59); and, indeed, ‘it is within the context of an acknowledged anti-religious obsession that Johnson will be seen to exemplify some underlying patterns of the Puritan intelligence’ (48). Johnson’s critical view of fictional constructs was exactly the Puritan pattern that Parrinder underlines: ‘I wish to stress [. . .] that his [ Johnson’s] objection to “telling stories”, so far from being revolutionary, is the traditional objection of English Puritanism’ (1977: 46). Parrinder hinted at the contiguity of Johnson’s and Weil’s positions when he notes that ‘the more strictly religious the writer’s temperament the more wary he is likely to be of the inauthentic, external fictions that surround him’ (1977: 47); there is even a nod in the direction of Weil’s Christian Platonism when Parrinder refers to ‘the Platonic demand for the moral justification of imagination’ (1977: 48). Of course, Adorno could be just as wary, from a materialist Marxist perspective, of ‘inauthentic, external fictions’, as Weil was from a Christian Platonist perspective. My argument that Johnson’s position within Albert Angelo in fact straddles materialist and spiritual perspectives seems to reinforce Parrinder’s dual emphasis on the religious and anti-religious qualities of Johnson’s writing. The value of a critical perspective which fuses materialist and religious approaches to Johnson, can be seen in relation to his central concerns with the idea of ‘the human condition’ and the status of fate. These concerns, as Parrinder understood, were inextricably related to Johnson’s London background and the issue of class: The value of stoicism is sardonically affirmed throughout Johnson’s novels. For him such an attitude was not abstract but was ingrained in his origins in the London working class. The experience of the



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Blitz is invoked at the beginning of an early story, written in a laconic neo-realist vein: That was the night a stick of landmines got the British Home Stores, the Salvation Army and the Surrey towpath just beside the bridge. ‘Get your head down, mate,’ said my grandmother, who believed bad luck came in threes, after we heard the first one . . . . (Parrinder 1977: 53) Three-numerology again. Or as my father puts it—very much like Johnson, half in acceptance and half in rebellion—‘all these things are sent to try us’.

Acknowledgements An earlier, shorter version of this article was published in Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, 3 (1) (March 2005), http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/Bond.html. I thank Philip Tew and Glyn White for their help with this extension.

Works cited Adorno, Theodor W. (1991) ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’ in Notes to Literature: Volume One, Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), New York: Columbia University Press; trans. Sherry Weber Nicholson: 30-36. Coe, Jonathan (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Doering, E. Jane & Eric O. Springsted, (eds) (2004) The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Parrinder, Patrick (1977) ‘Pilgrim’s Progress: The Novels of B. S. Johnson (1933-73)’, Critical Quarterly 19 (2): 45-59. Sinclair, Iain (1997) Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London, London: Granta Books. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Weil, Simone (2002) [1953] Letter to a Priest, London: Routledge, trans. by A. F. Wills.



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Kaye Mitchell

On 20 February 1969, Panther Books (in association with Secker and Warburg) published B. S. Johnson’s new novel, The Unfortunates. This ‘book in a box’, as it would become known, featured twenty-seven individually bound and paginated chapters collected in a box, with only the first and last chapters identified as such; the intervening sections could thus be rearranged by the reader and read in any order they chose. Such formal experimentation was not unique—as several writers on Johnson, including Jonathan Coe, have acknowledged, the author was almost certainly aware of Marc Saporta’s entirely loose-leaved novel, Composition No. 1 (translated from French into English in 1963)—nevertheless, the format of The Unfortunates has afforded it no little notoriety, acclaim and commentary over the years. This article, then, investigates the effect of the form of The Unfortunates upon the act of reading it. In particular, it concerns itself with the reader’s understanding of causality and the relationship between any apprehension of causality and a perception of sequence and linearity: what Barthes remarks upon as our tendency to confuse ‘consecution’ and ‘consequence’: ‘what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by’ (1977: 94). It is precisely the order of sequence which is disrupted in The Unfortunates, allowing the reader to shuffle the middle sections at will and so order and structure, according to his/her own intention, the ‘dilatory space’ of the middle—to employ the phrase which Peter Brooks appropriates from Barthes. The ‘dilatory space’ is ‘the space of suspense – which we work through toward what is felt to be, in classical narrative, the revelation of meaning that occurs when the narrative sentence reaches full predication’ (Brooks 1984: 18). But does the ending of The Unfortunates confer this plenitude of meaning, or does the disruption of the central space of the narrative render the 51 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading

whole less determinate, leaving us in a state of perpetual suspense? What is at issue here is what it means to say that a text is ‘non-linear’ and whether it then lacks any coherent causal framework. Can this—or any—text truly be described as ‘non-linear’ or does the act of reading (the particular cognition involved) not impose linearity (and causal coherence) upon it, of necessity? The point will be to consider the ramifications of this alleged disruption (even negation) of linearity for the interaction of text and reader and for our understanding of the literary object more generally. As my theoretical framework, I want to employ two models of so-called active or interactive reading: the first, a phenomenological approach to reading; the second, theories of hypertext or ‘interactive’ narratives. The active construction of sequence (and hence, perhaps, of causality) that The Unfortunates demands its reader undertake, figures the work as virtual in a certain way: something that, insofar as it exists, emerges from negotiation and process, something dependent upon the shifting and indeterminate relations of author, text and reader, something unfinished, lacking solidity or ‘objectification’ in itself. It is the ideas of virtuality and interactivity, which connect the phenomenological and the hypertext-theory approaches to reading. The phenomenological approach conceives of the reader of The Unfortunates as ‘concretising’ that text, making it into the work it is, and asks whether the work that results from the reading of the (chopped up) text of The Unfortunates is any more or less contingent, subjective and transitory than the work produced by a reading of any other (bound, sequential) text. The hypertext approach considers Johnson’s novel as a prototypical hypertext narrative and ponders whether, even if all narratives are interactive, some narratives really are more interactive than others. And, in the wake of this theoretical approach, I also want to consider The Unfortunates’ subject matter of disease, degeneration and death, remembering and dismembering, fragmentation that is physical, mental, linguistic and formal, in order to assess how this too aids our theorisation of such matters as progress, causality and purpose; how it contributes to our understanding of the movement (across some indeterminate middle) from ‘first’ to ‘last’ in a narrative and in a life.

The virtual text By way of experiment, Roman Ingarden, in The Literary Work of Art, asks us to read a novel (his example is Buddenbrooks) backwards: by reversing either the order of the sentences, or the order within the



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sentences, or both. The changes to the work, says Ingarden, will be fundamental and may render it a different work—or even preclude its being read as a literary work at all (1973: 306–7). Even where word order within sentences is not reversed, the effects are significant, so Ingarden notes that, if individual scenes in a drama are ‘jumbled up’ (which is rather what happens with Johnson’s discrete but disorderly chapters) then, he says: Its unity is thus destroyed […] Transposition of acts or individual scenes must […] have the result that determinate situations that are constituted by the meaning content of corresponding sentences and the persons partaking in them are suspended in air, as it were. […] [R]epresented objectivities draw their content only from the structure of all the remaining strata of the work, in which units of meaning play the most significant role. If, as a result of transposition, interconnected sentences are missing up to a specific phase of the work, or if they follow only after a given sentence, the corresponding objectivity cannot be fully constituted. (1973: 308) This is when the work ceases to be a work (a literary object). Ingarden uses this argument to prove that ‘every literary work of art contains an order of sequence, a determinate system of phase positions’—the phases exist in a certain (spatial and temporal) relation to each other, it is this relation which makes them functional, but such ‘functions’, he says, ‘would be impossible if they were to occupy another place in the work’ (1973: 309). The work is figured as a mappable space, within which the different elements can be plotted as co-ordinates—in their relation to each other, and to the work as unified whole. How, then, do we account for the ‘functionality’ of the phases of Johnson’s novel, once the ‘order of sequence’ is disrupted? In fact we can’t talk of the ‘order of sequence’ being disrupted in The Unfortunates, because there is no originating order of sequence from which the ‘new’ readings can differ, only a (finite but multiple) number of possible orders of sequence. Does the work as a whole then lack ‘objectivity’ and ‘unity’ in Ingarden’s sense? This ‘following’ of one scene or episode after another, implies both temporal order and causality (the logic of cause and effect is a temporal logic) and the order in which events are presented by the sjuzBet has significant ramifications for both understanding and affect. Certainly the changeable order of the sjuzBet creates for the reader an impression of randomness, and The Unfortunates is most often talked about in these terms. So Philip Tew writes of its ‘fragmentariness and



Kaye Mitchell 53

non-linearity’ (2001: 37), and Nicholas Tredell interprets the loose-leaf format as a metaphor for ‘the random workings of the mind, the random spread of cancer, and the randomness of existence’; by arranging and rearranging the sections, the reader will, Tredell claims, ‘be able to participate in a task normally left wholly to the novelist: the construction of the sjuzhet’ (2000: 99). The implication, then, is that the sjuzBet remains fundamentally indeterminate until the reader comes to construct it and that different readings (and readers) will construct that sjuzBet quite differently. Similarly, according to the account of the novel’s inception proffered by Zulfikar Ghose, the form of the book was deliberately designed by Johnson to be a statement about ‘randomness’: Before he wrote [the novel], and while he was writing it, he discussed with me the form he had chosen. It was based on randomness, because that was the nature of cancer. The randomness that had led the author to write this novel had begun with the random decision on the part of the sports editor to assign him a game in Nottingham, and the game itself is a series of random moves where chance either makes the ball hit the crossbar or enter the net, and that led to his decision to insist on the shuffled pages of the text. (Quoted in Coe 2004: 230) Johnson himself, in the introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, argues that the novelist must seek out new forms in order to ‘embody present-day reality’, a reality which he figures as characterised by ‘chaos’ (AYRY 16, 18). This unbound book, subject to continual and necessary rearrangement, is then ‘a physical tangible metaphor for randomness’ (AYRY 25), and he uses this word again in the letter to David Farrar of Secker & Warburg which accompanied the final typescript, claiming that ‘the idea has succeeded well beyond my expectations [...]. To me, at least, it really does reflect the random way in which past and present interact in the mind: it is an enactment of randomness which the bound book simply cannot achieve’ (quoted in Coe 2004: 237–8). The word ‘enactment’ is, however, the key term here: the book performs, without perhaps fully ‘achieving’ this ‘randomness’. Moreover, the progression of cancer which The Unfortunates documents can be viewed as more systematic than random, however, haphazardly it may have selected its victim, and football is not only a game of chance but also, presumably, one involving skill and planning. So there is a certain disingenuousness evident on the part of Johnson (and Ghose) here. Most critical readings of the text in fact emphasise precisely this



54 The Unfortunates

impression of randomness which the text produces, while suggesting that this is outweighed by the orderliness of the individual sections, meaning that the book is not, ultimately, chaotic. So Judith Mackrell, while acknowledging Johnson’s attempt ‘to overcome both a linear chronology and [. . .] the fixed linear progression imposed by pagination’, concludes that ‘neither the form nor the material of the novel offers more than a superficial experience of indeterminacy’ (1985: 54–5); and Tredell concedes that ‘order and sequence’ are ‘largely observed within each section of the novel, and certainly within most of its sentences’, concluding that ‘The very posing of causal questions, even if they are then retracted or dismissed as unanswerable, inevitably invokes the framework of causal explanation’ (Tredell 2000: 103–4). Causality, although challenged by The Unfortunates, is not in fact done away with here. More pertinently, it is possible to argue that the relative stability and determinability of the fabula (concerning the life and death of Johnson’s friend, Tony Tillinghast) militate against any perceived randomness in the sjuzBet. However, this is arguable only because of Johnson’s own statements about the novel’s autobiographical nature and this appeal to the ‘determinacy’ of extra-textual evidence, as well as invoking the unwelcome spectre of authorial intention, also elides the degree to which the fabula is actually a product or effect of the sjuzBet. As Peter Brooks avers We must [. . .] recognize that the apparent priority of fabula to sjuzBet is in the nature of a mimetic illusion, in that the fabula – “what really happened” – is in fact a mental construction that the reader derives from the sjuzBet, which is all that he ever directly knows. (1984: 13. See also Culler 1980: 27–37) So, despite the ‘truth’ of the events depicted here—the fact that they did ‘really happen’—and despite Johnson’s efforts to present his work as ‘truth’ rather than ‘lies’, the reader has access to the fabula only by means of the sjuzBet and the order of events of the former is ascertainable only from the order of events presented by the latter—even though this order may (and does) differ. I want, therefore, to take an alternative tack, in claiming that the act of reading itself imposes an order, a solidity, however temporary, implied by the term that Wolfgang Iser borrows from Ingarden: Konkretisation. In fact, Ingarden claims that ‘the literary work itself is to be distinguished from its respective concretizations, and not everything



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that is valid for the concretization of the work is equally valid for the work itself’ (Ingarden 1973: 252). The work is, therefore, ‘realized’ or ‘concretised’ by the act of reading—‘the convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence’—but, significantly, ‘this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual’. The ‘work’ exists in some space between the text and its realisation, and it is this ‘virtuality’ of the work that ‘gives rise to its dynamic nature’ (Iser 1974: 274–5). Is The Unfortunates any more ‘dynamic’ or ‘virtual’ than any other text? What the author leaves ‘unwritten’ is the order of sequence of the central sections, so the reader is forced to acknowledge the contingency of any sequence that he/she might impose, but then Iser’s logic suggests that the reader should acknowledge the contingency of any realisation or concretisation, should acknowledge that there is a sense in which the work always exists for the reader, rather than in itself. Iser draws attention, in particular, to ‘the way in which sequent sentences act upon one another’ in a text and to the ‘process of anticipation and retrospection’ in the act of reading (1974: 276, 279). It is this experience of anticipation and retrospection which is altered from reading to reading of The Unfortunates, as the order of sequence is varied; but again, re-readings of any text will, according to Iser, result in new and different realisations of it, and all texts are ‘inexhaustible’ in a way that demands some decisive filling-in of gaps by the reader (1974: 280). A re-reading of The Unfortunates, like a re-reading of any text, will involve the realisation of a different ‘time sequence’ from that established by the first reading, for ‘we shall tend to establish connections by referring to our awareness of what is to come’ (Iser 1974: 281); an energetic shuffling will ensure only that we don’t know exactly in what order what is to come will come. In any case, the pressing awareness here of the inevitability of mortality is such that we always really know what is to come and can, at best, succeed in deferring it. This novel, as I will go on to argue, is primarily about (as well as being engaged in) such acts of deferral.

The hypertext If the format of Johnson’s novel was perceived at the time of publication as radical or even disconcerting (at least to publishers concerned with overheads), then it would perhaps appear much less so to the twentyfirst century reader familiar with internet-based hypertexts. Ilana Snyder’s somewhat schematic definition of hypertext will demonstrate its possible utility for our reading of The Unfortunates: ‘Hypertext is an information medium that exists only online in a computer. A structure



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composed of blocks of text connected by electronic links, it offers different pathways to users. Hypertext provides a means of arranging information in a non-linear manner’ (1998: 26). How far can such a definition be applied to The Unfortunates? It is comprised of ‘blocks of text’ (the individual sections) which can be arranged according to the reader’s present and immediate desire, thereby offering that reader ‘different pathways’ through the novel, so it has a structural affinity with hypertext narratives, which it could be said to prefigure. Even the terminology here (‘users’) seems apt as it emphasises the agency of the reader, and the different possible ‘uses’ of the text. In addition, Johnson’s novel is ‘non-linear’ at least to the extent that neither author nor text prescribes the particular line that the development of the action will follow, although ‘linearity’ is in evidence within the individual sections and the sentences which make up these sections (as indeed it is in the ‘blocks of text’ that we find in hypertext narratives, although theorists and/or devotees of new media tend to elide this more or less conventional feature of hypertext in their discussion of it). Unlike Snyder’s hypertexts which exist only ‘online in a computer’, however, The Unfortunates is notably dependent upon its particular materiality, the very palpability of its desire for ordering (and re-ordering): Johnson apparently claimed that ‘the physical nature of The Unfortunates reinforced its themes and enhanced its veracity’ (Tredell 2000: 98). Furthermore, those theorists who have set out to champion the radical and democratising nature of hypertext have sought to effect a wholesale disjunction between print culture and digital culture—so George Landow avers that print culture, ‘engenders certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text that hypertext makes untenable’ (1992: 31–2). But this is a highly contentious argument: the literary work as an imaginative space or intentional object is no more ‘isolated’ than hypertext, facilitating (as Georges Poulet has described [1969: 53–68]) a meeting of authorial and readerly consciousness in the virtual ‘space’ of the work, thereby throwing into doubt the boundaries of the work (and so its isolatability). Even as a physical object the text is continuous with a whole set of practices and assumptions from which it cannot be absolutely divorced. And we have moved far beyond the idea of the text as ‘authorial property’—as the post-structuralist theories of text that Landow so often cites document. In fact, his ‘convergence’ theory posits hypertext as the ultimate realisation of post-structuralist theories of narrative, but without acknowledging that those theories (as proffered by Barthes and Derrida, for example) emerge out of a discussion of printed texts.



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Landow’s comments are interesting, however, because they serve, unwittingly, to elucidate the critical response to Johnson’s text. Why? Because non-linearity and interactivity are seen by Landow, firstly, as unproblematic terms, and secondly, as unequivocally and fundamentally anti-totalitarian, anti-authoritarian (anti-authorial) and democratising: ‘The basic hypertext experience of text, information and control, which moves the boundary of power away from the author in the direction of the reader, models [. . .] a postmodern, anti-hierarchical medium of information, text, philosophy and society.’ (1992: 89). In dealing with supposedly non-linear and interactive texts/fictions (e.g. postmodern fiction, of which The Unfortunates is occasionally held to be an instance), it is evident that literary critics tend to respond in similarly utopian (or, at the other extreme, dystopian) ways. Johnson’s formal experimentation, then, is seen to add value to his work—not only interest value but also a kind of nominal political value—or, conversely, to detract from its value as literature, being mere gimmickry. So Paul D’Eath comments that the ‘unifying principle’ of Johnson’s work ‘has been a radical ethic whose effect has been to dismantle the involuted value system of the middle-class novel, a value system inscribed into the very practice of its writing’ (1985: 80); formal experimentation here amounts to a more general ‘radicalism’ (see Waugh 1992: 127). But is the reader of such texts any more ‘empowered’ than the reader of a nineteenth-century narrative novel (that ‘exhausted’ form, in Johnson’s view [AYRY 13])? And is Johnson, as author, any less controlling? I’ll return to this point at length. In recent theories of hypertext, the technological aspect has increasingly been elided, and the definition of hypertext has been expanded to give it a more general applicability. So Jane Yellowlees Douglas prefers the more neutral term ‘interactive narrative’ and Espen Aarseth argues that ‘cybertext’: Centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. [. . .] During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of “reading” do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning “work” and “path”. In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. (Aarseth 1997: 1)



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He cites The Unfortunates as an example of ‘ergodic literature’—without, however, proceeding to a discussion of it in the light of this categorisation. In a slightly different vein, N. Katherine Hayles writes of the ‘open-work’, which need not necessarily be an electronic text and she endeavours to stress, above all, the ‘materiality’ of hypertexts, arguing that ‘electronic authors are normally involved in every aspect of the production process’ and that ‘this embodied work of production naturally results in enhanced appreciation for the work’s materiality’ (2001: 23). On this reading, The Unfortunates is no more ‘material’ or embodied than any online text, although the latter may be more ‘open’ because of its ‘openness to instantaneous dissemination across the globe’ (Hayles 2001: 23). The utility of this hypertext-influenced approach is that it combines an attention to textual form, with a discussion of the way(s) in which that text is read; The Unfortunates clearly demands such a dual approach (as well as demanding the ‘nontrivial effort’ and ‘work of physical construction’ that Aarseth details). What all definitions of hypertext invoke, which may be useful for our reading of this novel, are the notions of non-linearity and interactivity. So, setting aside the pseudoproblems of technology and materiality, the issue here is the stability and meaningfulness (the arguable vagueness) of these terms. Briefly, it is my contention that no text that is intelligible is truly non-linear, and that all texts are, to some degree, interactively constituted in the act of reading. The Unfortunates, then, is not substantially more fragmented or disorderly than any other text, nor does it cede control of meaning to the reader any more radically or democratically than any other text; this is not, however, to diminish its considerable value as a work of literature.

Linearity and interactivity It is the arrangement of words in sequence—whether by reader or by author or by accident: waves on a beach, for example (see Knapp and Michaels 1985: 15–17)—their purposeful juxtaposition, which creates meaning, not words in themselves; we write, read and understand sequentially. The absence of some single, determined line of sequence does not amount to the absence of possible sequence—arguing that it does is akin to arguing that the absence of a single, determined meaning renders a text utterly meaningless (as monists, if any exist, might claim): it doesn’t, nor does it imply that any meaning goes. And it’s certainly not the case that any meaning goes in Johnson’s text: the boundaries are clearly and carefully established, the number of possible



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combinations of the unbound chapters is finite; the fabula is decided (in its scope and sequence); it is the sjuzBet which is apparently undecided (in its sequence, but not in its scope). The level of authorial control here is in fact relatively high. Johnson himself is unequivocal in his assessment of the hierarchical relationship of author and reader stating that I want my ideas to be expressed so precisely that the very minimum of room for interpretation is left. Indeed I would go further and say that to the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure. I want him to see my (vision), not something conjured out of his own imagination. […] If he wants to impose his imagination, let him write his own books. (AYRY 28) So, despite the apparent emphasis on readerly activity in The Unfortunates, it is the reader’s consciousness that is, arguably, colonised by the work, not vice versa. If it is not linearity that is lacking here, then what is it? A determinable trajectory, certainly, but even this does not mean that we apprehend the work all at once, or in some other non-sequential way. And as far as interactivity is concerned, the preceding discussion of phenomenological approaches to reading suggests that all texts, however conventional or unconventional in form, invite the active, imaginative participation of the reader (however much Johnson might seek to deny or avert this). Similarly, hypertext theorist Jane Yellowlees Douglas concedes that all narratives, even the most ‘realistic’, are ‘filled with gaps’ which ‘enable readers [. . .] to breathe life into them’ (2000: 70). The ‘veracity’ of The Unfortunates is, then, the truth of all texts: i.e. the requirement that they be at least partially constructed by the reader and, requisite to this construction, that they be understood as purposive; this is not a truth pertaining only to The Unfortunates, although it is a truth which is foregrounded by The Unfortunates, which in this way asks us to reflect upon it.

The Unfortunates As Gill Partington notes, ‘the concentration on the formal or ontological innovations of the hypertext/cybertext has largely precluded any consideration of narrative content’ (2004: 37), and the same may be true for



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discussions of Johnson’s best-known novel. At the time of publication, certain negative reviews suggested that the formal experimentation of the work was not matched by the quality of its content and characterisation, with Stephen Wall in the Observer commenting that it was, after all, but a ‘modest, sincere, small-scale novel’, and Richard Holmes in The Times suggesting that the ‘technical self-absorption’ of the book functions ‘at the expense of the reality of other lives: Tony and June, Wendy and Ginnie, blow away like loose leaves in the wind’ (quoted by Coe 2004: 269). In order to counteract this implication that the novel might be either (merely) a vehicle for formal experimentation or, more seriously, too poor a vehicle for the realisation of its guiding theories, I want to argue that, in fact, form and content work together extremely effectively in The Unfortunates to elucidate and expand upon its central concerns. As if to prove the point that form and content cannot easily be separated, The Unfortunates is preoccupied with time, memory, reconstruction, ordering and sequence: with how things fit together (or don’t) in a temporal and/or causal sense. The act of re-ordering that the reader performs mirrors that of the narrator in reconstructing (re-membering, giving a body or substance to) his memories of Tony; both acts attempt to fend off meaninglessness or death (respectively), as evinced by Tony’s bodily and verbal disintegration. The tension sustained and explored throughout the novel is precisely this tension between the meaningful and the meaningless, between order and disintegration, where one is always in danger of collapsing into the other, and it is Tony who metonymically represents both sides of the dialectic. As the narrator muses at the outset of the novel—‘how can I place his order, his disintegration?’ (U ‘First’ 4) The novel’s stylistic quirks and tics, its look-at-me aporias, successfully represent the activity of remembering, or failing to. The mind, for Johnson, is something which ‘wanders off’ (‘The pitch worn’ 2), thus creating, perhaps, the impression of tangentiality (which is not non-linearity, which is not even an anti-teleology, because all routes, however tangential, lead to the same end, here: death, which is the point and pointlessness of everything). The frequent textual blanks suggest gaps in knowledge, imagination or inspiration, the mind’s own blanks; such gaps apparently wilfully diminish the authority of the author, inviting the reader to fill them in; they imply a necessary interactivity, communication as exchange, and the incompletion of any text. They also instruct us on the limits of language in representing that truth that so concerned Johnson—thus he laments: ‘These melodramatic idiotic moments in which life is completely ’ (‘His dog’ 4).



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If this doesn’t (as I’m claiming it doesn’t) amount to non-linearity, it does emphasise circularity over a more obviously teleological momentum: for example, through the constant rhetorical questions and parenthetical comments which interrupt the sentences, diverting the narrator’s attention and ours, sending us off in different and perhaps unproductive directions. The narrator himself recognises this circularity, emphasising on the very first page, in what he tells us and in the way he tells it, that ‘the mind circles’ (‘First’ 1); but for him this ‘circling’ is more nihilistically evident as pointlessness, as he later opines it’s meaningless, though, it all is, this wallowing in recollection, stupid even, as well, I mean, where does it lead, there we were, students then, there these still are, students now, and so? Here it was he talked about the RAF. So? So must others, forever, or talk about something like it, and it does not matter to them, now, it cannot have mattered at any time to me, so why this, if it is so meaningless, anything means something only if you impose meaning on it, which in itself is a meaningless thing, the imposition. (‘Away from the ground’ 3) So, the shuffling of the sections takes the reader round and round in circles, rather than allowing us to progress neatly from the beginning of his friendship with Tony, to Tony’s death and to that death’s aftermath and effects. The ‘object’ of the novel is just this recollection, this circling, which is an end in itself, and which passes time (like the narrator’s walk up to the Town Hall: ‘it’s an object, it’s an objective, it will pass the time’ [‘Cast parapet’ 3]). This passing of time is further emphasised in the way that the reader is required to select, at the end of each chapter, which chapter to read next. In this way the reader is made all too aware of the act of reading as a (possibly meaningless and/or arbitrary) imposition of structure, order and, therefore, meaning itself; the act of reading becomes a self-conscious act of construction which detracts from the ‘naturalness’ of the process, and in the hesitations and selections the time of reading is subtly but noticeably prolonged. The novel, then, seeks to draw attention to that dilatory space of the middle, the passing of time between birth and death, first and last. In its circling it is attempting to delay the inevitable; but the ordering of this middle (which is: life) matters little (‘what does it matter?’ the narrator so frequently asks), given our knowledge of the start and end points. Nevertheless, there is an abiding concern with sequence here: call it a nostalgia for the meaning that sequence supplies. The tendency



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of the mind, whether remembering or reading, is to order: ‘how the mind arranges itself’, he says, ‘tries to sort things into orders, is perturbed if things are not sorted, are not in the right order, nags away’ (‘Southwell’ 1). And so, through the repetition of expressions like ‘at that time’, ‘now’, ‘it must have been then’, ‘later’ (one chapter even begins with the exclamation ‘Time!’ breaking in upon the pleasure of delay, the particular pleasure of a pint) the narrator attempts to place the events depicted in a definite relationship with each other (the ‘right order’), to create at least a reassuring illusion of that objective unity so valued by Ingarden. The overriding anxiety here, however, is that this ‘right order’ does not exist (in life or in narrative), so the form of the novel reflects this. The Unfortunates is beset by confusions as to its own temporal sequence: the narrator frequently says ‘it must have been later’ or ‘perhaps it was then’. He attempts to fix things in time by remembering cars, houses, jobs, relationships, ‘first’ and ‘second’ novels, the stages of Tony’s cancer: the suggestion is that it is these markers (many of them markers of progress or decline) which give us our experience of time and sequence, and so provide the only possible structure and security in a life otherwise ‘chaotic, fluid, random’, in Johnson’s own phrase (AYRY 14). What pleasures there are here lie in the act of reconstruction: for the narrator, the piecemeal remembering of Tony delays the process of forgetting and repays a debt of friendship (although the death he’s deferring is really his own); for the reader, the activity of ordering invokes a pleasure in perceived agency and intentionality. The format of the book, however, suggests that such acts of reconstruction are ultimately contingent, subjective and transient; the order imposed will not be final. Thus, although the last chapter proclaims itself as such, it ends with questions, not conclusions, and it lacks the final full-stop that would declare the matter closed. Given that Johnson’s view of life, (insofar as it is expressed in the admittedly rather dogmatic Introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?) is that it ‘leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily’ (AYRY 14), then this resistance to a more definite ending in The Unfortunates is unsurprising; to provide such a conclusion would be, in his terms, to lie. This anti-ending is, then, true, in Johnson’s solipsistic sense of truth (‘true only if it is true for me’ [‘Last’ 6]), and this box/coffin is one which demands to be re-opened and its contents re-read. In these re-readings we prolong the duration of the work, proving that it is inexhaustible in the way that a life cannot be, except in its narration.



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Aarseth, Espen (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath, London: Fontana. Brooks, Peter (1984) Reading for the Plot, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coe, Jonathan (2004) Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Culler, Jonathan (1980) ‘Fabula & Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative’, Poetics Today, 1 (3): 27–37. D’Eath, Paul M. (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson & the Consolation of Literature’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2): 77–81. Douglas, Jane Yellowlees (2000) The End of the Book – Or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (2001) ‘The Transformation of Narrative & the Materiality of Hypertext’, Narrative, 9 (1): 21–39. Ingarden, Roman (1973) The Literary Work of Art, trans. By G. Grabowicz, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Iser, Wolfgang (1974) The Implied Reader, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Knapp, Steven & Michaels, Walter Benn (1985) ‘Against Theory’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Against Theory: Literary Studies & the New Pragmatism, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 15–17. Landow, George (1992) Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory & Technology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mackrell, Judith (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson & the Experimental Tradition: An Introduction’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2): 42–65. Partington, Gillian (2004) Internet Conspiracy Epistemologies: Fact, Fiction & the Reconfiguration of Knowledge on the World Wide Web, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London. Poulet, Georges (1969) ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, New Literary History, 1 (1): 53–68. Snyder, Ilana (1998) ‘Beyond the Hype: Reassessing Hypertext’, in Page to Screen: Taking Literacy Into an Electronic Age, London: Routledge. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tredell, Nicholas (2000) Fighting Fictions, Nottingham: Paupers’ Press.



Works cited

Richard Leigh Harris

See the Old Lady Decently is, and will probably always remain, something of a problematic book in a variety of different ways. First and foremost, it is known (when it is known at all) as B. S. Johnson’s last work, yet was intended as the first volume of a projected trilogy, which remained tantalisingly incomplete. The basis of the core material is itself fairly straightforward: events, both actual and imaginary in the lives of Johnson’s own parents in the years and months that lead up to his birth, and additionally the decay and death of both his mother and of his mother country, culminating in an eventual and hard won sense of regeneration and renewal. The authorial deployment of these events, however, is far from straightforward, while the manner in which Johnson chose to order and reveal his narrative (or non-linear narrative) is commendably courageous and personal in its attempts to progress beyond the merely chronological and sequential, the well-trodden path of convention. There are various layers or strata of thought and reflection in See the Old Lady Decently, which both jostle, nudge and interrupt one another— the slowly shifting, tectonic plates of (necessarily imperfect) memory. This sense of constant, eroding, modification of the various elements results in a quasi-paradoxical stream of almost incessant narrative interruption. Johnson is seen here, as so often is the case, in the role of inveterate risk-taker: a virtuoso, ‘piler-upper’ of various objects or constituent parts, a stonewaller of parentheses, but also something of a structural conjuror. I suspect that even open-minded readers who had relished the prospect of ordering events for themselves in The Unfortunates (twenty-seven separate sections in a box, [see the previous chapter]) and who had eagerly embraced the fast pacing, the sly humour and sheer page-turnability of 65 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


‘From Embryo to Embryan’: See the Old Lady Decently—A Problematic Birth?

‘From Embryo to Embryan’

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, might well have found themselves stretched beyond their limits, in respect of the multifarious styles employed in See the Old Lady Decently. The material, however, is assembled and hammered into shape with a sense of exhilarating, Charlie Parker-like freedom that seemed to mark an advance in this writer’s authority—an authority and seeming confidence that was never truly in doubt, but which appeared to be growing with each new book. I use the phrase ‘seeming confidence’ deliberately in referring to Johnson because, as we know, that confidence was barely skin-deep and was liable to puncture and sudden deflation at any moment. Of his entire oeuvre, it was this particular book of all Johnson’s books, I would submit, that was undoubtedly the most personal, the most candid, the most revealing and for that very reason, probably the most self-lacerating. (Why am I writing this in the past tense, for God’s sake? All of these attributes remain not only intact, but valid and vital now!) Philip Tew is both astute and perceptive when he comments that ‘Johnson regards the reinvention of literature and its further development as a visionary, but incomplete and vulnerable process’ (2001: 66, my italics). How could we expect it to be otherwise, given that Johnson’s subject was himself? This was nothing new, of course, in that every single piece of writing that he ever wrote, be it verse, prose, play or film-script, was essentially concerned with an increasingly interior journey (indeed, journal) of self-examination to the point of obsessive morbidity—an obsession that would encompass a panoply of faults in both himself and others: from self-loathing of his own body to the various and, seemingly, numerous betrayals at the hands and bodies of various ex-girlfriends whose memories incessantly boiled up and over into Johnson’s rather unforgiving and, on occasion, uncharitable memory (see Trawl, for example). It is, I think, illuminating that virtually everyone that Johnson encountered tended to be considered and evaluated purely in relation to their consequent effect on the author’s own psyche—a familiar trait of a depressed personality, perhaps. Indeed, in the words of Lorenz Hart, ‘Nobody else but me’. One of the more immediately pressing problems in dealing with this text is one not of literary, interpretative or structural issues, but of the sheer availability, or, rather, non-availability of this book as an artefact. With the exception of second-hand hardback copies of the first and only editions in Britain (Hutchinson, 1975) and in America (The Viking Press, 1975), this book is simply not available to a general readership in any format or, for that matter, to a new and necessary generation of readers. Due to these exasperating circumstances, therefore, See the Old Lady Decently remains the ‘ghost’ book of Johnson’s oeuvre—a



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continuing and frustrating lacuna, the result of which has been to consign See the Old Lady Decently to the bottom of the pile and for it to remain the forgotten novel in Johnson’s short but productive writing career (seven novels, two volumes of poetry, films, plays, documentaries etc., from c. 1960–73). The time is now overdue, surely, for a plea to Picador to reissue it, preferably in the next couple of years. For obvious reasons, this on-going unavailability somewhat hinders my essay, to the extent that readers will not readily be able to consult the text under discussion. Nevertheless, it is too important a work in the Johnson canon to ignore and it certainly does not deserve its current relegated status. In its richly woven concerns, See the Old Lady Decently is absolutely central and fundamental in any attempt to begin to understand, yet alone probe, the complexities of B. S. Johnson as both man and writer. In his case, in particular, it would be foolhardy to attempt to disentangle the two entities, so closely were they entwined; I suspect that it would be an altogether impossible and fruitless task. To interpolate a personal note: See the Old Lady Decently was, ironically, the first book by Johnson that I read. I had seen his elegiac, intense and valedictory documentary for HTV, Fat Man on a Beach and was so impressed and moved by this distinctive and utterly personal piece of television that I hastened to the Central Library in Bristol to locate any available books. Even in 1974, seeking out his work wasn’t easy, for many library copies of his novels had already been stolen, the literary thieves strongly sensing that here were rare and precious cargoes—they were accurate in their evaluations, but made life hell for the rest of us! There is something about the cover of the Hutchinson edition, with its pink and black, so that incongruously it resembles in style and typography, a thriller. Possibly this was not quite what its author had intended for, as we know, he was extremely fussy (and with good reasons) vis a vis how his work was laid out on the page. The cover, however, did proffer a ready welcome and entre—a jovial, yet slightly shy photograph of the author and, on the rear cover, the apparently easy-going injunction: ‘Something for everybody! If you don’t like this or that part, or the other, then skip ahead or back to a part you did enjoy. It is no part of my intention to provide a continuous narrative, no . . .’ That last sentence was the clincher and must have been eagerly seized upon by many readers for whom the act of reading even a fairly brief novel proved just too time consuming, whether in the mid-1970s or, indeed, today. As an intrigued, but rather lazy eighteen-year old, it certainly resonated strongly with me, although for the record, I read See the Old Lady Decently in its entirety and, indeed, several times.



Richard Leigh Harris 67


That typically robust yet challenging exhortation quoted a couple of sentences ago continues to provide an ‘open-sesame’ into the intricate juxtapositions that are of absolute centrality to this text and which serve to reflect Johnson’s obsessive concerns with chronicling the chaos and apparent randomness of life. Yet while it is partly an intimate, touching and, indeed, humorous family memoir, See the Old Lady Decently nevertheless has the widest geographical and temporal boundaries of any of Johnson’s novels as they stretch to include not only the European genocide of the First World War, but what Johnson terms Broader Britain, the concept of colonial influence on a global basis. In this instance, the level of complexity, taken together with its mosaic-like qualities, engenders and reveals (rather than submerging) the ornate, Baroque richness and intricacies of the text. If this text were music, I could imagine that J. S. Bach and Stravinsky might well have appreciated it. Indeed, Johnson once talked to Alan Burns regarding the centrality of musical elements to his prose: BSJ: There are all sorts of rhythms stuttering away in my head. Rhythm is the most important thing to me. Burns: It’s a musical thing rather than meaningful thing? BSJ: I don’t go as far as you on that, they’re equally important. Just as Bach combines sounds of fantastic beauty with technical mastery, I attempt a combination of form and content in which neither dominates and both are in harmony. It’s arguable whether I’ve achieved it but that’s my aim. (Burns & Sugnet 1981: 83–94) Needless to say, back in 1974 all this was a revelation and a literal eyeopener, as regards just what the post-Joycean possibilities of literature might be—or, at least, could be in the hands, eyes and ears of this seemingly unique author. For this particular reader, it continues to remain a revelation. In this country, at that time, there were not too many other writers willing to forge ahead in idioms and genres that were, for the most part, regarded with suspicion and associated primarily with such French authors as Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Raymond Queneau and Claude Simon.

See the Old Lady Decently and the projected Matrix trilogy As Jonathan Coe has written with regard to Johnson’s own notes for the Matrix trilogy (Coe 2004: 360) the three books were to be structured as follows: Vol. 1 (STOLD) would create a fictional world, which would



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attempt to be popular; Vol. 2, Buried Although, would be written so as to shed doubt on that fiction, while the third volume, Amongst Those Left Are You, would move into an area of pure truth. The three titles were to spell out the one sentence across the three spines: See the Old Lady Decently Buried Although Amongst Those Left Are You. As we know, ‘fiction’ for Bryan Johnson was not only a dirty word, but a virtually heinous concept that was synonymous with telling stories (in both senses) and, therefore, telling lies—no more, no less. Johnson stipulated that all three volumes of the trilogy . . . ‘may distort and amend each other’. He also wrote of ‘All this ordinariness’: the possibility of the extraordinary emerging from the humble, even banal circumstances of the everyday. The macro-movement of the trilogy, then, is towards a region of total truth—a state of absolute ethical and moral necessity without which, I suspect, this author could not write. To write was to literally live—the only possible way of truthfully justifying his own existence; Tew again: ‘Johnson was tortured by struggling against the inevitability of the demands of such inventions . . .’ (2001: 67–8). If life was difficult and precarious, the demands of creative invention were, for this writer, dangerous with regard to his well-being and mental stability. The tensions that were to exist between the various states of total fiction, half fiction and all truth, their deployment and the stress to which the author was subjected by their projected working-out was considerable and possibly all-consuming. In retrospect, the alarm bells are already (or should be) sounding for the alert, sympathetic reader of Johnson’s proposed scheme and it was, perhaps, an impossibly Herculean task, both personally, morally and as an author that he was demanding of himself. In confronting himself through his own history (indeed, his story) and that of his forbears, it is possible that had he lived to complete this trilogy, Johnson might well have written himself into silence and oblivion. We may continue to speculate. Johnson suffered more than the usual ration of guilt with regard to his parents, especially his mother; the chief reason being that he was a Rhesus Negative baby—a condition that was not treatable at the time of his birth (February 1933). This meant that his birth prevented the conception of any subsequent children; that the first, therefore, had to be the last. He viewed himself, somewhat logically, if bizarrely, as the killer of his subsequent (unborn) brothers and sisters. Perhaps he was subconsciously re-creating the great round (uroborus), the great cyclic O of life, through the act of writing this book? And that having written of his own conception and birth, that his duty was to die, thus completing the circle? Henry Hitchings in The Times Literary Supplement on the 18 June 2004





judges that ‘See the Old Lady Decently reads like the first instalment of a census of Britishness, as well as an oblique, self-penned obituary’. Johnson’s notes for the projected trilogy, compiled in the months up to the summer of 1973, are quite detailed and comprise both intentions for all three books as well as short, sometimes quite terse personal statements and reflections that serve as memos, self-reminders, ‘motivators’ for the projected span of the entire trilogy, both at the micro as well as macro levels of structure. Coe (2004: 360–71) gives a considerable sample of the notes. The following selection serves to give both a flavour and an indication of the author’s thought processes: This must be a novel of the most intensely poetic I can manage . . . . (Coe 2004: 360) In the beginning, we do not know. In the end, we know we do not know, if we are lucky. Few of us are lucky. (Ibid.) The debt one owes to one’s parents, which I had thought one paid by having children oneself, I now see is more heavily paid in having to watch those parents die. In particular, watching the mother die. (Coe 2004: 361) Must be as funny as Xtie, in the ‘invented’ bits, at least: then the ‘hard’ bits will have the maximum impact. (Coe 2004: 362) The place of See the Old Lady Decently in the projected Matrix trilogy is, in one sense, that of preparation—a ‘clearing of the ground’ via the family archive (letters, photographs), of a huge ‘upbeat’ to the other two volumes; in Bachian terms, of a Toccata in relation to its subsequent Adagio and Fugue. Panoramic in both its historical and personal sweep, this book is both a flexible, yet precise document that employs many different styles to convey the necessary ‘bigness’ and, in a sense, uncontainability of all its disparate elements; a crucible that barely holds together all these elements of Bryan Johnson’s endeavour. Above all, See the Old Lady Decently exudes an extrovert, almost playful quality; the sense of a book that is almost bursting at its seams. Not only that, but (ironically) bursting with life.

Structure and structural elements of the book I am not trying to set a puzzle, but randomness, chaos is not neat and tidy’. (STOLD 9)



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B. S. Johnson wished to mirror this statement, to literally reflect this sense of sprawl, if you will, in how See the Old Lady Decently was not only conceived and written, but equally importantly, in its reproduction and visual impact on the page and how this would affect the reader. As always, Johnson was concerned with the affect, not the effect. These matters were crucial to this book and, doubtless, to the remainder of the trilogy. As Michael Bakewell observes in his ‘Introduction’ to both the English and American editions, this book posed a particularly intractable problem, in that in his books, hitherto, Johnson had (almost) always drawn on his own knowledge of events. Here, however, there were large portions of his mother’s childhood of which he could obviously know little or nothing. He had only a few letters and photographs to go on and decided, therefore, that some episodes should be blatantly fictional, such as those set in the kitchen of the bullying chef, Virrells where his mother worked as a young girl. These are the six main structural elements in See The Old Lady Decently: (1) All four of the Virrells episodes are briskly comic and are designated V1–4. (2) Letters and documents, particularly from Johnson’s maternal grandfather to his mother are headed by the year in which they were written— for example, 16(8) denotes the year and Emily’s age at that time. (3) The uppercase letters GB refer to Greater Britain and this serves to reflect the growth and decay of this country over many centuries. (4) The uppercase letters BB represent the notion of Broader Britain in the wider context of the British Empire; also the decay of this actuality and idea. (5) Five concrete poems interspersed throughout the book that gradually, but remorselessly, form the word ‘cancer’—the condition from which Johnson’s own mother died. (6) Other fictional and personal ideas, verbal doodles and jottings: these sections were labelled in lowercase letters, which appear totally random, but were, in fact, arrived at systematically in the following manner: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Third letter of section concerned; or if this is spoken for, seventh letter of the section concerned; or if this is spoken for, fifteenth letter of the section concerned; or if even this is spoken for, back to (1) but in (a) Greek alphabet. Repeat 1, 2, 3 for Greek; then to Hebrew; then ????? (Johnson quoted by Bakewell 1975: 13)





The centrifugal notion of chaos has, therefore and to an extent, been tamed and brought under authorial control, perhaps even to the surprise of Johnson himself. See the Old Lady Decently opens and closes with two sections labelled O1 and O2. These are a frame, or gateway leading both the author and reader into a quasi-labyrinth, a ‘rite of passage’ that serves to generate the operation of the time-defying uroborus: ‘O let me open as though [my italics] there were a beginning, though all there can be is the Great Round, uroborus, container of opposites, within which we war, laugh and are silent’. Johnson is fully aware of the implications of the phrase ‘container of opposites’, the Yin and the Yang; the Jungian balancing and possible reconciliation between the darkness and the light. Notice, too, the rhythmic alliteration of the ‘w’ words (evidence, need it be asserted, of this author’s poetic weighing and sounding of words). I cannot help feeling, incidentally, that Johnson would have gleefully and knowingly loved the possible pun(s) contained within the word uroborus. Besides the five cancer-eating poems, there are three ‘ritornellos’ of love that return to punctuate the text—tiny, simple poems of affirmation marked r1–r3, each of a mere six words that incorporate a visual ‘crescendo’ of one, then two, then three words: Here she said I love you Crucially, the seeming randomness and capacity for destruction that marks the spread of cancer is reflected at several levels of association throughout the book. The primary level could be considered to be the already mentioned five poems that act as a commentary on the death of Johnson’s own mother in 1971, a loss with which he was unable, or unwilling, to come to terms. Cancer is also a metaphor/signal for the erosion and collapse of Broader Britain, the Englishness of ‘abroad’ as expressed in the sometimes dubious notions of colonialism and Empire, which were still prevalent but losing power by the time of Johnson’s birth. Cancer is itself a recurring ‘ritornello’ in Johnson’s life, even if not, initially, experienced at first-hand: witness the anguish in seeing his friend and supporter Tony Tillinghast gradually slipping away, a process that was unflinchingly described in The Unfortunates with the culprit graphically illustrated on the box-cover of the first edition.



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In his verse-play You’re Human Like the Rest of Them, the chief protagonist, Haakon, rages against his condition, swearing to go as bloody mindedly into the dark as possible, wriggling, indeed, in imitation of a crab. Christie Malry, the hero of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) also, perversely, contracts cancer. Throughout his career, Johnson was always preoccupied with the effects of unfairness (as in his short film on industrial relations, Unfair!) as well as the purely random; with this particular disease, he could, it might be said, accommodate both concerns. Cancer is deemed to be not only unfair, but must be the ultimate betrayal of the body. The whole of See the Old Lady Decently serves to build a mosaic-like structure of many elements and voices in the reader’s memory. For each reader the affect as well as the effect will be totally different, yet seldom can the techniques of collage and fragmentation have been employed to such powerful, poetic and personal ends. But Tew, quite reasonably and wisely, sounds a warning note: ‘Fragments remain suggestive of failed unity or signification’ (2001: 179). What will, after all, seem completely effective for some readers will be likely to produce the exact opposite response in others. Besides the above-mentioned components, there are five quotations from Erich Neumann’s work, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. This book seemed to resonate deeply with Johnson and it can be no co-incidence that the mother-figure features increasingly in all his last works; from the dominating and dotty House Mother in House Mother Normal, to the invocation of the Mother Goddess on Carn Fadrun in Fat Man on a Beach—an event which happened to the bemused and mystified writer one morning at dawn upon this mountain. The Mother is seen as the bearer and container of all, without whom life is impossible. Although penetrable sexually, she remains essentially impenetrable vis a vis her essence, her nature. She is certainly a figure of mystery, but clearly central and absolutely crucial, especially to Johnson’s increasingly esoteric beliefs. In these last works, Johnson’s continual evocation of her almost amounts to the superstitious, somewhat desperate reiteration of a mantra: ‘if I keep repeating x, then y won’t happen’ . . . A sense of awe as well as neurosis seem to be present in equal measure—and, as we now know through Jonathan Coe’s biography, Johnson was becoming increasingly superstitious and paranoid in the last few months of his life. Equally important, it seems to me, are the frequent asides, interjections, interruptions and parentheses, which are typical of Johnson. The nature of these might be directly comic, domestic or, more likely,




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(1) that which is cyclical and keeps returning - Uroborus, the great O. (2) a complementary, but linear and chronological, unfolding of events. Both the above patterns, however, are always subject to breaking-up and to unforeseen juxtapositions of both past and present.

Classification Like everything else in this extraordinary book, the classification of See the Old Lady Decently and what it is, or what it is not, cannot be neatly resolved—it cannot (nor should it) be too glibly and readily categorised. As readers, we are not librarians, after all. Is it autobiography, even pre-autobiography, perhaps? I suggest that it is possible, even beneficial, to view See the Old Lady Decently as a welcome mixture of both. Fiction is certainly a part of it (blatantly so in the kitchen/Emily/Virrrels episodes), but it is also a highly personalised history-cum-documentary, aided by letters, photographs and memories of snippets of recorded conversations for which, as far as I am aware, there was no equivalent literary precedent. The various genres certainly tend to spill over and tumble into one another, providing a rich, delirious feast. It can (and surely should) be read in all manner of ways: dipped into, read straight through or with bits missed out (with the consent of the author, you will remember?) Neat and tidy it is not; nor was it ever intended to be. Yet another angle on this glorious ‘ragbag’ of a book is to see it as Johnson’s ultimate, if oblique, confession; an opportunity for our author to bare to the world (as it turned out, for the last time), the assorted skeletons in his cupboard. Besides the attempt to enumerate its genres, there remains an aspect of the novel which I have, thus far, failed to mention. It operates at several levels throughout the book and can be readily observed, though it is not of direct literary value per se and, perhaps, tends to be ignored: I refer to the abiding sense of affection and love for the characters and individuals who weave their assorted paths through the labyrinth of Johnson’s writing, be they the author’s parents, grandparents, friends,



revealing the doubts weighing in on his own mind, both in general and with regard to the progress of the book in hand. In terms of the book’s macro-structure, then, there are two interleaving patterns:

neighbours or acquaintances. This is the glue that holds the various, disparate parts together. See the Old Lady Decently is also both a threnody and a celebration for a London long since vanished; more specifically, for the people and places around Johnson’s own ‘patch’, Mall Road in Hammersmith. Perhaps at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter what See the Old Lady Decently is and how we or the world label it. That Johnson wrote this volume of prose at all, and under intensely emotional circumstances (the death of his mother) is wonder enough; and, perhaps, like the world, it is up to each one of us to make of it what we will. For myself, this strange, beautiful and compelling hybrid of a book remains fresh and, indeed, moving on each encounter.

Reception When See the Old Lady Decently was eventually published in the late spring of 1975, its posthumous appearance in the eyes of many reviewers seemed to merely confirm their already entrenched views as to the status of its deceased author—explicitly for or against. Although mixed in reaction and tone, virtually all the critics acknowledged and could agree upon Johnson’s reputation as an author of books which were both different, provocative and highly personal. As regards the affect and effect of what was, after all, the first volume of the trilogy, many were slightly puzzled by the apparent form (lessness) of the book, but were moved and touched by the content. The consensus appeared to be that it was a more-or-less impossible task to judge what was, essentially, an unfinished project. Johnson’s proven track record accorded him the position of having his new book placed at the head of the reviews, which appeared in the first week of May. The other contenders for that week included Ian McEwan’s debut, First Love, Last Rites and Richard Llewellyn’s Green, Green My Valley Now. Johnson’s reviewers included three fellow writers, Janice Elliott, Julian Barnes and Robert Nye, all of whom showed a certain level of sympathy with our author’s aims and intentions, if not necessarily, his execution of the same. Janice Elliott in the Sunday Telegraph wrote that ‘See the Old Lady Decently was not half as alarming as it looks at first sight’. While she mentions the usual irritations of this genre: ‘self-consciousness and syntactical tricksiness’, she also commends the ‘author’s humour, personality and tenderness’. Part of her final sentence both manages to be





wide of the mark (in Johnson’s terms) yet gives tantalising, if arguable, food for thought, too: ‘. . . a striking example of traditional narrative art and a saddening indication that within B. S. Johnson the experimentalist there was a fine novelist’. Elliott omits the words ‘waiting to get out’, but the implication is all too evident. Julian Barnes, writing in The New Statesman on the 2 May, is quietly supportive in a level-headed, slightly neutral manner: ‘Johnson’s experimentation, besides his recognition as one of the funniest writers of his generation, was often in fact rather demure’. That use of the word ‘demure’ is interesting, for most of Johnson’s detractors insisted that his experiments were all too obviously brash, exuding a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Barnes sees beneath the surface, even if he still has reservations: ‘It is all gummed together . . . with considerable ingenuity and a friendly, buttonholing humour. But the themes at this stage merely co-exist: whether they would finally cohere is an untested, and now of course unanswerable, question’. One of the more perceptive reviews came from Robert Nye writing in The Guardian: ‘Like so much of his [ Johnson’s] work, it is an agreeably offhand joke on a serious subject’. Nye then cautions: ‘It is overmuch a beginning, it remains in all essential aspects a blueprint of what might have been, it raises more questions than it answers’. The final part of that last sentence strikes me as being a positive trait, though this is not apparent to Nye who then states his belief (in common with others) that Johnson had ‘insufficiently integrated the things that he was trying to say.’ But did Bryan Johnson want, or even attempt to aim at, integration? I doubt it. Rather more likely was that this first volume was deliberately intended to be exploratory, elusive and to adequately reflect the perceived chaos of his life and memories. More pertinent, however, is Nye’s observation that: ‘he [ Johnson] wrote best when forgetting his theories and allowing the plainness of his perceptions to issue in straight-forward comedy ...’ (my italics). Nye’s final comments also serve to hit a nail fully on the head: ‘B. S. Johnson was ... a writer of authentic power and even his failures were worth attention especially since they failed because he tried too much [my italics] where most contemporary fiction stays on the surface and does not try at all’. An interesting comment that also hints at Johnson’s competitive nature, perhaps? Whether the activity in question was tennis, squash or writing, Bryan Johnson always tried to the very best of his considerable abilities.(You may remember his comment vis a vis the state of post-Joycean literature, that if this was a relay race, then the baton of invention had been dropped long ago ... at least in this country.)



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Clearly, in Nye’s eyes, See the Old Lady Decently was a failure, but a feisty and spirited failure, nonetheless. Four years after the novel saw the light of day and was slapped into breath, Bernard Bergonzi in his essay ‘Fictions of History’ got it both right and spectacularly wrong—all within the space of a single sentence—when he wrote: ‘[STOLD] is no closer to being a traditional well-made novel than Johnson’s other books—less so, indeed, than some of them—and its formal devices are often arbitrary. Nevertheless, it works better than many of his other novels—partly, I suspect, because Johnson had more to write about in it’ (Bergonzi 1979: 53 [my italics]). Of course, Johnson did not strive to write the “well-made”, easily pigeonholed, nineteenth century style novel, but Michael Bakewell’s Introduction to See the Old Lady Decently does indicate that our author took exemplary, indeed, painstaking care with regard to the extremely precise deployment and positioning of those self-same ‘formal devices’ (though they can certainly be read as arbitrarily positioned). Clearly Bergonzi’s praise for this novel’s breadth is at the expense of Johnson’s previous works but in its ‘epic’ sweep See the Old Lady Decently does come closer than most of Johnson’s work to the three-volume Victorian family saga that is clearly still the model for English writing. With one or two exceptions, virtually all the reviewers (particularly Barnes, Elliott and Nye) clearly regard the book as important, even if its apparently wayward execution (deconstruction?) had left something, or possibly several things to be desired. These complaints and quibbles boil down to the usual critical ghosts that haunted Johnson and his prose for their all-too-short life: a needless typographical complexity as well as a perceived absence of form. These are core issues which Johnson strongly and indignantly continued to refute. Doubtless he would have been angered, if not wholly surprised, by the critical reception and reaction to See the Old Lady Decently in the form that it was published. But he would, I am sure, have felt that he had done the right thing by his mother; indeed, this book is both for and about her. There can be few such lovingly assembled and personalised testimonies-cum-scrapbooks by any writer. See the Old Lady Decently Buried . . . Just so.

Breaking the circle See the Old Lady Decently turned out to be Johnson’s last will and testament. The deadline for the book was 30 September 1973 and the manuscript was finished and ready for typing by the evening of 22 September.





Charles Clark, Johnson’s editor at Hutchinson, had reservations about this first volume of the trilogy, feeling that the various strands had not been woven together satisfactorily—or, at least, to his satisfaction. This obviously disappointed Johnson, as he clearly felt that he had written this work with complete involvement, candour and honesty and that he had successfully dealt with his preoccupations both in and on his own terms. ‘Candour’ and ‘honesty’ are words of paramount importance to our understanding of, and empathy with, the entire range of Bryan Johnson’s oeuvre. After the completion of this volume (which concludes with his own birth) and the filming of Fat Man on a Beach (those uncannily prescient final shots of Bryan determinedly walking into the sea . . .), Johnson took his own life. His tragic death shockingly and irrevocably broke the circle, the uroborus. Thus, any sense of closure and completion to the Matrix trilogy was to be denied. This novel-cum-memoir (repository of memories) had a difficult, contrary and protracted birth, then, in more than one sense—eventually See the Old Lady Decently saw the light of day in 1975, published nearly two years after Johnson’s death—an insult to a recently deceased author, if ever there was one, surely? But, as the midwife remarked, better late than never. See the Old Lady Decently is both a paean to life and to the inseparable notion of a Mother’s gift of birth; it is also (and equally) wide-ranging, inclusive, warm and witty. Furthermore, it is quite evidently his most personal work of prose and, in many ways, his most imaginative (a word that he would have loathed and taken issue with); also, for reasons already mentioned, his most courageous. To quote from the inside jacket of The Viking Press edition: ‘Intricate, beautifully constructed, See the Old Lady Decently is, for all its brevity, a major work of fiction, in which all of B. S. Johnson’s major concerns—the pursuit of truth; integrity as an artist; the deeper meanings of motherhood; style and language—all fuse into a coherent and powerful whole’. I think that’s a pretty reasonable summary. ∗∗∗



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Coda: February 5th, 1933, early morning, Queen Charlotte’s Hospital:

from embryo to embryan from Em, Me (STOLD 139)

Works cited Bakewell, Michael (1975) ‘INTRODUCTION’ to B. S. Johnson, See the Old Lady Decently, London: Viking, 7–14. Bergonzi, Bernard (1979) ‘Fictions of History’ in The Contemporary English Novel, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 18: 43–66. Burns, Alan & Sugnet, Charles (eds) (1981) The Imagination on Trial: British & American Writers Discuss their Working Methods, London: Allison & Busby. Coe, Jonathan, (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester: Manchester University Press.



from them from Em

Carol Watts

The phrase ‘the mind has fuses’, which sparks the following reflection about the particular nature of B. S. Johnson’s writing, is taken from a moment in The Unfortunates (‘Then they had moved’: 5). Johnson is recalling his friend Tony Tillinghast, encountering the feeling of his loss, the sudden irruption of memories of his early death, triggered during a journey to Nottingham to report on a football match. ‘I fail to remember, the mind has fuses’, he writes, in a simple line, its own paragraph. This is a registering not simply of the inability to remember, but of a short-circuiting, as if the mind, faced with something traumatic, will blow, like a fuse box. That something in this particular incidence is a hazily recalled report of his friend’s distress at the fact that he would not live to see his son grow up, a source of pain that Johnson’s mind can’t bring near. And yet he will return to it again and again. If one of the qualities of Johnson’s writing is a sometimes irascible sense of impasse, of the discovery of sometimes incontrovertible limits, it would seem that it is always charged with this sense of affective overload, a fusing that might make the lights go out altogether: cutting through the page (as in Albert Angelo 149–53, where the hole reveals the fatal wound that killed Christopher Marlowe) or militantly finding the ultimate point of exchange (as in the terroristic ledger economy of Christie Malry, where the accountant’s double entry bookkeeping spirals into the ‘just’ recompense of mass murder). There is a pathos here, but one that importantly has social correlatives for all its turning inwards, maybe even by virtue of that intense interiority. It is the social (and political) dimension of what remains a private intensity of feeling which is the focus of this essay. In tracking these circuits and their incendiary moments it is possible to explore what constitutes the kernel or motor of his work, and its formal energies. 80 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


‘The Mind Has Fuses’: Detonating B. S. Johnson

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It seems important to emphasise from the outset that I want to stay with this point of overload as a writing rather than in terms of the man, for whom its personal cost might seem all too plain. If, for Johnson himself, writing self-declaredly provided a means of exorcism: ‘to remove from myself, from my mind, the burden of having to bear some pain, the hurt of some experience: in order that it may be over there, in a book, and not in here in my mind’, as he says in Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (1973: 18–19), his writing nonetheless returns repeatedly to that point where the mind has fuses. I want to think further about what is, or risks being, blown in such a writing, and also in more generative ways (to pursue the metaphor differently), what it might be seen to detonate. It is difficult perhaps to remove the sense of writerly impasse from a reading of the man, since Johnson claimed the right to speak for his craft with a seemingly egotistical bloody-mindedness that at times shines through his pronouncements on his intentions, as well as through the implosions and reflections of his texts: from the ‘OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING!’ which breaks into the narrative of Albert Angelo (AA 163), to the wry observation from the dying Christie Malry to his narrator, ‘you shouldn’t be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it’ (CMODE 180). These are in part declarations about the limits of the novel—as an outmoded form of nineteenth-century narrative storytelling, and also as a contemporary failure to fully engage ‘in the course of a world’ in Theodor Adorno’s words, ‘which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings’ (1992: 80) It is possible to see these limits—both the rejection of the solaces of realist storytelling that had not taken on the lessons of Joyce or Beckett, and the demand for political commitment—in that oddly recalcitrant statement Johnson makes in his ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoir? about the place of the reader: to the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure. I want him to see my (vision) not something conjured out of his own imagination. How is he supposed to grow unless he will admit others’ ideas? If he wants to impose his imagination, let him write his own books. That may be thought to be anti-reader; but think a little further, and what I am really doing is challenging the reader to prove his own existence as palpably as I am proving mine by the act of writing. (AYRY 28)



Carol Watts

‘The Mind Has Fuses’

There are literary ghosts in Johnson’s statement, not least the Sterne of Tristram Shandy who finds his way onto the inside of the box of The Unfortunates (1999) testifying to his work as a ‘history-book . . . of what passes in a man’s own mind’, and whose ‘conversation’ with the reader involved blank pages, where she or he might go ahead and draw their own Widow Wadman, and the mortal black page marking Yorick’s death which no reader can pierce (put to variegated use by Johnson in Travelling People). Beyond such an underlining of authorial literary property, Johnson asserts a non-identity with his reader, as the mark of a ‘truth’ defined by the act of writing, proof of his existence in the world. It is this encounter with a condition of non-identity, the Beckettian NotI repeatedly revisited in his fiction, that can feel at times like the most intensely personal of states, a painful ‘solipsism’ in Johnson’s terms. In Trawl, this state seems by turns at its most disabling and yet generative: Now I know these rocks only as shapes, that they are rock is of no point, they drop, but how do I know they even do that, they may climb, everything is relevant only to me, relative only to me, to be seen by my eyes, solipsism is the only truth: can be the only truth: a thing is so only because I think it to be so: if I do not think it to be so, then it is not so: this must be the only truth: belief does not arise. (T 172) Generative because it is in the propriety of these fiercely asserted and individuated truths in the absence of belief—‘a diagram of certain aspects of the inside of his skull’, as the narrator of House Mother Normal declares (HMN 204)—that the formal and creative work of his writing takes place. In Trawl the queasiness he experiences on board the fishing boat is in part provoked by the overwhelming amount of material which surfaces and roils about in him like the action of the sea, which ‘swells and subsides, swells, swells, subsides, swells, subsides, subsides, subsides, swells again; impossibly consistent, constantly varied’ (T 95). The difficulty at times appears to be in finding the right distance—or proximity—to bring it into view, into form. In this most confessional of novels, the flow of thoughts records its struggle with making sense, trying to find the personal truth in the mass of childhood memories constellating around the trauma of his wartime evacuation. And the word ‘evacuate’ begins to take on other metaphorical dimensions: I’ve had enough of High Wycombe and being evacuated: surely I must have exhausted it by now, the pain must be exorcised, the tedium of interest, of making myself regurgitate all this: for what? · · Think,



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then, analyse, then, this estrangement from home, from London, parents, younger self.[. . .]What use are analyses, reasons, causes? All I am left with are just things, happenings: things as they are, happenings as they have happened and go on happening through the unreliable filter of my memory. But try. What else is there to do? (T 93–4) As the ‘old man’ and ship’s caretaker bluntly explains to him, ‘You’ll be sick until you bring up your green bile, you’ve got to bring up the green bile that’s been there maybe since you were a child. And once that green bile’s gone, you’ll be all right, he said, and his mate too said, You’ll be sick, but you’ll fooking eat afterwards!’ (T 105). The ‘bile’ that rises through Johnson’s text (recalling earlier literary works, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, perhaps, or Sartre’s La Nausée) merges the memories of banal sexual encounters, the experience of National Service, indifferent school meals and deeper pain with visceral details of the gutting of fish: ‘redfish, their great deepsea eyes burst, their mouths bloated with a bubble formed from some depressurized intestine to make them look as if blowing bubblegum’. (T 133) The narrative tips and tilts between modes of reflection, from the realist detail of the nature of shipboard labour and the continuous rolling and pitching of the ship, to the monologue of that inner voice bringing up its catch, evacuating. By its conclusion the narrator decides some kind of clarity has been reached: [. . .] everything, building up on this voyage, all the thinking, collectively, accumulatively, must have led to this sudden freedom I feel now, relievedly, relieved of all the thinking. (T 166) In the assembling and accretion of shapes and materials there is a temporary release and freedom from their undertow, one that a journey ‘home’ may convince him of attaining. It is not quite a talking cure however. If Trawl concludes with isolation—‘I, always with I · · · · · one always starts with I · · · · · · · · And ends with I’ (T 183)—there is also some sense of remainder, something not quite borne in that accumulation of things and happenings, which gives his writing a particular charge beyond the conscious and declarative tone of its self-reflection. Such an overloading is here more organic than the metaphor of circuitry I began with would suggest, but it charts the same risk: a failure to remember, and the accompanying possibility of systemic breakdown. Such a remainder is also present in the productive, if erratic and uncertain, layering of The Unfortunates, where the memories do not so



Carol Watts


much flow as work by a form of spatial hinging together, depending upon the way the sections are shuffled by the reader. Within the sections, gaps also appear, sometimes unpunctuated, as if the monologue goes out of earshot or the sentence waits for an imaginary interlocutor to intervene: That this thing could just come from nowhere, from inside himself, of his very self, to attack him, to put his self in danger, I still do not understand. Perhaps there is nothing to be understood, perhaps understanding is simply not to be found, is not applicable to such a thing. But it is hard, hard, not to try to understand, even for me, who accept that all is nothing, that sense does not exist. We must have talked in the pub Can’t remember anything we said, but something must have been discussed about the novel. The pub was on the cliffs, neon signs, a jukebox. Nothing else? Nothing else. Yes, I drove [. . .] (U ‘For recuperation’, 2) The visceral image of something attacking a body from within is paralleled in Johnson’s other narratives (such as the sickness rising in Trawl and the final reckoning in Christie Malry); here, the cancer suffered by his friend feeds into the formal arbitrariness of his text’s combinations, ‘a physical tangible metaphor for randomness and the nature of cancer’ (AYRY 25). And the mind works over this ground, routing its connections like a wiring: ‘random, the circuit-breakers falling at hazard, tripped equally by association and non-association, repetition’ (U ‘First’, 3). If ‘sense does not exist’ as Johnson asserts, meaning sense as understanding, it nonetheless remains as brute material, something continually repeated, like the sea’s recombinatory movement in Trawl. It returns, but not as ‘association’, often breaking up the pitch of the sentence as the narrative reflection attempts to construct a smoothness of recollection, or drawing in the perspective of the narrative, as if in a myopic texturing of sound, speed and sight, like a film close-up: All coloured by rust, affected by the action of oxidation, these textures, from the window, wear of metal on metal, wood sleepers, granite chips, are they granite, the rails the only bright positive, the rest an alloy of rusty textures. A pool of light from that signal box, someone inside I imagine waiting to make a decision which will set us moving again. (U ‘Last’, 4–5)



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Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. . . . It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition. In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but that which bears directly on upon the senses in an object which can be recalled, imagined or conceived. (Deleuze 1994: 139) The urgency to give a sometimes confessional form to memories, objects and persons imagined from the past, animates Johnson’s writing. But it does not, ultimately, produce recognition. At its most affirmative, it generates affective sensations—pain, suffering, laughter, tenderness, anger—in his encounter with what in the world is forcing him to think. ‘Sense’ of a different order. Yet the same condition also has the capacity to plunge the writing into darkness, to cut its energies, to trip the circuit. The loneliness of such an encounter, without the solace of recognition, returns as a crisis for Johnson in which the fuses may blow in more devastating ways. It is hinted at in the opening epigraph from Trawl, a ‘sepulchral epigram’: My name is . . . What does it matter? My country is . . . And what does that matter either? I am of noble birth . . . What if you came from the working class? When I died my reputation was high . . . What if it had been low? And I now lie here. Who are you and to whom are you telling this? The interrogation of this exchange begs questions, since it can be read both as the epitaph of someone seeking memorialisation from an other belligerently refusing him that security, or the stance of a writer testily disturbing the testimony of the past. Either way, it seems of a piece with



What does it mean then for such a circuit to ‘trip’? These points of overload, where the fuses might blow, are, at their most creative, moments of encounter, which it might be possible to think of in Deleuzian terms:


the impression often gained from Johnson’s work, of a certain neediness in his demand to be recognised, and of his sometimes angry remonstrations with a world which has spurned him—either in the form of women who have fallen short of his expectations, or which has perversely shelved Trawl in the angling section (AYRY 31). His declaration of non-identity with a reader can in this light seem like a retreat, and at its negative root—which ‘always starts with I · · · · · · · · And ends with I’ (T 183)—a disabling withdrawal into a state than can appear, for all its melancholy, like a form of egotism. Yet this conclusion needs again to be pulled away from the man himself, and to be thought firstly in terms of a writing, and secondly in terms of a politics. Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse of the nature of writing: ‘To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not – this is the beginning of writing’ (1978: 100). For all the intensity of personal affect, its pathos, in Johnson’s writing, there is arguably a continuous encounter with this impersonal and structuring truth. The dynamics are there in The Unfortunates, in search of the mark of his lost and loved friend. ‘Not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died, are of concern, to me, only the fact that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss, to me, to us’, he writes on the last page (U ‘Last’, 6). It is significant that Tony Tillinghurst is someone ‘who helped me with my work when no one else was interested’, as he repeats in his memoir, a critic who may have helped his friend the writer write a better book ‘rather than expend himself on dead men’s work’ (AYRY 24–5; U ‘The opera singer’, 1–2). Johnson imagines their eventual growing apart, ‘perhaps saying to him in anger Let the dead live with the dead!’ (U ‘Last’, 4). There is something of the fort/da game with separation here, imagining his friend as confirming, an interlocutor who might respond positively (without the interrogation of the sepulchral epigram) and then, angrily, as radically absent. It is a writerly form of death that haunts the pages of The Unfortunates, the novel in which he tries to do justice to his friend, his ‘order’ and ‘disintegration’ (U ‘First’, 4), the writing compensating for nothing, sublimating nothing, there where his friend, and Johnson himself, are not, to echo Barthes. It is mistaken in my view to see the intensely personal investment of Johnson’s writing as somehow distinct from the political and social dimensions of his interest, more obviously articulated in the pages of Christie Malry and in the activism of his film-making and trades unionism.



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The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies. (U ‘Last’, 6) Leaving aside the play here with an adapted Cretan paradox—‘in general, generalization is to lie’—this resisting of doxa, of received truths or concepts, which are held to be identical with the world, is central to the critical dimension of his writing. In an Adornian sense, non-identity thinking exposes the shortfall between concepts and what they predicate, with what is. In Johnson’s writing it is a shortfall that is inhabited, which has a cost. Its lineaments are to be read less in these authorial pronouncements, and more in the actual formal experiments of his writing. In the voices of the children of Albert Angelo, often speaking in parallel columns alongside the controlling narrative voice, or the elderly of House Mother Normal, rambling, dissociated, or determined to articulate their freedom (‘Let me out, or I shall die’ [HMN 176]), there is an acute sense of the human cost, the potential and actual waste of lives and stories, caught within, and asserted against the grain of, the bland generalisations of a society that are violent in their effects. The voice of the House Mother gets it exactly: What you do not understand, I think, friend, is that what we imagine they want for themselves is not actually what they do want. I do not know what they do want, either. But I do know that they are certainly not as we are, and that therefore by definition they do not want what we want. How does anyone know what anyone else really wants? Multiply that by the diffusing effect of time, friend, which alters with every day, every minute, virtually! When I was eight I wanted to be a fairy in a ballet, ho ho ho! he he he! ha ha ha! heh! heh! heh! and similar printers’ straitjackets for the gusty, exploding liberation of laughter. (HMN 193) There is a precise grasp here of the kernel of class warfare at work in generalised discursive notions of welfare, education, the task of fulfilling



The non-identity I have been tracing, the point at which ‘the mind has fuses’, is where his work contends with what makes it think at its most political. In The Unfortunates he writes to a familiar strain:


desires (which is in part the place of politics): ‘they are certainly not as we are, and that therefore by definition they do not want what we want’. The notion of impasse here has a more overtly political charge, a selling short which speaks to the present political moment in more ways than one. Johnson would have had something to say about the current ramifications of the word ‘choice’, about the weight at home and abroad of exporting democracy and freedom in the terms of the Bush–Blair dissensus, for example, when the elderly can still face malnutrition in hospitals at home. The formal engagement with non-identity in Johnson’s work becomes a means of forcing an encounter with those excluded from the conservative certainties of bourgeois life, even as they are made the object of those certainties. Johnson also seems to have sensed wider kinds of disenfranchisement, the investment in kinds of unfreedom, which had people whose experience taught them otherwise voting Tory in 1973, as he puts it in Christie Malry: ‘Lots of people never had a chance, are ground down, and other clichés. Far from kicking against the pricks, they love their condition and vote conservative’ (CMODE 82). In the pages of The Unfortunates he recalls a journalistic project to interview housewives of suburban estates ‘driven mad by tedium, loneliness during the day’ as a result of ‘bad planning and architecture’, so much so that ‘there would be an explosion sooner or later’: ‘but I could never prove it, housewives I interviewed on new town estates said they were too busy to be bored, I had to abandon the article’ (U ‘Then they had moved’, 6–7). People in Johnson’s universe are shown to ‘choose’ disenfranchisement, as if the vestiges of any utopian vision that life might be otherwise (strongly shared in the notion of welfare after the Second World War, that British life might be radically reimagined to the benefit of all) are hardly to be found. The voice of the House Mother has a vindictiveness that recalls lines in Adorno’s Minima Moralia about the violences at the heart of the conservation of middle-class values: with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better. In losing their innocence, the bourgeois have become impenitently malign. The caring hand that tends the little garden but fearfully wards off the unknown intruder, is already that which denies the political refugee asylum. Now objectively threatened, the subjectivity of the rulers and their hangers-on becomes totally inhuman. (Adorno 1974: 34)



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If this is angrily sensed throughout Johnson’s writing, it is answered by a controlled and precisely plotted formal revenge in the comedy of Christie Malry. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry answers a question posed long before in Albert Angelo: ‘Is there a constant quantity of violence in the world, continually circulating?’ (AA 70). This novel’s encounter with the point of non-identity, where ‘the mind has fuses’ is of a different order. It occupies its distinctive ‘trip’ like the twist of a Moebius strip, knowing that the very terms of its negativity are borrowed from the reason—economic, instrumental, devastating—it is attempting to escape. This is a terroristic double bind, which the narrative detonates with a grim humour. Violence produces violence, generalisations are taken at their literal word in marking a systemic ‘casualness, indifference, mass carelessness’: What [society] does in practice is not what it says it does. It does not care for human life: it shortens that life by the nature of the work it demands, it poisons that life in pursuit of pure profit, it organises wars from which it is certain mass killing will result . . . . but you know the ways in which we are all diminished: I should not need to rehearse them further. (CMODE 116) The scope of Johnson’s last novel published in his lifetime gives the incendiary moment of this negative encounter a historical duration, placing a clerk born of the conformism of the fifties into a later moment of radical disaffection. Christie is an ‘industrious pilgrim’, thinking, even at seventeen, of his pension and retirement. Calculating that freedom from his wage slavery will be due to him in 43 years, Christie turns to accountancy, which seems to offer a means to get closer to the money that is denied to him: ‘in order to see where the money came from, how it was manipulated, and where it went’ (CMODE 16). His understanding of the nature of double-entry bookkeeping (the very key to the mercantile development of capitalism), where it is possible to calibrate debits and credits side by side, suggests a way of representing and controlling the degrees of unfreedom he experiences and their ‘proper’ recompense: I shall list my choices. I may choose to walk for some forty feet along this particular stretch of pavement at a width of approximately eight feet. On one side my freedom is limited by my desire not to be hit by traffic. On the other by whoever built this no doubt speculative office block. The first



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limitation I accept, forced on me reasonably enough by society. The other I do not accept. Who can I blame? The person who took this decision which clearly does me no good is probably no longer alive. But his successors, heirs, executors, administrators, personal representatives and assigns certainly are, or they would not be here, in business. They are not averse to taking responsibility for all the money they/he/she left them, so they may conveniently take responsibility for standing this building in my way, too, [. . .] I could express it in Double-Entry terms, Debit receiver, Credit giver, the Second Golden Rule, Debit Christie Malry for the offence received, Credit Office Block for the offence given. How settle that account? (CMODE 23–4) What are at first trivial acts of retaliation, in which Christie operates a quid pro quo with the banalities of the world employing him, soon escalate into acts of terrorism, in which the deaths of thousands by cyanide poisoning mimics the indifference of a society which regards human lives as easily replaceable. ‘Am I not overdrawn?’ Christie considers (CMODE 147), and decides the wrongs done to 50 million others sustains his logic. Before the ‘industrious pilgrim’ turned urban guerrilla can finally detonate his fuses under the Government he holds responsible, his body succumbs to cancer, and his ‘account with THEM’ is closed. In his notes for the preparation of the novel, detailed by Jonathan Coe (2004: 316–18), Johnson had determined to make his tale ‘as timeless as possible’. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry draws on the political impasse of its moment nonetheless. The revolutionary action in which he imagined ‘Xtie’ to be ‘perfectly, superbly successful’ echoes the Angry Brigades bombings of the early 1970s, when Johnson had observed the trial for explosives offences. Christie’s actions also parody the spontaneous shop-floor militancy which the Labour opposition, under Wilson, had seen as dangerous, and argued had been prompted by the repressive measures taken by the Heath government then in power. The novel also marks, as Coe suggests, the perceived paranoia of the establishment post-1968 (parodied in the text by the exchange at Scotland Yard, when the ‘piqued’ Chief Commissioner of Police declares that tactical nuclear weapons may be required to counter the anarchists [CMODE 111]), and the febrile climate surrounding the Industrial Relations Act, which seemed to Johnson to herald a form of fascism (Coe 2004: 310–18). If the despair and anger of the time feeds into a coruscating wit in this narrative, its timelessness, to use Johnson’s word,



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resides in the grasp of the persistent instrumental rationality it aims to detonate, the truth contained in the very ledgers of capital, in the manner of a Swiftian ‘Modest Proposal’. At one point when Christie Malry calculates the number of dead he has dispatched by cyanide, the narrator remarks that it is ‘just over twenty thousand’: ‘This was the first figure that came to hand as it is roughly the number of words of which the novel consists so far. / Be assured there are not many more, neither deaths nor words’ (CMODE 147). The parallel between deaths and words recalls what is at stake in Johnson’s writing, its productive and yet disabling encounter with a non-identity which can seem at once the occasion for the most conscious self-fashioning, and yet the point at which the fuse might blow. It is an unbearable parallel, too, if the biography of the man, and the writing, are allowed to produce their own form of bookkeeping. But the end of Christie Malry grasps very simply the equation between a writing which always begins and ends with I, and the impossibility it marks, a place where recognition is not to be found, and life unseeingly goes on. If this is the generative and creative point of tension in his work, it also suggests something unremitting, beyond the personal pain, a demand that people might live otherwise. In the seeming egotism of that Johnsonian voice—confessionally ‘solipsistic’, continually and impossibly in search of being able to name its own ‘truth’ completely—is a measure of a ‘lived’ political condition, a brave risking of failure, its angers and points of impasse as relevant now as they were in different circumstances 30 and more years ago.

Works cited Adorno, Theodor, (1974) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, London: New Left Books, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. Adorno, Theodor, (1992) ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature: Volume Two, Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), New York: Columbia University Press, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholson: 76–94. Coe, Jonathan, (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Deleuze, Gilles, (1994) [1968] Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone Press, trans. Paul Patton.



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Re-reading the Author



Section Two




Rod Mengham

The main focus of this essay is a close reading of Trawl, conducted partly in response to Jonathan Coe’s biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, published in 2004. Coe’s text presents a combination of different kinds of information conveyed in different ways in its different sections. The first section consists of critical readings of all the novels, employing fairly traditional kinds of analysis and concentrating on plot summaries. Where the analysis goes beyond this modest scope is in relating Johnson’s statements of intent to the evolving narrative strategies of his seven novels. There are no systematic readings of the dominant imagery, or of the rhetorical structure, of the novels; nor should this be expected as a matter of course in biographical writing. What is somewhat odd is that Coe’s critical discussions of the novels do not avail themselves of much of the relevant biographical data that he assembles in the rest of the text; they use the biographical evidence much less than one can imagine other critics doing. From a certain angle, this can be seen as part of the overall plan. The large central section of the biography consists of quotations from Johnson’s texts and from interviews, all woven together with commentary of a thoroughly postmodern variety, punctuated regularly by metatextual remarks professing lack of evidence, insecurity of point of view, guesswork and self-reflexivity. Very different in status and authority is the final section, which has the potential to reconfigure all the other material. This final section is where Coe discloses the results of his astute detective work, clearing up the questions that remain about Johnson’s final hours, identifying the people who saw him last, and where they saw him. The crucial figure in this respect is the mysterious Michael Bannard, an especially volatile person who exerted a powerful influence on Johnson. Bannard was a dabbler in the occult whose homosexuality 95 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


In the Net: B. S. Johnson, the Biography and Trawl

In the Net

may have posed a difficult challenge to his aspiring writer friend. Coe shows conclusively that he did not just fade out of Johnson’s life when the writer was still in his twenties; rather, he remained a significant and disturbing presence right up to the very end. The other thing that this section does is to supply a previously unpublished originally planned opening of Albert Angelo, in which the relationship of the characters Graham and Samuel appears to reflect significantly on the relationship of Bannard and Johnson. What it shows is a relationship that is close and fraught; not homosexual in any physical sense, but involving an unusual intensity and intimacy. The missing chapter is unlike any of the other fictionalised representations of same-sex relationships in Johnson’s novels, and Coe implies strongly that its subject matter is a motivating power behind many of the elisions in the oeuvre. What I would suggest is that this is fascinating and revelatory in biographical terms, but that to those who have already read the novels it could be relatively old news. This is particularly the case with Trawl—generally thought to be Johnson’s most autobiographical novel—where the complexities of approach to questions of sexual identity conform in scope and bearing to the claims and projections of the last section of Coe’s biography. Philip Tew, in his study B. S. Johnson, A Critical Reading, investigates the aesthetics and philosophy of composition of Trawl, but leaves room for a detailed scrutiny of its figures of desire and repulsion. Tew provides a good cue for such an approach in his succinct proposition: ‘the obsessive bodily and sexually embodied detail of Trawl focuses on a division between body and consciousness of both self and alterity . . . .’ (2001: 232–3) The analysis I wish to pursue does not start from this point, but it does end up somewhere in its vicinity. Since the novel is entitled Trawl, it is perhaps inevitable that the image of the net attracts much of the most tendentiously literary material explored in the narrative even though the authorial persona professes antipathy to the use of symbolism (see, for example, 180). The initial train of writing (T 9–21), focuses on the condom and on a smutty comparison between the female genitalia and a ‘handful of sprats’ (11). The trawl-net itself is equipped with a ‘cod-end’ that gives it the same structure as the contraceptive sheath, with its paradoxically named ‘teat’. It offers a direct comparison with the condom the protagonist loses inside his lover, Joan, leaving her to pull it out from between her legs, with ‘the emission . . . sliding from the inside of her left thigh’ (14). This clinical exactitude recalls the standard method of emptying the net, ‘with a ritual jerk’ that ‘undoes the one knot that keeps the catch confined’ (30).



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The ship as a whole is transformed into a series of channels and receptacles that resemble those of the birth canal. The fish are released from the net into the washer, and from there down a chute into the fish room, some head-first, some tail-first: ‘Those which come out of the washer head first have an easy passage, those which present their tails often stick them through the rollers and thus become stuck’ (39). At this point, the narrator admits, ‘Analogies suggest themselves.’ The description of the female genitalia in terms of a multitude of small swimming things is paradoxical and ambivalent. But it is precisely this ambivalent imagery that is at the centre of all the autobiographical memories processed by the narrator of Trawl. In every individual case, this rather discomforting imagery is incidental to the main focus of each instalment of anecdotal material, but viewed in the context of the book as a whole, the recurrence of such images makes them central to its meanings. They include the eel seen in the practice tank of the rowing club (36), the leeches in the brook at Chobham, Surrey (46), the crayfish in the pool by the waterfall on the river Wye (62) and the leeches in the pool in Denmark (122). The bullheads caught in the brook at High Wycombe are recalled in association with their colloquial name of ‘Miller’s Thumbs’ (50), only four pages after a reference to Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale with its scenario of cuckoldry and sexual inadequacy. Close attention is also paid to the organic linings of some of the relevant water-containers, such as the water tanks in the school at High Wycombe and the bed of the lake in Denmark, both of which seem to possess a kind of mucous membrane. These images are seminal in every way; often they are images of attempted insemination, juxtaposed with constant references to the male body in trouble, particularly in the series of anecdotes of failed sexual conquest, where the crucial indicator is the extent to which the male member is ‘standing’ effectively or not. Equally significant, in the present tense of the voyage of the trawler, is the extent to which the body is literally unable to stand for very long, either because it is forced to lie down through seasickness, or because it is bent over with seasickness. Seasickness is represented as the body trying to turn itself inside out, expelling not only food but even its own organs, with particular reference to the tissue just below the solar plexus and the diaphragm. The descriptions of the body struggling with the impulse to eject a part of itself conjures up the image of a male body in labour, trying to give birth through either mouth or rectum. There are numerous correlates to this rather alarming scenario in the frequently repeated accounts of the process of gutting fish; in the descriptions of



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In the Net

the deep-sea redfish, disgorging their intestines through their mouths, in the depictions of larger fish being slit open to release the smaller fish they have ingested; and in the many instances of fish being attacked through their anal canals by seagulls intent on extracting their livers. One of the most vivid moments in the book is the occasion when the deckhand Scouse removes the heart still beating from the body of a half-halibut, ‘not really halibut but a bastard breed produced by some miscalculated union in pre-history’ (132). The emphasis on disembowelling supports a direct reference to Johnson’s method of composing his text. Although the process of writing is supposed to issue from the retrieval of a catch of memories, using the net of conscious retrospection, it is more interestingly identified with ‘regurgitation’ (94), with the constant bringing up of something the subject is trying desperately to keep down. The alternative form of excorporation, through the anus, is aligned with the imagery of giving birth, in a feminising of the male body that connotes a kind of ‘miscalculated union’ of male and female traits. This hybridisation is insinuated in a number of ways: in the characterisation of the typical trawler-fisherman’s body as possessing a soft paunch through lack of exercise; and in the overinsistence on the assertion that there is ‘no hint of anything homosexual on this ship’ (98) despite the fact that several crew members derive amusement from devising ways of striking the narrator on the backside: ‘catching the pleasure tripper on the arse unawares has been something of a sport with several of those on watch’ (42). Symbolically female is the narrator’s desperate need for fruit in the course of his three-week voyage. This desire is satisfied by the captain, no less, the ultimate authority on board; he grants this privilege to no one else and permits the narrator to fetch an orange from the privacy of his own cabin. His permission brings relief of three kinds: physical, psychological and symbolic. It quite precisely redeems the situation endured in the narrator’s youth when he was caught stealing fruit from the garden of the local mill. His punishment had consisted of humiliation at the hands of his headmaster, who had shamed him with the challenge: ‘If you want fruit, don’t steal it: I’ll give you some: you can come any time you like to my garden and help yourself to fruit, he said’ (66). Symbolically, the captain’s gesture revokes the prohibition against sexual knowledge imposed on humanity in the person of Eve. The connections between Eve, the narrator and sexual knowledge seem confirmed by the narrator’s obsessive use in childhood of the catchphrase ‘I know’ even and especially in situations where he is ignorant: ‘no topic of conversation could arise . . . it seemed, without I would say, I know, and soon my I know became catchphrase of ridicule and attack against me’ (91).



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The desire for knowledge, particularly of the differences between girls and boys, of what precisely one would do with a girl if one held her in one’s power, and of how to satisfy the woman in sexual intercourse, or even keep her interested, leads repeatedly to ridicule, humiliation, a sense of betrayal, a conviction of inadequacy and a suspicion of sexual inferiority. The earliest memory recounted in the novel is of a fear of castration; this is triggered by the neutering of a pet cat that is operated on under anaesthetic, expressed as ‘put to sleep’. The narrator’s reaction is a determination to avoid the same treatment: ‘I kept awake for as long as possible in case they doctored me after I had been put to sleep’ (33). The anaesthetic used, chloroform, is absorbed into a series of associations with ‘greenness’ (chloros is the Greek for green) which link together various references to losing control of one’s body, and losing consciousness, often in a sexual context, together with feelings of guilt and inadequacy. The substance inhaled by the narrator and his schoolfriends in order to obtain a high, and to knock themselves out, is carbon tetrachloride. The most troubling of the narrator’s sexual experiences, alluded to several times but only engaged with once, is the encounter with the ‘green pro’, the prostitute dressed in green who makes the narrator come but without his achieving an erection. This curious suppression of conventional maleness which is nonetheless sexually fulfilling climaxes in the capture of sperm in a condom paralleled elsewhere by the trapping of fish in the trawl-net: ‘She worked manually at my flabby member until the teat end of the sheath she had provided filled opaquely’ (153). This encounter, which ambiguates the narrator’s body for years afterwards, making one eye twitch and making the corner of the mouth droop, is the only sex for which the narrator pays, in a book that ends with an announcement of settling accounts: ‘I feel as though I have repaid at usurious interest some debt, which has occupied all my thoughts, all my energy, impossible of limitation or definition; and worst of all, I can never remember having had benefit from the loan in the first place’ (179). Among the many fascinating kinds of information divulged by Coe’s biography is the evidence that one of the most obvious ways in which Johnson was an innovative novelist was in his establishment of new kinds of contracts with his publishers. He was concerned to invent more effective ways of ensuring how he would be paid something close to what he felt was the true value of his work, and this would sometimes involve being paid a salary rather than a pro rata fee. The method of payment should reflect as far as possible not the market value of the text, but the value of the writer’s artistic gifts, of his creative personality: in short, of Johnson himself. The self that composed



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his novels was often conceived of in terms of debts, loans, mortgages, value. And what is particularly intriguing about this is that the same vocabulary found at the end of Trawl is used to sum up the relationship between Graham and Samuel in the rejected opening of Albert Angelo. Jonathan Coe draws attention to the relevant phrasing: ‘he did not mind learning from anyone, anyone, but that it created in him a huge debt of obligation which he felt he would rather not bear, rather not bear’ (2004: 439). The repetitions are especially interesting because they are in strong contrast to the movement and structure of the prose immediately before and after, and what they suggest is that it is a preoccupation of the author that is being meditated on, rather than a stylistic trait of the narrator. What the coincidence of vocabulary entails, among other things, is the possibility that the ostensible purpose of writing, trawling and meditating in Trawl—the purpose of finding the roots of the narrator’s isolation—is in fact a search directed at uncovering the roots of something else, which the novel can never finally bring out of obscurity, can never finally prevent from being ‘impossible to define’. In my reading, it is actually the text of the novel Trawl that implies this impossibility, no less strongly than Coe’s biographical researches do. The opening section of the book, which concentrates on the early sexual experiences of the narrator, not only installs the imagery of contraception, it also explores the failure of contraception. The ill-fated sheath comes adrift in the act of intercourse, rendering all precautions futile; and the two bouts of love-making between the narrator and the character Joan are counter-pointed by a visit to two of Joan’s three institutionalised children. This reminder of the burdens and responsibilities of parenthood (which have proved insupportable—one of the children has been injured badly by her now absent father) is juxtaposed with the narrator’s anxiety about his desire to become a writer. After watching a short film in the cinema about ‘palmology, or palmistry, rather, chiromancy in any case’ (12), the narrator becomes exercised by the need to check whether or not he has the requisite lines on his palms to count as a potential writer: ‘they said writers had two crossed lines at the base of one of the fingers’(12). Despite his apparent vagueness about the proper name for this fortune-telling skill, he is clearly desperate to find the crucial marks on his hands, even in the darkness of the cinema auditorium, to an extent that is rivalled only by his quest for sexual satisfaction. His creativity and sexuality are clearly being framed in a way that makes them mutually defining, not least in the operation of a syntax that gives



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I could not see my own palm in the dark and kept trying to remind myself to look when I was outside, but Joan was very clinging, in this film, not in the other, she was engrossed in Swedish unmarried mothers, yes, engrossed is the word, and she somehow entwined her leg over mine in a most lascivious way, distracting me from whether I might be or not, and she fondling John Thomas, as well, the while ... (T 12) While the narrator is fixated on the film that raises questions about his identity as writer, Joan is taken up with the apparent alternative of parenthood; her sexual advance distracts him from the issue of ‘whether I might be or not’, a set of alternatives that has to be referred back to his curiosity about palm-reading, but its formulation is embedded in the context of an unwilling surrender to female desire, raising momentary doubts about ‘whether or not’ the narrator is secure in his sexual choices. It is very striking that the scene of writing for this meditation on sexual identity should be on board ship, in company that is exclusively male, affording what the mate, Duff, refers to as ‘Freedom from nagging women’ (31). The initial scene-setting on board ship culminates with the first of the narrator’s many bouts of seasickness, curiously meshed with an allusion to Macbeth’s panic about his blood-stained hands: ‘cool my head against the pitted red steel, stained with puke, ah, the all-cleansing sea will wash away my, . . . the blood on my hands’ (32). Perhaps it is Macbeth’s prowess as a child-killer (Macduff’s two sons, Banquo’s progeny) that prompts this allusion, immediately before the narrator’s first memory of his childhood, which centres on cat-neutering. Once again, a scenario of alternatives correlates with the narrator’s phobia about the apparent need to choose between fathering and unmanning. His childhood involves relationships between two cats: one, with the neutered Peter, which is deeply satisfying; the other, with the un-neutered Winkie, which is dismally unsuccessful. It is the narrator’s fear that Winkie (so named because of his incessant blinking) genuinely hates him, and it is guilt about the justification for this hate which is almost certainly behind the twitching eyelid symptom that follows the sexual debacle of his encounter with the ‘green pro’. The narrator is shy about disclosing to others the motivation for his voyage on the trawler, but to the reader he is insistent that the isolated



priority to adjustment and revision, qualifying and ambiguating information already given:

In the Net

situation it forces on him will be ideal for the purposes of meditating on the deep roots of his chronic alienation: ‘the causes of my isolation’ (53). His delving into childhood memories produces a number of scenarios that could be interpreted in various ways; but the narrator is anxious to guide the reader in certain directions, keen to prompt certain responses rather than others. It is precisely at moments when questions of sexual identity seem most pressing that the narrator proposes the complex alibi of status, wealth, and culture: ‘I now realize the point at which I became aware of class distinction’ (53). His years as an evacuee are centred on experiences of guilt, shame, and fear: none more intense than the alarm he feels on being locked into one of two derelict old buses. The other bus, he is aware, houses a mentally deficient woman named ‘Old E’mly’, a Dickensian figure whose powerlessness reflects the young boy’s own feelings of helplessness: ‘I watched her food prepared on an enamel plate and sometimes saw it handed in to her. She mumbled only partly intelligibly: dropped certain sounds in her pronunciation. I think she must have been mentally defective . . .’ (45). His own mental ability is questioned later on in the form of his exam failure; and subsequent challenges to his intelligence are also shadowed by the danger of feminisation; when he fails to guess the answer to Scouse’s riddle, ‘What was the difference between Shakespeare and Elizabeth the First?’ (98), the answer (‘One was a wonder and the Other was a Tudor!’) is less interesting than the narrator’s puzzled train of thought: ‘three years doing a degree in English had not enable me to make a guess nearer than that indicated by the subjects’ respective sexes, or sex, since some will have it that Shakespeare was a woman, and yet others that Queen Elizabeth (the First, of course) was a man’ (98). Throughout the text, inadvertent ruminations on the differences between male and female, on questions of being ‘whether or not’, are associated with formulations of obscurity in the delineation of character, the definition of identity. As the narrator expresses it himself, ‘I always kept the main part of myself within me’ (88), a inwardness that remains interiorised and retentive despite the recurrent images of trawling, dragging off the bottom, bringing up to the surface, vomiting, regurgitating, and delivering. In terms of conscious desire, the narrator’s focus is on clarification and the removal of dilemma, on the elimination of alternatives and the forging of a singular identity: ‘I was never one for stalemate, again: I liked things decided: either way’ (69). But the chronic strategy of the text is to reproduce conditions of stalemate, to drift constantly towards the deadlocking of opposed forces, to return constantly to the forking of paths, the indecisiveness of either/or.



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The syntax becomes more disciplined, more elaborate but also more ostentatiously controlled, on those occasions when male and female roles are at their most distinct, as in the description of the narrator’s first love-making session with the character Laura. The relevant sentence (113–14) lasts for nearly thirty lines, but the evident relief and incipient bravado with which the narrator recounts this accession to normal heterosexual activity is reflected in the confident grammatical subordinations of the successive clauses. At the same time, the stripping of clothes that leads towards the achievement of heterosexuality does not finally uncover the naked truth of a physical reality, but clothes it in a curious form of circumlocution: ‘[she] dragged my flies apart and undid my belt and slid my trousers down and pulled at my briefs as I took my jacket off: and took in both hands those this disinvestiture had all been directed to’ (113). This strange verbal coyness in fact covers over an interesting misconstruction: ‘disinvestiture’ is a rarely used synonym for ‘disinvestment’. A word that does not have to do with the removal of clothes, ‘disinvestiture’ is an economic term referring to the removal of investments, the withdrawal of interest. At precisely the moment when a self-conscious urgency propels the syntax towards a secure sexual identity, the semantic slippage ensures that the narrator turns aside from the full disclosure of what is expected, keeps the ‘main part’ of himself hidden ‘within’. Even when the language and thought of the text seems most concerted in its attempt to ‘settle the accounts’ in favour of presenting the narrator’s identity as conventionally male, the ambiguating language of economic metaphors links this episode back to the much more problematic encounter with the ‘green pro’, not to mention the relationship between Samuel and Graham in suppressed chapter from Albert Angelo. The extraordinary energy with which the narration of Trawl commits itself to the exploration of self is precisely what sustains its ability to escape capture by conventional forms of language, by familiar genres of writing, and by traditional models of experience.

Works cited Coe, Jonathan (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson, A Critical Reading, Manchester: Manchester University Press.



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The question of human procreation, like every other question which touches human life, involves more than the limited aspects specific to such disciplines as biology, psychology, demography or sociology. It is the whole man and the whole mission to which he is called that must be considered: both its natural, earthly aspects and its supernatural, eternal aspects. (Pope Paul VI, Humanæ Vitæ: Encyclical on the Regulation of Birth, 25 July 1968) The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. (Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 1961) About two-thirds of the way through B. S. Johnson’s first novel, Travelling People (1963), the protagonist, Henry Henry, finds himself in unwilling attendance at an orgiastic party in the Welsh country club where he has a summer job as a barman. As he instinctively recoils from the ‘debauch’ at the Stromboli Club, the narrator explains that Henry has no interest in casual sex: Henry was not a puritan of the kind who regards sexual pleasure as ‘sinful’; but indiscriminate copulation seemed to him to be so shallow, so meaningless, so transitory, and so to offend against the best 104 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Strange Intercessions: Contraventions of the Muse in the Writings of B. S. Johnson

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Although Henry’s contempt for the revellers is lucidly delineated, there is something opaque about the way this scene develops, something the narrator neither comments on nor explains. Having inadvertently walked in on a couple having sex in his chalet, Henry retreats ‘in extreme disgust’ (172) to the prelapsarian space of an orchard until the offending couple have left. When he returns, he finds something that should, one would suppose, increase his rancour even further: On the floor was the blunt instrument of contraception used. Henry’s anger, white-hot until now, suddenly disappeared as something seemed to snap inside his mind, and he found himself quite calm. He cleared up, put the light out and locked the door. (TP 173) In the context, Henry’s sudden calm at the sight of the contraceptive is mysterious. What is it about it that causes Henry to suddenly assume the poise of a Hemingway hero and go calmly about the work of putting things to rights? What is it that transforms him from an outraged, ‘puritanical’ spectator into an enlisted man in modernist writer’s war against disorder, waste produce, and sticky human mess? In a later scene in Travelling People, the idea of contraception recurs in relation to another mess Henry is obliged to tidy. When Maurie, the Stromboli’s owner, dies of a heart attack in the middle of the night, Henry decides, for reasons that are not altogether clear, that it would be best to leave the body as it is until morning. He also decides that any visible indication that Maurie’s girlfriend, Kim, had been present with Maurie when he died should be removed. In a reversal of the earlier scene in the chalet, Henry actively searches for contraceptives by Maurie’s bed but finds none: ‘His mind reacted very strangely to this result, being at once pleased and yet disturbed’ (232). Again, Henry’s reaction is mysterious. Is he relieved because he has one less piece of human detritus to deal with or because the absence of a contraceptive by the bed might indicate that Kim did not have sex with Maurie that night? The third-person narrator does not say. All that can be discerned from the immediate context is that contraceptives feature in two key scenes although an actual sample is present only in one. This is significant to the extent that there is a counterpoint of presence and absence established here that will become a



of which humankind was capable, that his attitude towards it was similar to that of a puritan of extreme convictions. (TP 172)

Strange Intercessions

recurring feature of Johnson’s emphasis on contraception in his later work, particularly in Trawl (1966) (see Mengham’s essay in this volume). As an object that links two scenes in Travelling People, the contraceptive implicitly connects copulation with death. Perhaps this is why it arouses, in Henry’s mind, feelings of pleasure and disturbance in equal measure. In order to take full account of what the idea of contraception carries in Johnson’s work, it is necessary to place it in the context of his wider concerns. Establishing what these were involves giving some credence to his apparently genuine belief in the existence of a muse. While many writers have written and spoken of such a figure, it is probably fair to say that few, in modern times, would take literally the idea that ‘the muse’ has an objective existence. Although Robert Graves claimed that he could not think, ‘of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her,’ Johnson was surely in a minority in believing that he had actually encountered his muse in the flesh (Graves 1961: 24). Johnson recorded this encounter in a short story that appeared in his first collection, Statement Against Corpses (1964). The story’s title, ‘Sheelana-Gig,’ refers to medieval carvings of nude female figures found on the walls of churches in Ireland and, less commonly, in Britain. The figure is usually depicted in a squatting position with the legs wide apart and the arms ‘outside and under the thighs for the hands to hold open an enormously exaggerated vulva.’ (SAC 95) It is commonly regarded as a fertility symbol (see Cherry 1992). Having discovered one unexpectedly while driving in the West Country, Johnson comments: The sheela-na-gig is a representation of the twin aspects of life: death and procreation symbolised by her upper and lower halves. [. . .] But what the sheela-na-gig stands for is constant for all ages, eternal and universal: for if there were no death then there would be no need of procreation. The two are inseparable. (SAC 95–6) This vision of death and procreation underlies much of Johnson’s work during the 1960s, being particularly germane to Albert Angelo (1964) and Trawl (1966). The story, however, does not end with the epiphany in the churchyard. Johnson goes on to record a meeting with an enigmatic hitchhiker who bizarrely becomes a living embodiment of the figure he had seen carved on the wall of the church: . . . there she was, sitting down in the road facing me, just inside the headlights’ range. She raised her knees, and suddenly she was the sheela-na-gig, just as the one at Kilpeck, but living, living.



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According to his biographer, Jonathan Coe, the story is based on an event that occurred (apparently) in early 1955 when Johnson was twenty-two (Coe 2004: 71). Johnson also recalled the encounter in his final film, Fat Man on a Beach, which was broadcast on ITV on 12 November 1974, about a year after his death. It is unnecessary, however, to establish the biographical truth of this episode when considering the insight it grants into the nature of Johnson’s writing as he perceived it. His muse was a figure that locked birth and death into an eternal cycle; whether it was experienced, fantasised or hallucinated, the spectre of such a figure ensured that anything that sought to interfere with or control that cycle would acquire a psychological and emotional resonance it would not otherwise possess. A specific example of this can be seen in ‘An Instance,’ a sonnet that appeared in Johnson’s first poetry collection, Poems, in 1964: This, then, was one such occasion for you: I was walking back from Richmond along the grey shingle towpath of my rotted leaf and knotted condombearing river, walking back, that is, after seeing home a not-that-sort-of-girl, in a week of swollen tides, while an irresponsible testiculate moon smirked at her floodwork, and a train laboured in long agony across the arched girder spans of Barnes Bridge; then, on seeing the eye of Chiswick Eyot, I took comfort in this nightwalk’s instance: the untame Thames still inundates its banks and bears more dead leaves than perished condoms (15) It is not unlikely that the ‘you’ addressed in the first line of this poem is the ‘muse’ Johnson encountered in or around 1955. The poem is therefore more than a sketch of an urban scene, one where the condoms littering



I felt an elemental oneness, union, unity, with the moon, the lights, the road, the moor, the sheep, the van, the stones, and, above all, with her. (SAC 100)


the river are merely grossly corporeal signs of disorder. Rather, perennial Johnsonian themes, such as the difficulty of finding a ‘that-sort-of-girl,’ are inscribed within a mythical, quasi-religious framework evocative of The Waste Land with the condoms emblematic of an artificial curbing of the procreative urge. Confronted with such a dispiriting rebuttal of his muse (not to mention his difficulties with his date), Johnson finds a hopeful counterpoint in the presence of the moon, which he associates with male reproductive potential as well as the female reproductive cycle. The dead leaves that outnumber the condoms on the river’s surface are a positive image in so far as they are samples of organic matter that belong to a cycle of birth, death, decay and regeneration, while the abundance of water that threatens to break the river’s banks works in counterpoint to the artificial containment represented by the condom. In making this interpretation, it must be stressed that Johnson was not against contraception in a sociological or political sense. His reservations are aesthetic and religious in the ‘pre-Christian, even anti-Christian’ manner represented by the sheela-na-gig (SAC 93). Another poem in the same collection, ‘Natural Progress,’ gives voice to the imagined disappointment of sperm that, having been promised ‘homes, / embedded in the soft wall,’ find only, ‘the barrier’ of the prophylactic sheath at the end of their journey: ‘To go back impossible, unnatural: / [. . .] So we died: / what else was there to do?’ (Poems 22). In both poems, in a manner that is characteristic of Johnson’s work as a whole, the seriousness of the theme is deflected by a resigned shrug while being underpinned by a private mythology that is not made immediately present to the reader. Jonathan Coe has written, not altogether approvingly, of how Johnson was ‘sometimes more wrapped up in the private meanings of his work than in the task of communicating with his audience’ (2004: 263). Ironically, one of the many virtues of Coe’s biography is that it brings aspects of Johnson’s previously suppressed private mythology into the public domain, where it can now be incorporated into readings of his work. Johnson’s emphasis on contraception, for instance, is given an intriguing twist by a passage he deleted from the final draft of his second novel, Albert Angelo, which Coe reproduces in his biography. The passage in question belongs to a section that Johnson originally envisaged as the novel’s opening. Although he cut this whole section from the final draft, one particular passage leaves a ghostly trace on the published text, one that illuminates aspects of the novel that might otherwise seem random, gratuitous or opaque. The deleted opening of Albert Angelo explores in detail the relationship between Albert (going, in this draft, under the name of Samuel)



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and his close friend, Graham. Although Graham never appears in the final draft of the novel, he is the main topic of the conversation that takes place between Albert and his friends in opening pages of the published ‘Prologue.’ In his biography of Johnson, Coe demonstrates that the character of Graham was based on Michael Bannard, a man that Johnson had an intense, difficult friendship with in the 1950s. Coe’s view of the relationship is that Johnson had felt ‘quiet powerful (and disturbing) homoerotic feelings for Michael Bannard in 1955, but had decided not to act upon them’ (2004: 446). One piece of evidence Coe puts forward in support of this is a 1961 diary entry where Johnson wrote: ‘M wanted to go too deep and I was too scared to follow him’ (quoted in Coe 2004: 70). Another reflection Johnson added to this shortly afterwards reveals that any homosexual experiments he might have been tempted to make would have profound aesthetic implications. ‘Homosexuality,’ Johnson wrote, ‘would be such an affront to the Goddess that I am tempted, merely to see if she would destroy me’ (Coe 2004: 70). For Johnson, aesthetic issues were not divisible from the issues of sexuality that underlay them; any experimentation that strayed beyond the bounds of heterosexuality incurred the risk of poisoning the source of his art. All of this has implications for the deleted opening to Albert Angelo. One of the major discoveries of Coe’s biography, the scene where Graham/Bannard launches a bitter tirade against Samuel/Johnson emerges as the origin of Johnson’s youthful conviction that he would die at the age of 29, which in Albert Angelo is figured by the death of Christopher Marlowe in a tavern brawl in 1593 (AA 153).1 As tends to be the case with what is most disturbing in Johnson’s work, Graham’s attack on Samuel is opaque in both its motivation and intention. Ostensibly, Graham seems to be angry or envious at Samuel’s decision to leave his job at the office where they both work. The attack, however, goes far beyond any conventional level of betrayal or envy: That afternoon Graham came bouncing into Samuel’s part of the office and in a frenzied, shouting attack said that Samuel would never be an architect, that he had treacherously betrayed all that was good in him and in the world, that he would now be earthbound, of the earth, and that his small spark of spirit would prick and burn him still. And that he would die at 29. A lot more of this hysterical shouting Samuel could not understand at all. Graham stumbled out before Dubois could decide whether to call the police or tackle him himself. Samuel felt highly embarrassed, and left at once without completing the afternoon. A collection for him by Doreen raised 7/1d, and the



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The narrator never goes on to say exactly what it is about contraceptives that make them an appropriate purchase for Samuel to make at this point. As in the case of Travelling People, the immediate context alone endorses no particular interpretation. Placed in the context of Johnson’s work as a whole however, the following interpretation emerges: if the muse of Johnson’s art is a pre-Christian figure of fertility, Samuel’s purchase of contraceptives here is a gesture of despair, one that suggests he has internalised Graham’s accusation of betrayal and accepted his prediction that he will never find fulfilment as an artist. The everyday action of buying contraceptives becomes an act of self-sabotage on the part of an artist manqué who is indeed destined never to work as an architect as he will die prematurely at the novel’s end. Although the killing of Albert may seem like a gesture of suicidal selfloathing on the author’s part, it appears quite the contrary when the manner of that death is considered in the light of fertility rituals. Albert drowns when some of his more recalcitrant pupils throw him into a canal, a death that recalls what Jessie L. Weston has identified as an important feature of the Adonis cult, where an effigy of the dead god is not buried in the earth but thrown into water: ‘Throwing into, or drenching with, water is a well-known part of “Fertility” ritual; it is a case of sympathetic magic, acting as a rain charm’ (1957: 51). In this context, Albert’s death is an affirmative gesture of renewal and regeneration, one that anticipates the aquatic setting of Johnson’s subsequent novel, Trawl. In Albert Angelo, death by water is only one of various strategies Johnson employed in his effort to undo the hex cast by Graham/Bannard. The removal of the original scenes featuring Graham allowed for an alternative opening, one in which Graham is dismissed as a madman. It is no coincidence that this denigration of Graham is interwoven with a defiant image of fertility. As Albert cracks open an egg in the kitchen of the flat that used to be Graham’s, he discovers it to be: A double-yolker! How about that, then? Joseph said: I thought they weren’t allowed anymore by the egg manufacturers? Albert said: That’s made my day! A double-yolker! Joseph said: What happens with them? D’you get two chickens out?



girl had added enough herself to buy a 7/6d Boots token which she gave him on behalf of [sic] when she saw him that evening; Samuel bought contraceptives with it; he felt it was appropriate. (Quoted in Coe 2004: 443)

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Luke said: Y’know, I reckon that Graham was off his trolley. I mean, I’ve been here some evenings and you should have heard what was going on upstairs! Joseph said: All through the bloody night, too. Albert said: He was certainly unusual . . . eccentric . . . . Luke said: Eccentric! He was bleeding round the twist, mate, straight round the twist, no doubt about that! (AA 12) What Johnson is attempting here goes beyond any conventional use of autobiographical fiction to settle scores; what is stake in this scene is the source of Johnson’s art itself. Shortly after this, the conversation takes another turn, with the dismissal of Graham giving way to Albert’s insecurities in relation to his work as an architect. First, he reveals to Luke that he is an architect who has to earn a living by teaching. Then he admits that none of his designs have actually been built yet and may never be during his lifetime. These reflections reveal that any victory Johnson has achieved in relation to Graham by cutting him out of the novel is a tenuous one; although the novel does not refer to Graham hereafter, the set of associations established in the deleted passage between contraception, artistic failure and the betrayal of a muse maintain a ghostly presence in the published text. Short of working as a pharmacist, the profession of supply teaching that Albert is forced to adopt to make a living is the one that seems most likely to bring him into contact with contraceptives on an almost daily basis: ‘I don’t give a damn if they screw each other without my knowing, but when they drop frenchie packets in my wastepaper basket in the middle of a lesson, what am I supposed to do?’ (AA 142). Although this could be said to be a ubiquitous feature of classrooms everywhere, there is an oblique reference to Graham contained in Albert’s subsequent indented remarks, constrained in a column in the original, on the ‘lunchtime brothel’ (144) he is convinced some of the girls in his school are running: Albert said:

[ . . . .] I can smell it, mate, smell it. They’ve just had it off somewhere. And they come and stand at my desk as close as possible, probably thinking I know nothing about it or something. Or seeing if I do, and have got the guts to say something. It’s enough to drive you round the twist. (AA 144–5, my emphasis)



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When Joseph’s response to this is that Albert has got ‘sexual problems’ (145), Albert counters with the admission that indeed he has but his problems are not ‘simple’ ones: ‘It’s nothing like as simple as going out and screwing some old scrubber for a few bob’ (145). In making this remark, Albert alludes to a joke told to him earlier in the novel’s ‘Development’ section. This joke, like most of those told in Johnson’s novels, is manifestly gratuitous while latently touching on something that lies at the source of his writing. The joke, which is told to Albert by a pub landlord, concerns a tramp who, walking along Oxford Street, finds a pocket-book with five pounds in it: SO HE THOUGHT HE’D INVEST IT IN A BIT OF THE OTHER AND WENT TO THIS OLD SCRUBBER. SHE DIDN’T WANT TO KNOW UNTIL HE SHOWED HER THE LOOT, BUT THEN SHE TOLD HIM TO GO AND HAVE A BATH, SO HE DID, AND WHEN HE CAME BACK SHE SAW HE HADN’T WASHED HIS JOHN THOMAS, SO SHE SAID, YOU DIRTY OLD MAN, GO AND WASH IT, SO HE DID, AND WHEN HE CAME BACK SHE SAID, THAT’S BETTER, NOW HAVE YOU GOT THE LETTER? AND HE SAID, CHRIST, DO I HAVE TO HAVE TO HAVE REFERENCES FOR IT AS WELL? (AA 114) The joke’s punch line, with its deliberate confusion of a mode of contraception with an instance of writing, is a mise en abyme of a larger pattern in Johnson’s work. The tramp’s confusion of a ‘french letter’ with a letter of reference anticipates an arresting phrase Johnson deploys in Trawl, where the narrator, in recalling his affair with a woman called Joan, remembers how he began to long to have sex with her without ‘the intercession of the rubber’ (16). ‘Intercession’ is a word that encapsulates the ambiguous nature of contraception in Johnson’s work. On the one hand, it denotes the action of interceding or pleading on behalf of another. In this sense, the contraceptive fulfils the role of intermediary or go-between. In a world where women such as Joan feel terrified of becoming pregnant yet again, a condom is a prerequisite for intercourse; the first night the narrator spends with her she asks him: ‘Have you got a rubber? And I said no, and she said Please don’t then, another time when you have, but I mustn’t have a baby, I mustn’t have another baby, you mustn’t give me a baby’ (T 11). This, however, is a secular deployment of a word more usually employed in a religious context, where intercession takes the form of a prayer on another’s behalf. This reading raises the highly problematic



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status of the sheath in relation to a muse that is envisaged as a goddess of procreation. And if, in secular terms, a condom embodies sexual promise, the word ‘intercession’ also conveys the more negative meanings of cessation, interposition and intervention. At another point in Trawl, when reflecting on his failure to ever make it ‘into double figures’ (116) with any woman, the narrator remarks on the ‘strange intercession’ (116) that has never allowed him to get beyond nine. The condom is an object that Johnson returns to obsessively in Trawl, where his narrator’s sexual recollections focus almost obsessively on whether the sex he had with his former girlfriends took place with or without a sheath. Although this can be seen as exemplifying a realistic aesthetic, an example of how Johnson insists on ‘truth’ at all costs in his fiction, the amount of space Johnson devotes to the presence or absence of a sheath in these reminiscences goes far beyond the dictates of realism, sociological interest or authorial truth. While it is true that the narrator states the importance of remembering everything (‘it must be everything, otherwise I shall certainly not understand, shall have no chance of understanding’ [T 14]), the idea that Trawl is a total recall of the narrator’s past is disingenuous. If the novel’s title suggests a wide and indiscriminate casting of a net, the activity as practiced on board the ship that is the novel’s setting entails a proportionate amount of sifting and discarding; those images the novel retains become endowed with the aura of artefacts salvaged from a shipwreck, neatly catalogued and displayed under glass. If the obsession with contraception in Trawl conjures up the ghost of Graham/Bannard and his attack on Samuel/Johnson in the deleted opening to Albert Angelo, the writing of the later novel undertakes a supreme effort to achieve a final exorcism of this shadowy presence from Johnson’s work. When one of the men on the trawler assures the narrator that none of the things he may have heard about sailors happen on this ship, the rejection of homosexuality conveyed encodes a deeper rejection of Graham on Johnson’s part. The narrator’s agreement that there is ‘no atmosphere of anything homosexual’ (T 98) on the ship is immediately followed by an account of how this particular sailor and his wife are valiantly trying to conceive a child during the short breaks the man gets on shore (99). However, if fertilisation is implicitly opposed to homoeroticism in this scene, it has to be admitted that the longed for conception is presented as desired rather than achieved. This anxious uncertainty in relation to conception typifies the way the ship is represented in figurative terms. On the one hand, the ship is presented as a self-fertilising entity, having a steam winch below the deck whose spout ‘ejaculates oil into the



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womb of the slowly hissing machine’ (T 100). The sailors display a respect for the reproductive cycle characteristic of Johnson himself; when one of them discusses the reproductive habits of skate, he speaks of it, the narrator notes, ‘with a delicacy which contrasts oddly with the dirty stories he tells me at other times’ (132). The defiance of Graham these moments embody is countered, however, by images that connect the ship and sailors themselves with contraception through their apparel when they go about the job of gutting fish wearing, ‘gloves and rubber smocks, long boots, thigh boots, waders, some even like rubber dungarees, if that is the name’ (38). These paradoxical figurations of the ship and its sailors relate to the abiding doubt that besets Johnson’s early writing: that Graham’s portents will be fulfilled, that his work will fail and that his muse will abandon or destroy him. Near the end of Trawl, in a moment of aesthetic self-doubt that recalls the ‘Disintegration’ of Albert Angelo, the narrator asks: ‘what use is it pointing to this ship as a womb, for instance, as a symbol, these men’s refuge as well as their purgatory, and all that balls? What use would it be?’ (180). At the same time, he writes of feeling ‘exorcised’ (179) and looks forward to a future that implicitly links a wife and a child with ‘freedom to work as I have to work’ (180). The conclusion of the novel does not force a resolution between these conflicting signals but leaves both echoing with equal resonance. Bannard made his final appearance in Johnson’s work under the guise of Jack in The Unfortunates (1969). In the section of the novel that begins, ‘I had a lovely flat then,’ Johnson recalls how he and a friend got barred from a pub in Chapel Market for what, on the face of it, looks like little more than schoolboy misbehaviour: Jack and I had got very drunk in this pub one night, and he had written up Fuck the Pope in their virginal urinal, and I had added, it being about that time, And the Earl of Snowdon, and later still Jack had started blowing up french letters as though they were balloons, and banging them together, he and I, that is, popping them off. (U ‘I had a lovely flat then,’ 3) That the character of Jack is another incarnation of Bannard is suggested by the detail that Jack had occupied the narrator’s flat before him; in April 1961 Johnson had moved out of his parents’ house and into a ground-floor flat in Claremont Square that had just been vacated by Bannard (see Coe 2004: 101). The typically Johnsonian swipe at the upper orders also dates the episode to 1961 because the peerage title,



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Earl of Snowdon, was only created that year for Antony ArmstrongJones, who had married HRH The Princess Margaret in May 1960 (Kidd and Williamson 2003: 1490). Significantly, Bannard’s one appearance in The Unfortunates occurs in a scene that juxtaposes contraceptives with acts of inscription. Although the mildly scatological context might suggest that the theme, at this point, no longer had the uncanny nature of an obsession for Johnson, the ludic element of the scene in the pub is in counterpoint with a story told elsewhere in the novel about a man who had recently committed suicide for no apparent reason: We speculated on motives, Tony and I, he more than I, who am not really interested in motives, actions are what are important, but he did say he thought sex was something to do with it that Paul’s wife was a Catholic and that they had decided that they would have no children until after they had both finished their research, she was a postgrad as well, and that the form of birth control they had elected to employ was self-denial. (U ‘Then he was doing research,’ 5) Although Johnson paradoxically and somewhat disingenuously claims that he was ‘interested enough in the story, the event, at the time, but not enough to write it down’ (5), at least part of its dark appeal would seem to stem from its juxtaposition of birth-control with selfdestruction. On a conscious, rational level, Johnson would undoubtedly have agreed with Sigmund Freud when he referred to contraception as ‘one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject’ (Freud 1976 3: 277). In Johnson’s writings however, it is hardly ever represented in such progressive terms but is repeatedly aligned with something that is opaquely disturbing. In his biography, Coe demonstrates that despite being a militant atheist who was opposed to organised religion, Johnson had a superstitious side that was fascinated with ‘paganism, witchcraft, and the pre-Christian religions generally’ (Coe 2004: 29). Although Coe concludes that Johnson for the most part kept these elements ‘at a safe distance from his work’ (29), the particular set of associations gathered around the theme of contraception suggest that these elements were not really kept at bay so much as sublimated in his work. Conflating ambivalence towards homosexuality with death, disorder and artistic failure, contraception, in Johnson’s terms, was a ‘strange intercession’ that was also a contravention of the muse.



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1. Marlowe’s reputation, which encompassed atheism, blasphemy and homosexuality, makes him a suggestive figure for Albert/Johnson to identify himself with in the context of an overwhelmingly feminine muse. It does not begin or end with Albert Angelo. In Travelling People, Henry walks into a bar ‘like Christopher Marlowe into Eleanor Bull’s tavern at Deptford Strand on 30th May 1593’ (TP 261), though without the same unhappy outcome. In Trawl, there is an allusion to the death of Marlowe in the scene where an ‘overblown version of the catfish’ is stabbed ‘cruelly in an orange coloured eye’ (T 132) by one of the sailors.

Works cited Cherry, S. (1992) A Guide to Sheela-na-gigs, Dublin: National Museum of Ireland. Coe, Jonathan (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Freud, Sigmund (1976) Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press, trans. and ed. by James Strachey. Graves, Robert (1961) The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, London: Faber and Faber. Johnson, B. S. (1964) Poems. London: Constable. ———. (1974) Fat Man on a Beach, broadcast on ITV, 12 November 1974; screenplay published in Giles Gordon (ed.) (1975) Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction, London: Hutchinson. Kidd, Charles and Williamson, David (eds) (2003) Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage, London: Debrett’s Peerage Ltd & Pan Macmillan. Pope Paul VI (1968) Humanæ Vitæ: Encyclical on the Regulation of Birth, July 25. Weston, Jessie L. (1957) From Ritual to Romance, New York: Doubleday.



Note

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B. S. Johnson recognised the significant impact the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) could have on his literary career as a potential platform for his writing. During the 1950s and 60s it was a hugely influential cultural institution, maintaining its radio monopoly throughout, though it was forced to restructure its radio provision in 1967 (adding Radio 1 once the popular offshore pirate stations had been forced to close by Government legislation), and gaining a second television channel (BBC2 in 1967). The BBC’s institutional inclinations were, however, artistically and politically conservative and Johnson’s relationship with the Corporation was destined to be a volatile one. The main cause of conflict between Johnson and the BBC centred upon his desire to introduce unconventional, experimental literature to all audience types, including the mainstream. From Johnson’s point of view BBC Radio held a frustratingly cautious attitude to experiment: ‘Hesitation in the use of experiment can be seen in the whole gamut of Home Service productions’ (Priessnitz, 1981: 40). Despite his best efforts to convince them otherwise, the BBC continued to place his work, when they placed it at all, in the Third Programme, which according to Martin Esslin (1980: 175), catered for the ‘none-too-numerous community of people interested in avant-garde and truly experimental works’ or, in other words: ‘the literary gourmets who go in for recondite lesser classics or rare foreign works’. Johnson did not view his work in this way at all. The Corporation was also cautious in its attitude toward content: ‘the Radio Drama Department, along with other sectors, traditionally avoided themes likely to cause public or political offence’ (Murdock, 1981: 145–6). The subjects regarded as controversial were Legion and included ‘propagandist problem-plays’ and ‘plays dealing with physical 117 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Institutional Negotiations: B. S. Johnson and the BBC (1959–73)

Institutional Negotiations

disabilities – cancer, stammering, tuberculosis’ (Gielgud, 1981: 146) and this cautious attitude remained constant throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. Asa Briggs (1985: 335) makes a significant point: this department ‘was unique in having only two heads in fifty years of sustained output’. This illustrates how a conservative hegemony within the BBC remained constant over time. According to D. G. Bridson, the BBC’s ‘role, as the BBC saw it, was to reflect the most respectably orthodox opinion as it already existed – and that meant conservatism’ (Hewison, 1981: 36). Johnson’s agent, and former BBC employee, Diana Tyler (2000) suggests that Johnson’s treatment of sensitive subject matter impeded his success with the Corporation. House Mother Normal, for example, set in a residential home, explores dementia, cancer, sexual perversion, cruelty and exploitation of the elderly. This was considered too contentious and the Head of Radio Three withdrew his interest in broadcasting the 1971 novel as a radio play. The BBC’s Reithian-formed broadcasting hegemony depended on employing staff with orthodox views. Tom Burns detected a distinctly Reithian outlook among the staff he interviewed in 1963 and 1973. He particularly recalled the repetition of certain stock phrases, such as ‘the way the BBC does things’, ‘Broadcasting-House-Mindedness’, ‘what the BBC stands for’ and ‘the public service idea in broadcasting’ (Burns, 1977: 43). This shared vocabulary, which is also revealed in the BBC’s Caversham archives, bears testimony to the presence of a collective outlook underpinning BBC staff attitudes. Burns (1977: 42) also identified a specific ‘BBC type’ which prompted him to conclude that ‘BBC culture, like BBC standard English, was not peculiar to itself but an intellectual ambience composed out of the values, standards and beliefs of the professional middle-class, especially that part educated at Oxford and Cambridge’. Subscription to establishment values were not openly admitted, and the existence of a ‘BBC type’ strenuously denied, but the collective outlook of the BBC remained orthodox-Reithian, especially with regard to radio. Upon his graduation from King’s College in 1959 Johnson recognised the professional gain in having his work broadcast on radio and wrote to the BBC. Philip Tew (2005) deals with these first contacts in detail, but a brief reference to the last paragraph of Johnson’s supplication illustrates the tone particularly well: ‘At present I spend most of my time writing (I am working on a novel) and support myself by private coaching’ (1959). Johnson adapts his language to announce his suitability on an ideological level by adopting the middle-class vocabulary of the Corporation. Johnson is aware that he needs to appeal to the BBC on



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an ideological level if he is to achieve success. Endorsement by such an influential cultural institution would have positive reverberations in his negotiations with other media. However the opposite, of course, is also true. When culturally certified institutions, like the BBC, form a negative opinion it is likely to be duplicated elsewhere. While BBC policy of the time is not documented, it is revealed in the unguarded comments on internal memorandums, correspondence and the crossed out sections on scripts. Primary material from the BBC Written Archive provides valuable insight into how the Corporation decided what material would and would not be broadcast. Johnson’s letters, retrieved from the archive, reveal his growing impatience with the BBC’s apparent veto of experimental literature. This is particularly apparent in 1961 when Johnson sent some poems for broadcast on the ‘Living Poets’ series. Johnson (1961a) supports his request by referring to his literary contacts: ‘Anthony Thwaite, in a letter dated 26th June 1961, told me that he had passed on to you another of my poems [. . .] Can you let me know whether you have made a decision about this poem please?’ At this time Thwaite was a published poet who had served alongside Johnson on the Universities Poetry committee. Along with his inquiry above regarding poetry already seen, Johnson enclosed a further five poems. As he did with his 1959 letter of introduction he cites literary endorsements of his work. Two years later Johnson (1961a) writes: ‘Daughter has been taken by ISIS, Clay by OUTPOSTS, A Dublin Unicorn by THE SIXTIES, and this latter will also appear in the PEN anthology of NEW POEMS 1962’. In spite of Johnson’s successes, outlined above, by April 1962 he had still not received a reply to his request of 1961. With obvious irritation he writes, ‘You may be interested to hear that I have just won one of this year’s Gregory Awards for young writers’ ( Johnson, 1962a). Terence Tiller, from the Features Department, to whom Johnson had sent his poems recognised and reacted to the implied criticism in his reply: ‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting so long for a decision about your poems, which I return herewith. I kept them by me in case my first impression might be revised. I am afraid, however, that I still do not think that they would make effective broadcasting material, whatever their other merits’ (See Johnson, 1962b). Tiller’s final comment points to a certain defensiveness on the part of the BBC for having taken a total of ten months to reply. As Tew (2005) details, Johnson enjoyed better success with George MacBeth, producer of The Poet’s Voice. Johnson met MacBeth at a writers’ meeting in 1960 and through MacBeth he re-submitted a play that had



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previously been rejected. MacBeth ensured that the play was seen by the appropriate department but, despite this intervention, Johnson’s play, ‘It May be Just What We Need’, was turned down. The play, which involved the abduction of British Railway train carriages for the distillation of illegal whisky, elicited the following response from Drama Department: ‘Sounds pretty crude, but is in fact quite well done. Disadvantages, of course, in that it’s fantasy at all, and that this sort of humour is completely out of fashion. Also, it’s indirectly rather scathing about British Railways. I think on the whole the audience wouldn’t like it’ (See Johnson, 1961b). In fact, internally, the BBC held almost the opposite reason for the play’s rejection as is clear from Peggy Wells’s written opinion: ‘on policy grounds it is unacceptable all apart from popular taste. British Railways seem to me far too sensitive a subject to be laughed at in this way’ (See Johnson, 1961c). The final view is given in M. Harlwich’s hand-written remark below Wells’s: ‘there is certainly no future for this piece’. Harlwich’s advice to be conveyed to Johnson (1961c) is that if he ‘could find appropriate ideas’ he would have better success in the future and that he should try to write ‘a nice little comedy or two for us on more realistic lines’. Harlwich’s comment reveals how: ‘The necessity of realism reasserts itself as a major emphasis of the institutional framing of artistic production’ (Tew, 2005: 130). From an organisation broadcasting The Goon Show from the mid-1950s and partly responsible for popularising the ‘satire boom’ of the mid-1960s these grounds for rejection look odd. Anarchic and contentious humour did have a place in programme schedules, just not Johnson’s brand of anarchic humour. It is possible to point to the Oxbridge connections of the satirists but that does not apply in the case of the Goons and ultimately there is a question about the correct venue for Johnson’s work. Though Coe (2004: 96–7) reveals Johnson had a stab at a Goon show script in 1960, he came to the BBC as a poet and an author, not a dramatist or a comedy scriptwriter, and would continue to be treated as such. The rejection letter for the play (see Tew, 2005: 131) was written by Michael Bakewell (later to become Johnson’s agent) and established a contact that Johnson pursued, writing to Bakewell at the script unit in April 1962: ‘I have run into difficulty over treatment about which I would be very grateful for your advice’. Johnson (1962c) asked Bakewell which approach would be ‘more suitable’: ‘(1) from a simple, dramatic, narrative, surface point of view (⫽ Home?) Or (2) in psychological depth (⫽ Third?)’. At this stage in his career Johnson was happy for his work to be broadcast on either the Home Service or the Third Programme and conveys



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both his flexibility and willingness to accept advice. However, the reader’s report on Travelling People, while critical of ‘an almost deliberate flatness in the writing’, was still significantly positive in its suggestion that Johnson ‘write something for Sound or to send in his next novel’ (See Johnson, 1963a). In the balance of praise and criticism, encouragement and rejection, the BBC preferences against experiment and potentially controversial material was upheld while still appearing inclusive. A short while later Johnson wrote to MacBeth to express his disappointment over both the BBC’s reaction to Travelling People and that of literary reviewers. He (1963b) states: ‘no one has made any attempt to examine the validity of my reasons for a new approach, for the necessity of experiment’. He adds that ‘Praise was given to the novel in spite of its form; and indeed it seems as though ‘form’ and ‘technique’ are regarded as dirty words’. In closing, and with characteristic opportunism, Johnson (1963b) does however ask: ‘Do you think there is an idea for a programme or item in NEW COMMENT on form in the novel?’ Johnson (1964a) was nothing if not determined, and his persistence paid off: in July 1964 he was paid five guineas for a five minute interview on the Third Programme’s New Novel series. This same month his publisher, Constable, wrote to the BBC suggesting ‘that B. S. Johnson would make an excellent subject for an interview’ (See Huddleston, 1964). Constable’s intervention on Johnson’s behalf represented a positive breakthrough with the BBC. In August 1964 his second novel, Albert Angelo, received the attention of an entire New Comment programme. The BBC’s positive response to Constable’s request illustrates hegemony in practice. As part of the literary establishment Constable achieved in one letter what Johnson had been trying to achieve for five years. Johnson’s interview experience was a mixed one, however. The crossed-out sections on the talks script reveals an underlying prejudice against literary experiment that, in places, leads to a total breakdown in communication between Johnson and BBC interviewer Christopher Ricks. With regard to the holes cut through two of the Albert Angelo’s pages, Ricks (1964) demands: ‘what would your defence of that be?’ Provocative language provokes a defensive response. Coherence breaks down in Johnson’s, later deleted, response: ‘well you know it says a great deal on the state of reviewing and readership as well that since [. . .] since this book is difficult . . .’ (See Ricks, 1964). In an unbroadcast interlude the reception of experimental literature is discussed further. As the debate becomes more heated Ricks’s (1964) command of language also



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begins to deteriorate: ‘whatever the state of critical opinion, I mean whatever the welcome that was given to new conventions [. . .] what you’re trying to do is to shock and alert the reader, so that I don’t think at this point you can blame people for being shocked and alerted’. Johnson is astounded and demands to know whether, in Ricks’s opinion, literary experiment ‘diminishes the book; that it’s a worse book for those devices because they draw attention to themselves?’ Ricks confirms Johnson’s fear by unequivocally replying ‘Yes’. Over one third of the Ricks interview featured similar disputes. These were not broadcast on the final programme either. The most damaging example of the BBC’s editorial practices occurs on the final two pages of Ricks’s script. In these Johnson is accused of being ‘misguided’ and criticised for using devices that in Ricks’s (1964) opinion are ‘really rather old and used up rather than new and at the beginning of a new frontier’. Johnson counters that in his view, to say ‘the things I’ve got to say’, he needs to both invent and adapt literary techniques in a way that is appropriate to his contemporary experience (Ricks, 1964). The audience was not given the opportunity to hear Johnson’s passionate defence of experiment or to judge for itself the legitimacy of his reasons for experiment. The platform on which he had hoped to counter some of the negative press his novels received in review simply presented listeners with the BBC’s view of literary experiment. It is in this way that the critical hegemony’s acts ‘of evaluation – represented in what they exclude as well as in what they include – constitute not merely recommendations of value, but [. . .] also determinants of value’ (Smith, 1991: 46). This is not to say that Johnson did not receive any support for his ideas during the 1964 programme. Ricks concedes that it is ‘clear from the novel that your intention is a serious attempt to extend the conventions that are open to the novelist, not to abolish convention but to give [the writer] more’. Here the sympathetic, liberal voice of the BBC emerges and this comment was left in the broadcast programme. In reality, as this brief overview of the programme has shown, the BBC could also be extremely illiberal. But this mattered little given that ‘the BBC holds the position of acting as its own censor’ (Murdock, 1981: 146). The experience of his 1964 interview seems to have persuaded Johnson that he might have more success pleading his case on his own terms and the following year Johnson (1965a) suggested to the BBC that he write a talk on experimental writing ‘in the hope of creating understanding about what I and the few writers like me are trying to do’. In anticipation of objection to this 1965 proposal he once again capitalised on his contacts at the BBC: ‘It is difficult – as Rayner Heppenstall,



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another experimental writer and colleague of yours (who incidentally suggested that I send this talk to you) has found as well – to get anyone to take “experimental” writing seriously’. This endorsement from someone within the BBC, however, failed to persuade the Corporation. Head of Talks, D. G. Bridson, replied ‘I am afraid that it is in the nature of broadcasting that we cannot rely upon a possible audience for your talk being familiar with your published fiction, and don’t feel that such a talk would really be justified without that foreknowledge’ (See Johnson, 1965b). Johnson felt this to be an excuse rather than a legitimate reason based on listening figures. Johnson (1965c) responded by conducting his own research into listening figures, which prompted him to write: I must respectfully ask you to reconsider your decision regarding my radio talk [. . .] since your reasons in rejecting it [are] demonstrably unjust to me in at least two ways. Firstly, most of what I have to say is relevant to the whole of contemporary fiction in English, and not only to my novels. Secondly, the number of people who have read one or more of my books is at least 35,000 [. . .] and it is reasonable to assume that at least as many again know something about me. I am aware from BBC audience research figures that many of your talks programmes start with a potential audience of far less than 70,000. It is not as though I am unknown to a radio audience, either, since the whole of a New Comment programme was devoted to my work in August 1964, and Albert Angelo was discussed by The Critics in the same month. I know that in writing this letter I am very likely doing myself a great deal of no good: but I will not suffer injustice from anyone, and you have treated me unjustly. Johnson’s sales figures cannot be corroborated. However, if they are taken as accurate, in the context of BBC viewing figures the counter-argument Johnson presents is a valid one. Bridson responds with equanimity: ‘if you care to send your script in again I will have it personally read for you by the Chief of the Third Programme’ (See Johnson, 1965d). The correspondence ends here but the absence of any further reference to this recording on Johnson’s BBC file points to a disappointing outcome. I suspect that it was Johnson’s hostile tone more than a concern over audience figures that was responsible for the BBC’s rejection of his proposal. I refer in particular to the arrogance of the second sentence coupled with his refusal to accept the BBC’s reason for rejection. Johnson’s angry outburst above, in addition to the anger displayed in the New Comment programme, did not endear him to the BBC, and neither did it fit with the BBC’s code of conduct based on the Reithian



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philosophy of ‘similarity of outlook’ (Stewart, 1975: 159). By June 1966 an anonymous hand-written remark on an internal memo confirms that an unfavourable view of Johnson was beginning to emerge in some quarters of the BBC: ‘he seems to be a prolific writer in several media, and has had one flop on Third. I’d be interested to see anything else he sends in, but no more’ (See Johnson, 1966a). The ‘flop’ referred to is presumably one of the works broadcast on the Third Programme. These comprised of Johnson’s poem ‘Rejectamenta’, the New Comment programme on Albert Angelo and his radio play Entry. The final remark above, however ambiguously phrased, strongly suggests that any future submissions by Johnson to the Third would not be welcome and a personal dislike of Johnson is plainly perceived. Johnson sent his unperformed 1964 play You’re Human Like the Rest of Them to the BBC’s television script unit. They, ‘having no use for it’, passed it onto the Third Programme. The initially encouraging comments from television, that Johnson was ‘a very good writer’ and that ‘A.H.D.(S) [Assistant Head of Drama for Sound] should certainly see it’, did not extend to BBC Radio (See Johnson, 1966b). Bennett Maxwell from Drama for Sound declared it to be ‘a fragment of a play – over before it really started’, with the final opinion: ‘It’s not for us’ (See Johnson, 1966c). In spite of this rejection, in 1967 You’re Human was awarded one of only fifteen government grants to adapt it into a film, administered by the British Film Institute (BFI). The film version then went on to win Grand Prix at both Tours and Melbourne International Film Festivals in 1968. The dichotomous treatment of Johnson’s film abroad, as with his novels in the States, indicates how experimental work could receive a far more positive reception overseas. The success of Johnson’s film did eventually filter through to the BBC. After the BFI’s endorsement of his work, which was reinforced abroad, Johnson and Bruce Beresford from the BFI were invited to take part in a BBC discussion programme on the subject of grants for film. The topic that immediately arose, and which was later deleted from the final broadcast, centred on the continuing and seemingly inherent hostility toward the term ‘experimental’. Indeed Beresford revealed that his organisation had to change its name from the ‘Experimental Film Fund’ to the ‘British Film Institute’ because: ‘distributors used to hang up their ‘phones very quickly when we said we had a film to sell and it was experimental’ (Rhode, 1967). The history of Johnson’s play reinforces the negative perception of experiment in the broader cultural arena.



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In 1967 Johnson’s tenacity resulted in yet another heated dispute, this time with Esslin when he was Head of Drama. The argument centred on the possible dramatisation of Johnson’s first three novels, an idea which had come from a December 1966 conversation with Bennett Maxwell after the rejection of You’re Human . . . In support of his proposal Johnson once again cites his sales figures in his negotiations. The BBC did not even acknowledge his suggestion: this enraged Johnson and he wrote a particularly angry response ( Johnson, 1967a). He blames ‘the BBC compartmental mind’ of unfairly marginalising his work because, in their view, it is ‘not [. . .] acceptable to a Home Service audience’. Johnson declares it ‘an insult that [his] novels were not considered on their own merits but rejected under some blanket policy formulated by the Head of Third Programme’. He suggests that the ‘technical innovations’ of his novels, if ‘re-thought for Sound, would certainly result in their gaining “a new dimension through dramatisation”’ but concludes on an angry note, stating that he has seen ‘no evidence that they have even been considered in this light by the BBC’. Esslin responds to Johnson’s criticisms by promising to mention his ‘suggestion of readings on the Home Service’. Optimism that this might finally signal the broadcast of his novels to a radio audience, however, is undercut by Esslin’s warning that ‘looking at the books chosen for “Book at Bedtime” I do think that on the whole they tend to go for a different type of material’ (See Johnson, 1967b). Johnson’s response to the irony in the comment above is swift and valid. He replies: ‘I expect you may have by now seen the no doubt unconscious humour of the paragraph in which you deny possession of the BBC compartmental mind while yet assigning my novels only to “Book at Bedtime”’. The correspondence above reveals Johnson’s exasperation with the BBC, which has built up over an eight-year period. A major contributing factor was the different treatment of his work elsewhere. While the BBC’s World Service found it perfectly acceptable to broadcast a seven-minute reading from Trawl in 1966, its British counterpart did not. Johnson’s language when angry undermined any success his persistence may have had. This was pointed out to Johnson in Esslin’s final correspondence. He warns Johnson that the BBC will not be ‘intimidated into acceptance by the violence [. . .] of the language in which you make these complaints’ (See Johnson, 1967c). Esslin then refers the matter to his superior whose hand-written reply records a growing impatience: ‘I think you have written to him with great courtesy. It probably won’t prevent him from coming back’ (See Johnson, 1967d).



Valerie Butler


The author of this document, whose initials are indistinguishable, was correct in the assumption that Johnson would be back. In 1968, after working with Mollie Lee (producer of Woman’s Hour) on his book The Evacuees, Johnson approached BBC Radio for work again. This time, however, he tried a different approach and addressed his ideas only to those people with whom he had previously had a successful working relationship. As a result Johnson (1968a) asked Lee whether she ‘would consider TRAVELLING PEOPLE for serialization on [the] programme?’ He received a standard reply, that the novel ‘isn’t quite right for our particular purpose’. The parenthetical dialogue between producer and editor reveals the real reason for Travelling People’s rejection. Lee asks her editor if she agrees that there is ‘Too much bed?’ in the novel. The reply, ‘Yes, I think so; and too much conceit’, indicates, once again, content in conflict with the BBC’s view of acceptable taste (See Johnson, 1968b). At this time, however, Johnson’s luck undoubtedly began to change. In 1968 Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? received a fifteen-minute reading on the Third Programme. In February 1968 Johnson was also invited to appear on Bergonzi’s Radio Three series Novelists of the Sixties. This half-hour programme, presented by an important and respected literary critic, incorporated readings from his three published novels and even included a reference to his forthcoming novel, The Unfortunates. Johnson’s selection and inclusion on Bergonzi’s programme represented a positive breakthrough. This attention also indicates his increasing status in the literary arena. The true extent of the establishment’s ambivalence toward Johnson and experimental fiction is exemplified in his inclusion in Bergonzi’s Novelists of the Sixties. Introduced as ‘a young writer of exceptional stylistic gifts and some disconcerting and provocative ideas about the novel’ (Bergonzi, 1968: 4), the language immediately alerts one to the conditions attached to Bergonzi’s endorsement. Bergonzi announces that Johnson ‘probably won’t be pleased if I say that his theories seem to me mistaken and likely to interfere with the best use of his remarkable gifts as a novelist’ (1968: 17). Once again Johnson is informed that if he desires greater literary success he will concentrate less on his radical theories about the novel and focus instead on his realist abilities. Alan Sinfield (1989: 31) argues that ‘Dominant cultural formations are always under pressure, striving to substantiate their claim to superior explanatory power in situations where diverse features are resistant’. Johnson demonstrated his resistance to the hegemony of traditional mimesis by re-appraising the novel’s tools of realist



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expression. However, a more conservative view of realism stood in the way of his wider recognition. Johnson had better success with his editorial work. In October and November 1968 Johnson’s BBC ‘Requisition File’ shows that he participated in two discussions on wartime evacuation for Radio Four. However it is significant that, as with Constable in 1964, it was Giles Gordon at Gollancz, publisher of Johnson’s 1968 collection The Evacuees, who succeeded in persuading the BBC to include him on their broadcast programmes (See Johnson, 1968c). Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 188) argues that the ‘the practical justification of the established order’ is achieved ‘under cover of formal equality – between the qualifications people obtain and the cultural capital they have inherited – in other words, through the legitimacy it confers on the transmission of this form of heritage’. Gordon possessed the necessary cultural capital and social cachet and as a result he represented a legitimising force in persuading the BBC to employ Johnson. On his own Johnson did not possess the necessary qualifications, ideologically or economically: he lacked an Oxbridge education, and his books, to the BBC, lacked a reliable audience in that they were experimental. In terms of radio appearances without publisher intervention Johnson had only marginal success. In 1968, he won a weekly, threeand-a-half-minute slot on the World Service’s Bookcase series, though this programme only lasted for four episodes. Johnson’s BBC file does show that he also contributed a report on the Harrogate Festival and a feature on meths drinkers to Radio Four’s Out of This Week series. The diversity of Johnson’s editorial and documentary work with the BBC reveals that while his creative work was routinely rejected, the BBC did provide him with some paid work. On a less positive note, this type of work is merely an extension of Johnson’s other temporary positions as teacher and reporter, which are recounted, respectively, in Albert Angelo and The Unfortunates. Johnson’s employment history as recorded at the BBC Sound Archives in Middlesex confirms the supplementary nature of his career during the period 1968 to 1973. In various roles (writer, producer and director) Johnson also made a number of programmes for BBC Television, four of which were documentaries on issues such as modern architecture, while three were treatments of his literature, reinforcing the need to financially support his writing career. Jonathan Coe suggests (2004: 260), while ‘Partly a question of money’, ‘his work behind the camera [. . .] seemed to be completely taking over from writing’, though at least this work provided Johnson with some relief ‘from the isolation of the writer’s life’.



Valerie Butler


During this period the BBC did, however, begin to acknowledge Johnson’s growing importance as a writer. In July 1971 he was included on Alex Hamilton’s Radio Three programme, Novel Ideas, alongside established literary figures C. P. Snow (Lord) and David Lodge. The topic under discussion centred on the type of literature currently being produced. Johnson’s remarks are particularly revealing. When asked if he would be content ‘to work in a form that evolves into a specialised minority art’, he replied that he would be ‘quite happy with that situation’, revealing a new, post-Unfortunates pessimism in his attitude to novel-writing (See Hamilton, 1971). The literary establishment’s misunderstanding of the rationale for one of Johnson’s most emotional and personally important novels prompted a disillusion with critics and consumers alike (see also Coe, 2004: 270). The lengths Johnson had previously gone to in trying to present his work across the whole spectrum of BBC channels tend to contradict his statement. The most likely explanation for Johnson’s remark above is that he no longer cared about introducing experiment to a mainstream audience. This view is made clear in the following statement, later reflected in the Introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, that he ‘can only assume, just as people like Lord Snow and many other English novelists’ are ‘imitating the act of being a 19th [sic] century novelist’, that ‘there are also a great number of people who are imitating the act of being a 19th century reader’ (See Hamilton, 1971). Johnson’s criticism above was included in the broadcast programme. His equally acerbic closing comment also remained. On air Johnson predicted that just as poetry had become a minority art form, so too would the novel, and furthermore, ‘that this is no bad thing from my point of view’. At this time Johnson’s mother was also terminally ill with cancer, a factor that would have undoubtedly further influenced his mood. Johnson’s growing disillusionment with literature is reinforced by the increased attention he gave to television. But his chance to have his literary work dramatised for television was stymied fairly early. In May 1967 Travelling People was due to appear on ‘The Wednesday Play’ for BBC2, until Johnson withdrew from the deal. The BBC Archive supplies no specific explanation, though there is evidence of a disagreement over the fee. Another contributory factor was that the BBC wrote into the contract that Johnson would have to collaborate on the script. Johnson’s dislike of collaboration is evident in the 1967 BBC broadcast on experimental film, during which he reveals, ‘I don’t get on well in groups. I’ve been a failure of every group I’ve ever belonged to’



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(See Rhode, 1967). Nevertheless, Johnson’s unwillingness to collaborate on Travelling People was a mistake. This decision prevented the exposure of his work to the biggest possible audience. However, although television was emerging as the newest form of literary expression during this time, its importance as a literary medium passed unacknowledged by the literary establishment until much later in the twentieth century. Sinfield (1983: 161) confirms that literary critics at this time did not ‘recognize television drama as a medium of contemporary literary achievement’ and had Johnson gained a larger, mainstream audience through television the chances are that his work would still not have received a sympathetic reception by literary critics. It is both ironic and sad that in the two years prior to his death Johnson finally achieved the recognition he desired from BBC Radio, the acknowledged ‘literary’ medium. The character of this success, however, remained marginal. On the Overseas Regional Service Johnson wrote and presented his own (twenty-seven programme) series, The World of Books, from March to October 1972. Then through BBC Radio London Johnson achieved a first on British radio. In the lead up to the release of the sixth novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the whole text would be broadcast on BBC Radio London. Tom Vernon, BBC Radio producer, wrote to Johnson’s publisher Collins that this was ‘the first time on British radio that a full-length novel has been done in one lump’ (See Johnson, 1973a). Had he lived on, Johnson would have undoubtedly enjoyed his hardwon place on British Radio. But then, as this discussion has also shown, at times Johnson could be his own worst enemy. The belligerent part of his nature that emerged in his work, on the literary circuit and in his negotiations with the BBC, adversely affected both his critical reception and reputation. Johnson’s tendency toward feeling he was the victim of unfair treatment caused him to lash out on many occasions. The professional consequences of this behaviour were serious. Material from the BBC Written Archive reveals that Johnson suffered both bitter disappointment and significant success in his volatile relationship with the Corporation. The cultural capital the BBC attached to his name was unstable, rising and falling in value in accordance with the work or the individual producer to whom the work was sent. Internal correspondence and the deleted excerpts on talks’ scripts point to the lingering conservatism from Reith’s administration responsible for the BBC’s cautious attitude toward his experimental and potentially controversial material.



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Works cited

All material in the section below is from the BBC Written Archive: Caversham, Reading. Details of the correspondence between B. S. Johnson and individual BBC employees, cited in the essay, are provided below for ease of consultation.

Correspondence Johnson, 1959: Letter of introduction, 11.11.59. Johnson, 1961a: Johnson to Terence Tiller, 11.12.61. Johnson, 1961b: Internal reply (7.12.61) from Richard Imison to George MacBeth’s memo of 23.11.61. Johnson, 1961c: Internal reply (14.12.61) from Peggy Wells to Richard Imison’s memo of 7.12.61. Johnson, 1962a: Johnson to Tiller, 7.4.62. Johnson, 1962b: Tiller to Johnson, 12.4.62. Johnson, 1962c: Johnson to Michael Bakewell, 19.4.62. Johnson, 1963a: Internal memo from Ariadne Nicolaeff to Bakewell, 25.2.63. Johnson, 1963b: Johnson to MacBeth, 6.6.63. Johnson, 1964a: from Johnson’s BBC ‘Requisitions/Contracts’file. Tx 27.7.64. Johnson, 1965a: Johnson to D. G. Bridson, 30.8.65. Johnson, 1965b: Bridson to Johnson, 13.10.65. Johnson, 1965c: Johnson to Bridson, 15.10.65. Johnson, 1965d: Bridson to Johnson, 20.9.65. Johnson, 1966a: Internal BBC memo, 22.6.66. Johnson, 1966b: Internal BBC memo from Senior Assistant, Television Script Unit, Betty Willingale, to S.E.D.(S), 13.5.66. Johnson, 1966c: Internal BBC memo from Bennett Maxwell to William Ash, 14.6.66. Johnson, 1967a: Johnson to Martin Esslin, 13.4.67. Johnson, 1967b: Esslin to Johnson, 14.4.67. Johnson, 1967c: Esslin to Johnson, 21.4.67. Johnson, 1967d: Hand-written remark (16.4.67) on Esslin’s internal memo of 14.4.67. Johnson, 1968a: Johnson to Mollie Lee, 6.11.68. Johnson, 1968b: Hand-written commentary between Lee and the editor of Woman’s Hour on Johnson’s letter, 6.11.68. Johnson, 1968c: Letter sent from Giles Gordon to MacBeth, 26.6.68. Johnson, 1969a: The Unfortunates. Dir. B. S. Johnson. BBC2. 22.2.69. LMA6128S [Shown on the BBC’s arts programme Release. Available to view at the BBC Sound Archive, Middlesex]. Johnson, 1973a: Tom Vernon to Collins, 5.1.73.

Scripts Bergonzi, Bernard and B. S. Johnson. 1968. Radio Three. Novelists of the Sixties, rec.3.2.68. Bergonzi interviews Johnson about his work. [Edited transcript. Tx. 26.3.68] pp. 1–17.



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Hamilton, Alex and Lord Snow, B. S. Johnson, David Lodge and Dr. Jig Massey, Radio Three. 1971. Novel Ideas, rec. 8.6.71. Hamilton interviews writers, academics above on their views of the novel as part of Radio Three’s study session programme, Perspective. [Edited transcript. Tx. 11.6.71] pp. 1–16. Huddleston, Miles. 1964. Constable to BBC, 30.6.64. B. S. Johnson – ContributorSpeaker File 2 1963-67. Unpaginated, p. 2. Rhode, Eric and B. S. Johnson and Bruce Beresford. 1967. BBC Third Programme. Lively Arts series, rec. 6.7.67. Rhode interviews Beresford of BFI and Johnson about experimental film. [Unedited transcript. Tx. 19.7.67] Unpaginated: 1–20. Ricks, Christopher and B. S. Johnson. 1964. BBC Third Programme. Interviewed by Christopher Ricks on Albert Angelo for New Comment programme, 31.7.64 [Unedited transcript. Tx. 11.8.64] Unpaginated: 1–15.

Other sources Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, trans. Richard Nice. Briggs, Asa (1985) The BBC: The First Fifty Years, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burns, Tom (1977) The BBC: Public Institution and Private World, London: Macmillan. Coe, Jonathan (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Esslin, Martin (1980) Mediation: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and the Media, London: Methuen. Gielgud, Val (1981) in Politics and Television, ed. Kurt Lang & G. E. Lang, rev. edn. London: Quadrangle. Hewison, Robert (1981) In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War 1945–60, New York: Oxford University Press. Murdock, Graham (1981) ‘Organising the Imagination: Sociological Perspectives on Radio Drama’, in Politics and Television, Kurt Lang & G. E. Lang (eds), rev. edn. London: Quadrangle, 1981. Priessnitz, Horst P. (1981) ‘British Radio Drama’, in Radio Drama, Peter Lewis (ed.) London: Longman, 22–48. Sinfield, Alan (1983) The Context of English Literature: Society and Literature 1945–1970, New York: Holmes and Meier. ——— (1989) Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein (1991) Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. Stewart, Charles (ed.) (1975) The Reith Diaries, London: Collins. Tyler, Diana (2000) Unpublished interview with Diana Tyler of MBA Associates (Grafton Way, London), 9 February.



Valerie Butler

Jared McGeough Written in its final form six months before his suicide, B. S. Johnson’s ‘Introduction’ to his collection of short prose Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? is a composite; a manifesto and a memoir of his literary experimentation. It is a hybrid text in which Johnson attempts to compress his literary output into a single essay. Taut with desperation and a desire to be understood, it makes formal demands for an open-minded reading public and offers a methodological treatise. The very existence of this introduction complicates Johnson’s claim that he writes to ‘exorcise . . . the burden of having to bear some pain, the hurt of some experience: in order that it may be over there, in a book’ and not in his mind (AYRY 19). I read Johnson’s memorial exorcism as a performative moment in which he undertakes an analysis of his own work, a radical movement, a turning over and turning back. Johnson uses the ‘Introduction’ in such a way that it ‘will not let us shelter in the interiority of a psycho-biographical approach’ (Rajan 2002: 172). This essay investigates the function of the memoir through its particular manifestation in Johnson’s ‘Introduction,’ with its specifically aesthetic orientation. It appears as if the clinical (scientific-evolutionary) and the critical explicitly collide when Johnson compares the process of literary history to a creative evolution made up of multiplicities and/of combinations within which ‘novelists must evolve (by inventing, borrowing, stealing or cobbling from other media) forms which will more or less satisfactorily contain an ever-changing reality’ (AYRY 16–17). Unlike the auto-biographical content subtending the form of Johnson’s novels, the memoir does not perform the cathartic task of a psycho-therapy or a personal exorcism. Rather, the memoir acts as the site upon which the remainders of Johnson’s previous exorcisms produce a heterogeneous field that calls for self-examination that is an aesthetic 132 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


B. S. Johnson’s ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?: The Memoir between Life and Literature

critique or methodological rumination, effectively resisting the recuperative dimensions of the auto-biographical. Johnson’s literary memoir can thus be understood as a site of abjection, in Julia Kristeva’s sense of an expulsion ‘when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds the impossible constitutes its very being’ (2002: 232). Thus, the memoir deconstructs the interiority of the auto-biographical subject engaged in the literary field by exposing it to an exteriority always already at the heart of subjectivity itself. Such a memorial process could be understood in light of Althusser’s notion of a ‘history without a subject’ (see Althusser 1971). The memorial voice ‘chronicles’ its own history, desperately trying to find a subject or give it a rationality that humanises a process that is fundamentally enigmatic. Rather than serve as a disclosure of the various hierarchical levels of Johnson’s literary personae, the memoir is a ‘fold’ such as Tilottama Rajan describes in Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: a figure inviting a ‘double reading of the work in terms of public and private, outside and inside, present and past’ (2002: 169). Such folding, ‘de-luminating’ rather than illuminating, finds Johnson locating within his own life and texts a pathological world unavailable to the full disclosure of phenomenological description. In this sense I distinguish my reading from Philip Tew’s view of Johnson as a critical realist in his landmark 2001 study, B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading. If the auto-biographical function of the novels operates as a critical-realist dialectic then one must analyse the memorial form of the ‘Introduction’ with a different set of criteria. Johnson sensed a need to go beyond auto-biographical novels to express the truth of the world. As memoir, the ‘Introduction’ analyses the critical-realist dialectic through its remainders, through what has not yet been completely worked through. The progressive disclosure of Johnson’s life through his texts forces him to confront, in various ways, his own subjectivity. Thus in the ‘Introduction’ the perpetual exhaustion of literary forms in the novels becomes a metaphor for Johnson’s own exhaustion. The posthumous nature of the published memoir serves to remind the reader that six months later the life and aesthetic project alluded to will have exhausted Johnson completely and permanently. Nevertheless there is a productive side which Johnson refers to as ‘hope’ rather than ‘expectation’ (AYRY 28) in the dark humor subtending the question, ‘aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs?’ This gallows humor (albeit unintended) allows us to read Johnson’s creative evolution not as a failure but through the abject ‘detritus of the religious feeling’



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The Memoir between Life and Literature

(AYRY 18); a hope for thought, literature, and life that extends beyond his corporeal frame. Recognition of the auto-biographical content of Johnson’s literary works is commonplace within the existing criticism. Philip Tew states the situation thus: the texture and coordinates of Johnson’s life may be found in most of his prose work representing his own critical everyday and literary engagement with the real and its truth. . . . Johnson focuses upon and relates either directly or through the medium of narrators – modeled on himself – the minutiae of his life . . . in his broad attempt to define what it is to be alive as B. S. Johnson. Certainly, his own experience is both the subtext and the textual ontology of all of his prose. (2001: 11) As Tew points out, Johnson’s use of the auto-biographical consistently subverts oppositions between life and text that allow each to be interpreted in terms of an expressive causality. What Johnson’s questioning collection title asks us, and what it forces us to ask in return, is what occurs when the ‘texture and co-ordinates of Johnson’s life’ require a significantly different form? An auto-biographical narrative still retains a proximal relation between author and text: it runs the risk of becoming analogical. One can connect certain instances that did or did not happen in Johnson’s ‘actual’ life with those events that do or do not occur in the work. Johnson complicates this proximity when he argues that ‘the two terms novel and fiction are not, incidentally, synonymous. . . . The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form; within that form one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel’ (AYRY 14). There is a further distinction between the auto-biographical novel as a vehicle for truth and the ‘Introduction’ itself, whose form is not that of the novel but of the personal essay or memoir. This leads to a problematic question: in what sense can we say that truth ‘changes’ according to the form in which it is actualised? The OED provides two definitions of the memoir. The first states that the memoir is a ‘historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.’ This definition occupies what one might call the subject-pole of the memoir. The second definition notes that the memoir is an ‘essay on a learned subject.’ If one recognises the dual meaning of the word ‘subject’ as both topic and individual consciousness, then the second definition marks the object-pole of the memoir. The object pole is the where language



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theorises experience reflexively and posits the individual subject as its own object of study. The fundamental link between these poles is language. This means that both poles are ordered not so much according to their frequency of usage but express a singular movement from personal experience to its articulation in language. If the correspondence between the two poles is unproblematic, the memoir without residuum, it is analogous to what Edmund Husserl describes as eidetic reduction: ‘a closed-off field of being’ in the ‘methodically practiced seizing and describing of the multiple “appearances” as appearances of their objective units’ (1923: 24–5). This form of the memoir remains auto-biographical in the sense that its content ‘closes off’ the field of being in which the subject is immersed; language effectively forces the multiplicity of experience into objective units; events become ordered, definitive, fixed in and by language. Herein one can identify the transcendental dimension informing certain tendencies in Johnson’s understanding of language as that which congeals the chaotic flux of life into the signifier. By ‘strict, close selection,’ Johnson believes, he can fix something of the world ‘so that [he] could refer to it / so that [he] could build on it / so that [he] would not have to repeat it’ (AYRY 19). In effect, the auto-biographical aspects offer to illuminate all the dark corners of one’s life; consciousness becomes itself by collapsing into a linguistic-structural effect. However, Johnson does not put to use the negativity that ‘brackets’ experience in language or draw an analogy between consciousness and text. His use of the memoir-form is not illuminative. Johnson’s attempt in the ‘Introduction’ to ‘justify’ each of his major works simultaneously reveals and conceals within this posthumous text a literary corpus that is both offered and withdrawn. Two pages prior to stating his desire to fix experience in language, Johnson argues something that appears to contradict this ambition. Language’s imprecision regarding the chaotic flux of life is not the failure of some objective ideal of language that covers over experience with signs in order to make it intelligible; signs being the clothing of experience: ‘change is a condition of life. Rather than deplore this, or hunt the chimaerae of stability and reversal, one should perhaps embrace change as all there is. . . . For change is never for the better or for the worse; change simply is’ (17). Johnson echoes a kind of quantum understanding of literature and its relation to being. If change simply is then literature and life are connected by a parallelism in which one can never be a model for the other. It follows that neither language nor experience can be cut off from the ontological substance of which they are modes or expressions.



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The question becomes at once genealogical and ontological: how does order emerge from chaos? For Johnson, this question requires a corollary: why is the passage from chaos to order necessarily a storytelling? ‘Life does not tell stories,’ Johnson writes, ‘[it] is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification’ (14). But what Johnson means by falsification here is not falsity in the logical sense. In logic both the true and the false belong to the same system. In fact it is the true which determines what can and cannot be false. What is false does not disturb anything within this system since falsity itself is predicated on the ‘true’ law of contradiction. ‘Falsification’ on the other hand, especially by ‘close, strict, selection,’ entails a genealogical mode of expression in which the passage from chaos to order is based not on origins (of either language or being) but on lines of affiliation, stock, and descent. In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ Michel Foucault describes this method as that which: seeks not the exclusive generic characteristics of an idea that would permit us to qualify its subjects to an overarching concept. Rather, it seeks the subtle, singular, and sub-individual marks that might possible intersect in them to form a network that is difficult to unravel. . . . Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity . . . [rather] it identifies the accidents, the minute deviations, errors, faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value. (1977: 146) In this sense, genealogically, if the memoir is not the enumeration of objective units whose explication requires a synthesis along the horizontal line of chronology and the vertical-synchronic line of meaning, this returns us to Johnson’s questioning of how ‘form follows function’ (16). The priority of function over form is instructive; this distinction allows Johnson to posit how the social, political, and literary enter into a clinical zone in which each becomes indiscernible from the other. Function deploys forms insofar as it moves through formal or discursive unities, paralleling the flux of life itself when Johnson describes it as ‘growth and decay at an enormous variety of rates’ (17). This parallelism of life and text necessarily entails the exhaustion of forms by their function. As Foucault defines it in The Archaeology of Knowledge, function is a power that ‘cuts across a domain of the structures and possible unities [of discourse], and that which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space’ (2002: 97).



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Johnson’s emphasis on the priority of function leads him to reject formalism: ‘form is not the aim, but the result. If form were the aim, one would have formalism; and I reject formalism’ (16). Formalists adapt the dictum ‘form follows function’ in terms of an expressive causality by interpreting the movement from function to form as a teleology in which the effect (form) explains its cause (function). This contradiction is precisely why formalism is inadequate as a vehicle for truth; it confuses causes with effects in order to make the history of literature readable as an expressive causality. Instead, Johnson’s memoir appears to be an over-determined causality in which historical effects—his novels for instance—are determined by multiple factors, such as the plurality of styles within each novel juxtaposed within the space of memoir like pieces of a puzzle whose edges do not quite match up: ‘even in this introduction I am trying to make patterns, to impose patterns on the chaos . . . While I believe (as far as I believe anything) that there may be (how can I know?) chaos underlying it all, another paradox is that I still go on behaving as though pattern could exist, as though day will follow night will follow breakfast. Or whatever the order should be’ ( Johnson 1973: 18). Johnson is less advocating a psychoanalytic notion of fantasy than deconstructing its proximal relations in order to give desire a more materialist, creative, and productive meaning. Johnson attempts to transform the closure of the memoir and its phantasmal-ideological form into something productive: an explication of the ‘sheer technical joy of forcing almost intractable words into patterns of meaning and form’ by abjecting ‘the hurt of some experience; so that it may be over there, in a book, and not in my mind’ (AYRY 18–9). These abject, partial objects are not predicated on a lack that would cut off Johnson’s desire for truth. Truth is not the missing ‘object’ of Johnson’s desire. Instead Johnson discovers an endless proliferation of subject-matter. The memoir is not without an object but without a fixed subject. Not even Johnson himself is the subject of the memoir since this subjectivity is inseparable from a process of abjection that confuses the boundaries of inside and outside, subject and object. Similarly, without a fixed subject one cannot argue that Johnson advocates a theory of ‘relativity’ in which his novels act as a plurality of viewpoints on the same world or object (i.e. truth). Instead, each subject (novel or concept) is constantly opening to another subject that also contains others. As a series of disjunctive connections, literature and life do not recombine into the harmonious balance offered by the eidetic memoir. Instead there is an affirmation and distribution of divergent works and concepts constantly in the process of being ‘exhausted, clapped out’ (AYRY 13).



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The function of the memoir is therefore to produce genealogies that exhaust literary forms, calling for new ones rather than enabling neurotic repetitions of a lack in desire to compose the form of fantasy. The Johnson of the memoir is therefore a bricoleur: ‘most of what I have said has been said before, of course; none of it is new, except possibly in context and combination’ (AYRY 30; emphasis mine). What sounds like a modest rejoinder—‘none of it is new, except possibly . . .’—is precisely where Johnson’s memoir reflects on the radicality of his project. Context and combination become the imperative categories of a literary materialism in which language functions an expression of truth. In the memoir, Johnson possesses a set of materials and a set of rules that are both multiple and limited. Analysing his own life and literature, he demonstrates the bricoleur’s talent for rearranging his life’s fragments in continually new and divergent patterns. Tew resists identifying Johnson as a bricoleur in favor of an ‘acknowledgment of the lessons a critical eye can learn from the dialectic of nature and transformations of the real’ (2001: 161). In Tew’s interpretation the bricoleur and the solipsist are analogous. Johnson is distinguished from the solipsist and bricoleur by virtue of a ‘critical realism’ which, in Tew’s reading, is a mixture of Habermas’s ideal of a communicative rationality and Sartre’s existentialism. Johnson’s work is thereby contextualised as both a critical social science whose goal is to reflexively critique his society and explore the concept of existential freedom. The latter is expressed in literature insofar as it is composed of signs, which are like consciousness itself in that their only being is that of negation or being-for-itself. Responsibility for others becomes both an ontological condition of consciousness and of literature. A certain degree of existential angst is necessary to temper Habermas’s ‘enlightened’ notions of communicative rationality which is critical only insofar as it functions against a regulative ideal. Existentialism grants a degree of responsibility within the ontological constitution of the subject and prevents Johnson’s critical capacity from becoming Habermas’s protracted transcendental idealism. Likewise, Habermas’s emphasis on the public sphere as a rational space of inter-subjectivity lends some degree of objectivity to existentialism’s privileging of the ‘free agent.’ I do not necessarily disagree with this reading and there is certainly enough evidence to support it. However, I do not see critical realism effectively negating the role of the bricoleur in Johnson’s use of the ‘Introduction’ as memoir. Critical realism focuses on the ways Johnson’s novels are not nouveau roman but the ‘negation of humanity’s normative aesthetic priorities’ (Tew 2001: 161). Certainly, as Tew makes clear,



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Johnson does not share Robbe-Grillet’s desire for a hyper-formalist language limited to its own laws. However, the choice between the formalism of the nouveau roman and the functionalism of critical or dialectical realism only addresses the ‘public’ form of the novel. The memoir, on the other hand, is an irruption of the private into the public. Thus, Johnson presents the novels themselves not as organically and rationally constitutive but as abject expulsions of privacy that simultaneously break apart inter-subjective relations while making these disjunctions productive conditions of life itself. Johnson notes that ‘experimental’ to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for ‘unsuccessful.’ I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful; that is, it has been the best way I could find of solving particular writing problems [...] The relevant questions are surely whether each device works or not, whether it achieves what it set out to achieve, and how less good were the alternatives. So for every device I have used there is a literary rationale and a technical justification.... (AYRY 19) Such rationales and justifications do not fix the meaning of their corresponding works, rather they serve as condensation points of a radical aesthetic singularity. This opening is distinctive, as we mentioned earlier, because it does not fit into either the novel-form as that which expresses the truth of the world or the chaotic flux of life itself. Instead, Johnson’s memoir is closer to what Deleuze calls ‘metastable space’ which is ‘a plurality of ways of being in the world’ that are incompatible yet coexistent in the same universe: Johnson’s method is akin to an inter-disciplinary ‘cobbling’ of extra-literary techniques producing a ‘simultaneity of incompossible presents or the co-existence of not necessarily true pasts’ (Deleuze 1989: 131). Specific textual anomalies are neither accidents nor contingencies. Deleuze describes ‘chronic nonchronological time which produces movements necessarily abnormal’ (1989: 128) which may be read against Johnson’s description, in the ‘Introduction’, of his 1971 novel House Mother Normal: what I wanted to do was to take an evening in an old people’s home, and see a single set of events through the eyes of not less than eight old people. Due to the various deformities and deficiencies of the inmates, these events would seem ‘abnormal’ to the reader. At the end, there



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Johnson’s point here is not that ‘normal’ people, or those who think themselves as such, are truly ‘crazy’ and vice versa. House Mother Normal represents the juxtaposition of a series of sequences that refer to a single chronological passage and which are therefore meant to be understood, or read, simultaneously. Nine incompossible presents are created. Normalcy is dissolved within a schizophrenic process of combining and multiplying disjunctive narrative threads. House Mother as a character is supposed to resolve underlying contradictions of the perspectives which precede her own. If House Mother’s purpose is to give purpose, then she embodies the view of history as a readable expressive causality. However, House Mother’s bizarre narrative does not retroactively normalise the narratives that precede her own, neither in the sense of making each narrative part of an easily interpretable historical process or simply reversing the relation between the normal and the pathological. Instead, narration reaches a point in which normal and pathological become indiscernible. As Deleuze suggests, narration in a zone of indiscernability ‘is constantly being completely modified, in each of its episodes, not according to subjective variations but as a consequence of disconnected places and de-chronologized moments . . . Contrary to the form of the true which unifying and tends to the identification of a character . . . the power of the false cannot be separated from an irreducible multiplicity’ (1989: 133). Thus, in House Mother Normal Johnson writes ‘each line of each page represented the same moment in each of the other accounts’ (AYRY 27). When Johnson reveals in the novel that House Mother is the ‘puppet or concoction of a writer’ (quoted in AYRY 27) this is not a failure of representation. The puppeteer instead reaffirms that in a multiplicity everything is not equivalent to everything else nor is it a-historical. A puppeteer is not a copyist, a liar or a solipsist, but the ‘creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced.... [a] point of view which belongs so much to the thing that the thing is constantly being transformed in a becoming identical to point of view’ (Deleuze 1989: 146). The puppeteer’s memoir demonstrates how it is to be a puppeteer, to no longer pull any strings but his own, to become indiscernible from the puppet. House Mother Normal is a metaphor that deepens the meaning of the discussion in that it clears a path for a more disturbing exhaustion than that of literary forms; or, more accurately, the exhaustion of literary



would be the viewpoint of the House Mother, an apparently ‘normal’ person, and the events themselves would be seen to be so bizarre that everything that had come before would seem “normal” by comparison. (AYRY 26)

forms taken to the nth degree: an exhaustion of life and that of Johnson himself. Deleuze makes a useful distinction between the tired and the exhausted: ‘the tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted person can no longer possibilize . . . The realization of the possible always . . . presupposes preferences and goals that vary, always replacing the preceding one ... Exhaustion is something entirely different: one combines the set of variables of a situation, on the condition that one renounce any order of preference, any organization in relation to a goal’ (1997: 153). The tired person understands history in terms expressive causality rather than over-determination. What ‘tires’ is the constant disappointment at the actual not living up to the possible. Certainly, Johnson confronts tiredness: Christie Malry’s vain attempts to balance the book of his life, and the breakdown of narrative voice initiating the Disintegration section of Albert Angelo, for example. The chaos of life consistently threatens both Johnson’s characters and himself with despair. It seems matter of fact to conclude that suicide is tiredness par excellence. Johnson’s memoir, however, does not exemplify despair or angst; it is productive, militant, exhaustive: ‘to the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure. I want him to see my (vision) not something conjured out of his own imagination. How is he supposed to grow unless he will admit others’ ideas?’ (28). It is in the construction of his readers that the deep conflict between the public sphere of rational or critical reception confronts a more cruel challenge that subjects create themselves out of the exhaustion of one’s own selfhood. Johnson’s memoir therefore stages a kind of war for reality between the rational subjects/readers that Johnson desires who should be ‘sympathetic to what those few writers not shackled by tradition are trying to do’ and the considerably less harmonious desire to ‘[challenge] the reader to prove his own existence as palpably as I am proving mine’ (28–9). Sympathy meets a strange resistance in Johnson’s use of Nathalie Sarraute’s metaphor about literature as ‘a relay race, the baton of innovation passing from one generation to another’ (30). So the handshake is really a handoff, a communicative relay that is simultaneously the exhaustion of bodies and an event whose spectators are readers witnessing the amazing dexterity of the author-as-athlete. The cruelty of the relay race is that the athlete exhausts himself entirely in the short stretch of track allotted to him or her. After the subject has been exhausted there comes a moment in which the dissolution itself becomes productive, insofar as it entails the invention of new truths that ‘falsify’ established ones, such as the ‘neo-Dickensian novel’ (AYRY 15). Furthermore, it affirms the way



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Johnson’s exhaustion culminates in laughter rather than despair: ‘I feel myself fortunate sometimes that I can laugh at the joke that just as I was beginning to think I knew something about how to write a novel it is no longer of any use to me in attempting the next one’ (17). Extending Sarraute’s metaphor, the race finishes with the runner, exhausted having done what he can, returned to the same starting place on the track. In the black light of Johnson’s suicide the ‘Introduction’ becomes a powerful, and a difficult text. Johnson re-creates his own literary history as a series of partial-objects or abjections through which the desire for truth is inseparable from fragmentation, breakages that are themselves productive. We witness an exhaustion and dissolution of subjectivity, the agony of expressing the pure flow of life and the fact that this very desire always leads to something else, to new repulsions, abjections, or exorcisms, of what came before, and yes, new bursts of laughter. The power of the ‘Introduction’ is that it throws into relief this process of abjection as the outside of the auto-biographical function Johnson attributes to his novels. Johnson’s introduction-memoir is therefore a profoundly untimely text; a testament to the untimeliness of his death and his life. As memoir, the ‘Introduction’ reveals Johnson’s life and literature as a series of singular moments and upheavals, events that are neither eternal or historical but somewhere between; somewhere in the ‘interstices of novels and poems and other work between 1960 and 1973’ (AYRY 30).

Works Cited Althusser, Louis (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York and London: Monthly Review, trans. Ben Brewster. Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta. ——— (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco. Foucault, Michel (2002) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London and New York: Routledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. ——— (1977) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Interviews and Essays, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, trans. Donald Bouchard & Sherry Simon. Husserl, Edmund (1923) “Phenomenology.” Encyclopedia Britannica, trans. Richard E. Palmer. Kristeva, Julia (2002) The Portable Kristeva, Kelly Oliver (ed.) New York: Columbia University Press. Rajan, Tilottama (2002) Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester: Manchester University Press.



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Johnson edited The Evacuees (1968), a collection of accounts of evacuation written by former wartime evacuees such as himself, following the completion of The Unfortunates (published 1969) in the Autumn of 1967. According to Jonathan Coe’s deservedly award-winning biography, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (2004), Johnson actually did much of the work during his two-month spell in Paris over the turn of 1967 into 1968 (246). As such it falls into the period between the writing of The Unfortunates and House Mother Normal (1971) and can usefully be considered as part of that transition in Johnson’s novels from the autobiographical into what Patricia Waugh has described in Harvest of the Sixties (1995) as the ‘ostentatiously fantastic and darkly Jacobean’ (131). Indeed, we can already see some sort of transition within Johnson’s introduction to The Evacuees, in the way that Johnson uses personal experience to legitimise a role as public spokesman. In Albert Angelo (1964), for example, Johnson chiefly articulates a private sense of melancholy, which in a rare moment of paternal intimacy is shared between Albert and his father: ‘Chelsea lose three–two after leading two–nil at one point. Satisfied with our dissatisfaction, I and my father and the crowd squirm away from Stamford Bridge’ (AA 25). By The Evacuees, this desire for dissatisfaction has become the hallmark of a generation: ‘... in us the tendency to expect the worst from any situation, to cut our losses and accept disappointment (indeed, to feel something near disappointment in any case when the worst does not happen) is perhaps more evident than in earlier or later generations’ (1968: 9). If we read further into the introduction to The Evacuees, we find Johnson accounting for this shared phenomenon: For many of the children the return was evacuation all over again. They came back to a mother whom they probably remembered, but 143 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


‘An Evacuee for ever’: B. S. Johnson versus Ego Psychology

‘An Evacuee for ever’

she was sleeping with a stranger who insisted he was their father. In some cases they came from a comfortable middle-class home to a crowded flat in a slum or near-slum conditions; from friends, again, to an alien society where they had to make friends all over again; from a situation in which they had perhaps been neglected, had learnt independence, to one in which they were petted, fondled, embraced with a devotion perhaps guiltily over-compensating for the deprivations of the earlier years. (1968: 17) However, this complex model of a generation fits only one of the thirtyone contributions to the book: Johnson’s own. The vast majority of the accounts depict evacuation as having been a positive experience, whether actively pleasurable or because it taught valuable life lessons. In particular, Gloria Cigman values the experience for teaching her ‘adaptability’ ( Johnson 1968: 41). A position she subsequently endorses in her contribution to the ‘A Life in 44 Voices’ section at the end of Coe’s biography: ‘[Bryan] hated being an evacuee . . . But I adapted . . . everything [Bryan] was defined by was something negative: negative attitude to evacuation; negative attitude to school; to universities . . . He didn’t really learn to think’ (413). Of course, the claim here is not really that Johnson did not think but that he was incapable of developing and adapting his thinking. This claim runs parenthetically throughout Coe’s biography—‘( Johnson’s thinking never seemed to evolve, there was no organic growth, just a final inflexible position)’ (218)—and cumulatively builds to an understanding of Johnson as being predominately defensive both in terms of his personality and in his unbending adherence to (outdated) forms of ‘high modernist innovation’ (450). One way of evaluating these claims is to start by examining why Johnson’s account of evacuation is so much at odds with the majority of the contributions to his anthology. The introduction to The Evacuees provides some clear indicators of Johnson’s possible motivations: ‘Ironically enough, it was the evacuees who provided most of the raw material for the great amount of further investigation during and after the war by sociologists and psychologists into the importance of security in the early years for the subsequent development of a child’s personality’ (1968: 18). In the ‘Selective Bibliography’ at the end of The Evacuees (287), Johnson lists the first volume of the influential yearbook The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (1945) and draws particular attention to one of the contributions: Katherine M. Wolf’s survey of wartime child evacuation literature. This article continuously emphasises the point that successful adaptation to evacuation was dependent on, firstly, the child’s prior relationship



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It seems that evacuation produces a process in the child’s mental apparatus that in turn adapts this apparatus to a separation from the parents for an indefinite period. The child suspends his relationship to his parents for this given time. This creates a vagueness in his image of his home and probably produces a disturbance of his perceptive and imaginative processes in general. It expresses itself in a lack of concentration which is an almost uniform characteristic of evacuated children. This arrangement seems to make adaptation to evacuation fairly successful and explains the low incidence of neurosis formation in children who did not show neurotic symbols prior to evacuation. However, the literature seems to indicate that this mechanism of suspension is limited to those cases in which the child’s relationship to his parents had been a stable one. Where there was conflict, the conflict is so exacerbated that the child is compelled to act it out in the foster home environment. (Wolf 1945: 397) The counter-intuitive idea behind this explanation is that only those children with a stable relationship with their parents were able to separate from them sufficiently in order to adapt successfully to evacuation. In accordance with the dictates of this argument, Wolf pours scorn on the recorded statements of many children that they missed their parents by claiming that such ‘mentioning is done with a conventional and unemotional attitude’ (397). She dismisses one such case of an unhappy thirteen-year-old boy, who complained that ‘most of all I miss my parents’, with hard-hearted logic: This remark, similar to the stock replies of many other children, nevertheless seems to have more true emotional value, and so would seem a case disproving our thesis. Yet on closer knowledge of the facts, we learn that this boy’s mother died when he was a little child, and that since then he has lived alone with his father. (397) Such extreme judgements arose because the evidence of wartime evacuation was being used not only to establish child psychology as a recognised discipline, but also to adjudicate between two existing theories. Melanie Klein and her followers believed that, as an inevitable consequence of early infantile anxiety, children developed aggressive drives



with the parents and, secondly, the child’s ability to suspend these mental ties with the parents for the duration of the time apart:


which they protected themselves against by projecting externally. According to the ratio in which these drives were projected upon the world or their parents, each child developed senses of persecution and depression which became incorporated into their individual conscience or superego. Therefore, according to the Kleinians, all children required individual analysis from early childhood to diminish anxiety and modify aggressive impulses during the processes of superego formation, in order to develop the ‘desire to be loved and to love, and to be at peace with the world’ (cited in Brown 1961: 76). In contrast, Anna Freud and her followers believed that the formation of the superego began much later in childhood, before which fear of the outside world created an objective anxiety in infants and caused the erection of primitive ego defence mechanisms against unconscious drives. It was only in those children for whom normal ego development failed to supplant these primitive mechanisms that neuroses appeared and analysis was required. The experience of evacuation seemed to support the position of the Kleinians. A leading adherent, Susan Isaacs, edited The Cambridge Evacuation Survey (1941)—also included in Johnson’s bibliography—and emphasised how successful adjustment to evacuation was aided by the continuance of as much of the child’s own family life as possible (Isaacs 1941: 61). She stated explicitly that ‘it is quite clear that it is their families and friends whom most of the children miss, and there seems little conventionality about their expression of this need’ (67). This interpretation asserted the primacy of the ‘desire to be loved and to love’ over the mechanistic idea of normal ego development. Therefore, as a loyal follower of Anna Freud, Wolf simply gave the same evidence the opposite interpretation in order to support a pre-existing theory of the difference between normal and abnormal child development. Completing the circle, this particular interpretation then seems to have been incorporated as evidence of the theory into Anna Freud’s own contribution to the first volume of The Psychoanalytical Study of the Child, ‘Indications for Child Analysis’: During the time of mass evacuation in England, 1940, many children became neurotic sufferers after separation from their parents. It would be erroneous to conclude that they had all acquired a neurosis due to their traumatic experiences. In many cases their neurosis had merely not been in evidence while they lived with their mothers; acute anxiety and suffering appeared when they had to live with people



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These ‘phobic and obsessional arrangements’ were examples of those primitive ego defence mechanisms which, left to entrench themselves, offered such a threat to normal ego development during the period (in which the sex drives remain latent) between early infancy and adolescence. If establishment of the reality principle was thwarted and the ego was not strong enough to cope with the re-emergence of the sex drives in adolescence then a rounded adult personality would not be able to develop. A side product of these ‘phobic and obsessional arrangements’ was that a child could appear normal during the latency period even though ‘his ego is in reality weaker than that of a normal child since the id forces have gained a more or less lasting victory in the disguise of symptom formation’ (143). This phenomenon of apparent normality was also recognised by the Kleinians, albeit with different theoretical explanations (e.g. generally speaking, depressive types would appear more normal than persecutory types), so a consensus was possible over the idea that ‘abnormal’ children could adapt to evacuation. Thus, Wolf had no difficulty concurring with the Cambridge survey’s summary of which kinds of ‘mentally sick children’ could or could not successfully adapt: ‘The character of the disturbances in the two groups is not the same. The sick children of the maladjusted group belong mostly to the jealous quarrelsome, activeaggressive, or manic-depressive types. The sick of the adjusted group are either anxious or withdrawn’ (Wolf 1945: 392). At this point, it is worth considering Johnson’s own experience of evacuation, which consisted of two stages. At the outbreak of war, he was privately evacuated with his mother to a farm near Chobham. They returned to London in 1941 and he was then almost immediately evacuated again with his school to High Wycombe, which entailed separation from his mother for the duration of the war. In the extract from Trawl (1966) chosen as his own contribution to The Evacuees, Johnson compared the effects of the two experiences: There are these two pictures of myself: both are school photographs of the kind for which children are marched out in forms and lined up in fives against a neutral background. The first was taken at the school at Chobham, and shows a bright, chubby, roughly fair-headed boy, his eyes burnished with interest. The other photograph is of



who were less willing or able to show consideration for their phobic and obsessional arrangements. (A. Freud 1945: 134)


barely recognizably the same boy two years later: anxious, narrowed, the eyes now look as though they have seen most disappointments, and expect the rest shortly, the hair is darker, combed, and haircreamed back, parted, the mouth hard, compressed: in all, the face of a human being all to aware now of the worst of the human situation. (T 53–4; Johnson 1968: 156) It is difficult to say how familiar Johnson was with the psychoanalytic literature on evacuation when he wrote Trawl, but by the time he had finished preparing The Evacuees for publication, he would certainly have been aware of how his account would have been interpreted by a follower of Anna Freud. His failure to suspend his relationship with his mother for the duration of his second evacuation would have been taken to demonstrate the fundamental instability of the relationship. The success of the earlier evacuation in her company would have highlighted the extent to which her coping mechanisms provided a support for his phobias and obsessions. Therefore, it should be seen as a conscious act of dissent on Johnson’s part that he closed his extract with an emotional expression of missing his mother: ‘the thought of his mother being killed and him being left was far greater agony of mind than the possibility of injury or death to himself’ (T 56; Johnson 1968: 159). Furthermore, given that the subsequent passages in Trawl, describing roaming around the area with his fellow evacuee-boarders from Mrs Davies’s (T 57–65), are probably the most overtly nostalgic passages in the entire Johnson canon, the fact that Johnson excluded them has the effect of identifying himself with those withdrawn and anxious children who adapted to evacuation but not in the manner prescribed by either school of child psychology. While, the apparent adaptation of the anxious child to evacuation was explained by an overwhelming desire to please, the same ability in the withdrawn child was described as ‘depending largely on the child’s capacity to dispense with human relationships and to find satisfaction in a more or less remote fantasy life of his own’ (Isaacs 1941: 102). The example given in her The Cambridge Evacuation Survey is that of a fourteen-year-old boy for whom ‘the adjustment to the foster home was rated very high’ (103), but who avoided the various club evenings in favour of staying home alone and either reading or arranging his stamp collection. Although he scored highly for intelligence, he was rated totally incompetent at ‘applying his ability to the solution of practical problems . . . and gave the impression of a seriously unstable character who will have considerable difficulty in adjusting himself to practical



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life when he leaves the shelter of school, if indeed he succeeds at all’ (103). This bears comparison with the opinion of the psychiatrist Coe consulted on Johnson: ‘He seems to have markedly obsessional personality traits . . . and this personality structure is thought to predispose to depressive illness (because, in Freudian terms, the person has an overdeveloped superego which judges and finds the subject imperfect)’ (424). Johnson’s proneness to a ‘depressed and suicidal’ condition (424) and his eventual capitulation to it would seem to provide empirical support for the child psychologists’ interpretations of children’s responses to the evacuation process. The irony of this would not have been wasted on him. At the end of the introduction to The Evacuees he had proclaimed: ‘The full cost of this evacuated generation’s suffering has yet to be counted: we have not yet come fully to power, and the next thirty years will be ours’ (20). Yet thirty years after his suicide he was being diagnosed according to the very theories which had established themselves on the back of that ‘evacuated generation’s suffering’. And in the process, awkward as ever, he was posthumously laying bare the circular arguments of psychoanalytical orthodoxy. Sigmund Freud argues in ‘Observations on Transference-Love’ (1915) that analysts should not sleep with their patients, because the love generated between the patient and analyst is something that must be treated as unreal because it ‘is entirely composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, including infantile ones’ (1958b: 166–7). Yet elsewhere, Freud describes the successful analytic process as dependent on the analyst’s ability to induce a compulsion to repeat in the patient, who then ‘acts’ out what has been repressed as a ‘piece of real life’ (Freud 1958a: 150–2). It cannot both be that repetition is unreal with respect to love and that the analytic process allows repressions to be worked through as ‘a piece of real life’. Therefore, Freud’s attempts to distinguish between ‘normal love’ and ‘transference-love’ are unconvincing and call into question any Freudian distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ situations. The obvious conclusion from this is that the analytic method could not and cannot ever reconcile patients with reality, it can only induce them to ‘act out’, or perform, ‘realities’ for themselves in the hope that they will eventually hit upon one that will allow them to successfully reintegrate with the ‘reality principle’ governing society. As Freud explained in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), the compulsion to repeat was one of the primitive ego defence mechanisms which develop in infancy. The classic example is the child who compensates for the mother’s absences by staging the disappearance and



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return of toys within his or her reach. The compulsive repetition of a distressing moment does not accord with the pleasure principle but rather allows the child to attain an active role in place of his normal passive position. According to Freudian theory, this stage should be superseded in maturity by the subsequent adoption of the pleasure and reality principles. However, as child psychologists were aware—indeed, one could argue that it was the awareness which created the discipline and not the other way round—the child might well prefer this mastery through repetition to the developmental stages that were supposed to succeed it. This would still allow the child to adapt to external conditions but on his or her own terms, rather as the children labelled ‘anxious’ or ‘withdrawn’ by the evacuation studies still proved to be capable of successfully adapting to their new environments. Followers of both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud regarded such processes as forms of ‘denial in fantasy’ because what was being adapted to was not reality. However, given that psychoanalytic theory—as we have seen—has no theoretical grounds on which to distinguish between what is ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, the decision of child psychologists to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ adaptation to evacuation must have been determined by an external judgement of what the ‘reality principle’ demanded in wartime. This becomes readily apparent from an examination of the extracts in The Cambridge Evacuation Survey taken from essays written at school by evacuees under the title ‘Things I Miss in Cambridge’. The essay written by the thirteen-year-old boy whose mother had died when he was young (as discussed near the beginning of this chapter) includes the following lines: ‘I also miss Sunday marches with the Communist Party and will miss the May-day celebrations in Hyde Park next year. I miss the power to be allowed to choose whether I wish to go to church or not’ (Isaacs 1941: 75). Another essay was written by the fourteen-yearold boy who, as we have seen, was used as the example of how withdrawn children could apparently adapt to evacuation but were really doomed to long-term failure: The things about which I now intend to write hardly fit here, but I must say them. If these things give pain to anyone I ask their forgiveness. The over-enthusiasm of the Undergraduates, and their promises which were not kept. I am expected to attend Socials and Dances, to learn to dance. But I do not wish to dance, while not doubting that it is a ‘social asset’, I do not wish to be possessed of it. If I do not attend these functions I am regarded as ‘one aside’. Then



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the present ‘hate propaganda’ which has invaded a once sane country. This propaganda is shouted at us from all quarters. The Press roars its encouragement, and the preachers from the pulpit glorify these things. And we are expected to attend church and sing war-like psalms. (Isaacs 1941: 72–3) The decision to classify these responses as evidence of an inability to satisfactorily adapt to evacuation deliberately ignores their articulate expressions of political dissent and reveals the ideological nature of the ‘reality principle’. This is not to suggest that the pain and anguish of such positions was necessarily any less than that resulting from other types of neurosis. The isolation resulting from opposing the dominant values of society alone and without even the support of one’s family could give rise to equally debilitating effects. The difference is that the induced individual realignment offered by psychoanalysis as therapy could not, and cannot, possibly resolve this type of trauma because it was, and is, caused by society itself. Johnson, himself, understood this perfectly well: All that has helped me to understand perhaps just one thing in my research to trace the causes of my isolation: I now realise the point at which I became aware of class distinction, of differences between people which were nothing to do with age or size, aware in fact of the class war, which is not an outdated concept, as those of the upper classes who are not completely dim would con everyone else into believing it is. The class war is being fought as viciously and destructively of human spirit as it has ever been in England: I was born on my side, and I cannot and will not desert: I became an enlisted man consciously but not voluntarily at the age of about seven. (T 53; Johnson 1968: 156) While it had been that first evacuation, removing Johnson and his mother from their London social milieu and dropping them down in a new environment, which caused him for the first time to see others treating his mother as belonging to the ‘servant class’ (T 52; Johnson 1968: 154), it was only by undertaking Trawl’s written process of remembering, repeating and working-through that he was able to ‘act’ out that moment as the cause of his sense of isolation. This was a pivotal achievement in Johnson’s career because until then his sense of working-class identity had chiefly been associated with a sense of isolation and loss exemplified by his failure of the eleven plus.



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The easiest way of dealing with these feelings was to embrace failure as an affirmation of identity and hence, as we have seen, the only satisfactory experiences were those of dissatisfaction. Johnson, as Albert Angelo demonstrates, was acutely aware of how post-war state structures reinforced this model of class consciousness and thereby had begun to perpetuate a cycle of failure. Albert and his secondary modern pupils are equally trapped within the fiction of the ‘satisfactory dissatisfactory’ paradigm. By rejecting this fiction in the ‘fuck all this lying’ passage and replacing it with his own truth, Johnson released himself from the paradigm. As Philip Tew has pointed out in B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (2001), the combination of ‘laying bare the device with the ironic inclusion of empirical detail’ (12) in Johnson’s early writing reaches its high point in Albert Angelo where the interruption is ‘followed by a progressive resumption of a self revealing narrative form’ (25) allowing ‘narrative and objective function to co-exist’ (26). That is to say, by revealing himself to be the main character in his own novel, Johnson was able to textually generate a performative agency for an otherwise disenfranchised working-class subjectivity. Hence, the end of the novel, in which Albert is thrown into a canal by his pupils, can be read as the deliberate discarding of the restrictive fiction of workingclass failure, which is then given a fitting epitaph: the bodey was all painted up gust like somone on the stage thay panted the lips more red and the face hes pink and yellow thaye say it proseves it bus i think its Just plan stupid two spend and wast all that money on a thing like that it was Just a gerate wast of time (180) The advance Johnson made in Trawl of identifying society rather than personal failure as the cause of his isolation and thereby correlating his working-class identity with the plenitude of the mother–child relationship rather than with a sense of loss, offered not only a sounder base for his ironical and textual manoeuvres but also a goal to be achieved by them. Now there was a possibility other than failure to be ‘acted’ out by the continued rewriting of his life experiences. The account of the relationship with Ginnie, which might so easily have become just another addition to the list of betrayals and failures that precede it in the book, becomes explicitly identified as the possibility of ‘home’ (T 161) and opens up the closing possibility of an escape from isolation back to the plenitude which preceded it: ‘ · · I, always with I · · · · · one always starts with I · · · · · · · · And ends with I’ (T 183).



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However, Johnson understood only too well that this positive sense of identity was forever under threat of being lost within the chaotic confusion of fiction and truth that characterises the experience of life and death. In his next book, The Unfortunates, he described how a friend’s faith in the idea of ‘home’ was defeated by cancer: ‘Then they had moved to a house of their own, had resolutely preserved the hope that it was going to be all right in the end, ha . ...’ (‘Then they’, 1) Johnson’s response to the death of his friend, Tony Tillinghast, was to experiment with a form that would allow him to separate truth from chaos. Famously the publication of the book in unbound sections allowed the randomness of life and memory to be replicated, but it also supported a Chinese-box structure, which allowed Johnson to make use of a number of correspondences. In particular, the section containing his reporting of the football match can be read as an encapsulation of the whole book in its exemplary avoidance of fictional solutions—such as ‘telling phrases thought out in a notebook already’—to the problem of how to write about chaos: ‘Even if it’s a bad match, they tell you, disguise it, write as though it were a good match. Bollocks to that, bollocks to this stinking match’ (‘The pitch’, 8, 5). The net effect of the section is to record the truth of the game, not in the how, what and why of it as summarised in the copy he dictates over the phone, but in the faithful reproduction of the entire mental process involved in composing that report. Across the book as a whole, cancer is shown to be the deadly objective correlative of the entanglement of truth and fiction. Johnson’s literary technique is employed not to create a lifelike representation of his friend—for that would be departing from the truth of his loss—but to strip away the fiction from his death by recording ‘not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died’ (‘Last’, 6), but the mental process of remembering ‘what he said, what he was’. Thereby, the plenitude of identity was reasserted against even the most destructive chaotic form. It can be seen that the positions adopted by Johnson in Trawl and The Unfortunates bear a close resemblance to, but also crucially differ from, what Freud described as the death drive: the desire of living organisms to return to their original state of unchange. Freud’s argument was that elementary living entities would constantly repeat the same course of life if it were not for environmental conditions continually imposing modifications upon them. The mechanisms evolved to deal with these modifications—including the compulsion to repeat, the pleasure principle and the reality principle—all function to extinguish external stimuli and are ‘merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old



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and new’ (S. Freud 1984: 310). Therefore, life is merely the circuitous route organisms take in attempting to reach the degree zero of death. While Johnson’s novels clearly seek a return to some sort of original state, the difference from the Freudian position is that this original state is posited not as one of no consciousness, but as one of full consciousness which can only be re-attained by achieving a simultaneous awareness of all mental processes. Therefore, any success in widening consciousness was a reward in itself for Johnson and this suggests an explanation of his essential motivation as a writer. Freud, however, explained the motivation behind artistic achievement and ‘all that is most precious in human civilisation’ as stemming from the successful suppression, by deferring the pleasure principle to the reality principle, of the instinct to return to degree zero: ‘it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor’ (Freud 1984: 315). If Johnson was not already aware of this distinction, its practical applications would have been brought home to him during the course of his work on The Evacuees with the realisation that it was exactly the positions he took in his writing which were most pathologised by the dominant psychoanalytic accounts of evacuation. In particular his determination to recover all mental processes to full consciousness ran foul of the forceful assertion that successful adaptation to evacuation was only possible when the child could suspend mental ties to the parents. Moreover, because certain types of outwardly successful adaptation were also judged to be abnormal, it was clear that there was an ideological agenda present. This impression is reinforced by the accounts of some of Johnson’s fellow evacuees. For instance, Gloria Cigman comments: ‘What I will never know is whether being an evacuee developed in me those qualities which I have found invaluable ever since, or if my successful adaptation to the state of evacuee-hood only took place because I had them already!’ ( Johnson 1968: 42). Likewise, Leslie Dunkling notes in his contribution: ‘As to the overall results of this accidental sociological experiment that took place on such a massive scale, it is difficult to make an evaluation. The issue is complicated by the fact that many of us who were evacuees would ultimately have come into Richard Hoggart’s “uprooted and anxious” [working-class grammar school children] category even if there had been no war’ ( Johnson 1968: 78). Here, adapting to evacuation is implicitly equated with managing life and overcoming the educational hurdle which, as Johnson knew from his own experience, divided the post-war working class with fictions of failure and success.



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Viewed from Johnson’s perspective, the normative account of ego development and correct alignment to the reality principle appears necessary not so much as a precondition for the existence of civilised society, than as a guarantee of the norms and values by which success can be judged in a particular form of hierarchically organised society. The evacuation studies show how the theories of Melanie Klein, even though they became the basis for psychoanalytic practice, were subsumed into those of Anna Freud because of their shared privileging of adaptation as a virtue in its own right. By providing a theoretical model for a limited number of conceptions of self to be moulded into personal identities via the appropriate forms of adaptation (supported by the state apparatuses of education, health, national insurance, policing etc), the resultant form of Ego Psychology underpinned the central project of the British Welfare State: the need to combine rigid class stratification with a shared sense of national unity. In this context, Johnson, by using the extract from Trawl in The Evacuees, was not just dissenting from the psychoanalytic interpretation of wartime evacuation, but from the social arrangements of post-war Britain as a whole. It is this sense of purpose which makes the introduction to The Evacuees into a political manifesto: ‘the next thirty years will be ours’ (1968: 20). More fundamentally, however, Johnson had also come to understand that attacking social and political structure was pointless without also attacking the normative discourse which underpinned it. This purpose can be seen in the two novels he wrote after The Evacuees, House Mother Normal and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) which, as Waugh suggests, both function as psychopathic balancings of the books (1995: 132). If we consider House Mother Normal, we can see the house mother as the personification of the ego-psychological thinking behind the welfare state: ‘This is a happy house, friend, a holiday camp ... Here I give them constant occupation, and, most important, a framework within which to establish – indeed, to possess – their own special personalities’ (HMN 198). As Johnson realised, working-class resistance to this farce was channelled at best into a hold on the old fictions such as ‘satisfactory dissatisfaction’ which must inevitably weaken. Even though Rosetta Stanton is shown to recover an original state of plenitude (HMN 161–82), it was impossible to offset ego psychology with workingclass normality because any claim to normality would have simply collapsed back into normative discourse. Therefore, in order to balance his book, Johnson not only had to stage the house mother’s unforgettable ‘abnormal’ sexual performance, but to declare himself as the ‘writer behind it all’ (204) and thus present himself as a force for abnormality.



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This was another major step in his writing career. The difference to his position in The Unfortunates can be seen from the different metaphorical use he makes of the condition of cancer. In that book cancer had represented the entanglement of truth and fiction, but also the chaotic threat of life and the environment in general. In his later books, cancer is clearly connected much more specifically with societal forces and normative forms of discourse in particular. Physiologically, cancer is the condition where mature cells suddenly start to divide and multiply, as they are supposed to do in the reproduction process, thus causing growths which disrupt the differentiated function they have adopted in the body. In a different context, Freud described ‘germ cells’ as being the exception to the rule that all living organisms have a death drive and noted that the sex or life instinct was always opposed to the ego instinct (see Freud 1984: 312–3, 323). By extension, cancer provides a useful metaphor—displaying his characteristic black humour—for Johnson’s opposition to ego psychology because it represents several different conditions: the confusion of normality and abnormality; the opposition of the life instincts to the death instincts; and the pathologising response which deviation from ideological norms always provokes. Johnson’s identification with cancer can be seen in the description of the house mother’s pathology as including a ‘malignant cerebral carcinoma (dormant)’ (183). What erupts in her brain is Johnson himself, malignant to the discourse of ego psychology she represents. In Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, Christie develops, and is thus identified with, cancer at the end of the book, at which he poignantly announces to Johnson, himself: ‘“Soon,” he said, his old bright self in speech at least, “they’ll discover a cure for cancer. And that will make you look stupid. You’ll be knackered!”’ (179). If Johnson was identifying his opposition to the normative discourses of society with the condition of cancer, then the idea of its ‘cure’ suggests the final triumph of those discourses, rather than the unfettering of full consciousness and the life instincts that Johnson aimed for. By 1973, it was clear that the 30 years belonging to the evacuees had not yet started. He wrote in his ‘Further Notes for “The Matrix Trilogy”’: Mum – too much away from as an evacuee now about to be an evac. for ever. (cited in Coe 2004: 370) The question remains open as to what type of evacuee Johnson was. Was he only one of the ‘apparently successful’ as the ego psychologists described them or would he have gone on to achieve his aims? The



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Works cited Brown, J.A.C. (1961) Freud and the Post-Freudians, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Coe, Jonathan (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador. Freud, Anna (1945) ‘Indications for Child Analysis’ in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 1, 127–49. Freud, Sigmund (1958a) ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through [1914]’ in James Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XII, London: The Hogarth Press, 147–56. ——— (1958b) ‘Observations on Transference-Love [1915]’ in James Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XII, London: The Hogarth Press, 159–71. ——— (1984) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]’ in Angela Richards (ed.) On Metapsychology, London: Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, 275–338. Isaacs, Susan (1941) The Cambridge Evacuation Survey, London: Methuen. Johnson, B. S. (ed.) (1968) The Evacuees, London: Gollancz. Tew, Philip (2001) B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Waugh, Patricia (1995) Harvest of the Sixties, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Katherine M. (1945) ‘Evacuation of Children in Wartime’ in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 1, 389–404.



challenge of reading Johnson is the need to free the mind of ideological norms and what Johnson described in the introduction to The Evacuees as ‘the impersonality and generalisation of sociology’ (1968: 19), even when the cost of so doing is to label oneself pathologically abnormal.




Re-reading: New Perspectives



Section Three




Bradley Buchanan

In Rational Geomancy (1992), their manifesto-like study of experimental postmodern approaches to narrative, the Canadian writers bpNichol and Steve McCaffery (known collectively as ‘The Toronto Research Group’, TRG) discuss B. S. Johnson’s work at length. In fact, for the TRG’s purposes, Johnson was the pre-eminent experimental novelist of his age; they were fascinated by his disruption of conventional narrative sequence, his self-referentiality as a writer and his unorthodox use of textual space. In this paper I will trace what I see as Johnson’s influence on the TRG’s project and suggest that we can learn something about Johnson by applying some of the TRG’s insights to his texts, primarily House Mother Normal and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. Steve McCaffery was born in Sheffield and educated at the University of Hull, but he moved to Canada, in part to work with Nichol, whose sound and concrete poetry, as well as his lower-case, fragmentary style, were earning him international fame as an avant-garde figure. The TRG’s interest in B. S. Johnson may initially have been attributable to McCaffery’s influence, partly because of his English roots and partly because of his greater interest in experimental novels (McCaffery wrote one himself, entitled Panopticon), but Nichol’s own mixture of populist jocularity and intellectual ambition are clearly compatible with Johnson’s spirit, and there is every reason to believe that he was just as intrigued by Johnson’s experiments with textuality and narrative as McCaffery. In Rational Geomancy, the TRG are at great pains to unfold Johnson’s project: Johnson’s novel Albert Angelo . . . exploits a . . . technique of a cutaway page. This novel has several formal innovations, including 161 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Exemplary B. S.: B. S. Johnson and the Toronto Research Group

Exemplary B. S.

parallel texts on the same page and extended marginal glosses, but the most interesting from our point of view are the two excised rectangles, cut out from the bottom centre of pages 149 to 152. The cuts serve to reveal sequentially a small portion of the text (three and a half lines to be precise) on page 153. Exploiting the cut away and playing this off against the bound sequentiality of the book, Johnson situates this textual fragment in three separate periods of the narrative development and in two additional page contexts. (1992: 175) Nichol and McCaffery clearly attempt to duplicate or echo Johnson’s textual practice in their collaboration; indeed, the very page that contains this analysis of Albert Angelo also features two sections of parallel text, one placed above the other. Moreover, short of having cut-away pages itself, Rational Geomancy does everything in its power to subvert the linear integrity of its argument. It includes whole pages of aphorisms (often unattributed), diagrams, charts, comic-book style drawings, apparent photographs of crumpled pages of the text itself, as well as actual photographic images of medieval manuscripts, other books (among them Johnson’s The Unfortunates) handwritten passages, board-game style instructions for generating new texts and, in its original edition, a page to be written on directly by one of the authors themselves. The TRG frequently invoke Johnson’s name as a justification of these practices; in a section entitled ‘The Book as Machine’ from Rational Geomancy we read: when you break away from the traditional methods of narrative presentation . . . then you have to face a radical psychological change in the reading experience . . . the single effect of ‘unbinding’ a book as B. S. Johnson does in his novel The Unfortunates shatters the enforced consecutiveness of the narrative. [O]ptional paths present themselves which very possibly threaten a level of reading security that the whole Aristotelian typolinear trip invests itself with—that of ‘having come from somewhere and being in the state of logical sequential movement to a conclusion’. [P]resenting loose pages conveys the underlying suggestion that choice is arbitrary, that nothing’s hierarchically defined, that any one will do just as well as the other. [A]nd that places a pressure on the reader—one of responsibility to be either interested or not interested . . . . (1992: 82)



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Another voice, perhaps that of the other member of the TRG, or perhaps simply the first speaker’s alter ego or conscience, responds: ‘The Unfortunates asserts its own isolation and resilience in self-sufficiency, in a sense it’s all about “fuck the reader”, for while the book is interesting reading, technically inventive, its most important underlying proposition is that the reader himself is totally dispensable’ (83). The same dissenting voice (if in fact this ‘conversation’ is a dialogue, which is by no means certain) later adds: ‘in The Unfortunates [sequence] is meaningless. you have ‘free will’ if you like but all the choices have the same value’ (1992: 83). For avant-garde novelists like B. S. Johnson, however, there is not necessarily a fundamental contradiction between the two attitudes projected here by the TRG. The ‘fuck the reader’ attitude (taken perhaps too literally by the TRG) and the abdication of authorial control are two sides of the same coin. The freer play of textuality and the disruption of conventional narrative open up an utopian space for mutual jouissance for the TRG too (as their obvious delight in collaboration shows), and suggests all three writers’ desire to move beyond the autoerotic manipulation of words on the page to a mutually responsive relationship with readers [see James in this volume]. The problem, as the TRG frequently point out, is that this apparent dissemination and decentring of authority is only a partial solution, since there is still syntax to enforce a word order and world order that structures the readers’ responses and limits our enjoyment of language’s polymorphousness. The phallic directionality of words, their narrative momentum, is still present in a work like Johnson’s The Unfortunates, if interrupted. To ‘fuck the reader’ is never quite possible, for the TRG, though this achievement is their ‘holy grail’, the compensation for their self-professed ‘impotent’ nature as non-narrative creatures (1992: 214). This sexualisation of textual practice has become something of a commonplace in the years since Rational Geomancy was written (as the very title of Toril Moi’s Textual Politics, with its nod to Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, attests) but it is nonetheless important to underline the fact that TRG use the metaphor of ‘adultery’ to describe their attempt to disrupt what they call the ‘phenomenal and chronological constraint’ implied by ‘the mechanics of page’ and its ‘enforced consecutivity’ which is ‘a mandate for sequentiality, linear compaction and unilinear direction’ (1992: 165). Thus the book-machine is a kind of paternal phallic prosthesis guaranteeing the functionality of narrative and its unscrutinised words are a mechanism for concealing the gaps in language and the blank spaces on the page. To attack this book



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Exemplary B. S.

machine is both ‘adultery’ and ‘infantry’, to use a pun that encapsulates what the TRG see as their Oedipal jouissance in the naked space of the page. They quote Mallarmé’s sexual description of the act of reading: ‘the virgin folds of a book still give rise to a sacrifice, from which the red edges of old volumes bled; the introduction of a weapon, or paper-knife, to establish the taking of possession’ (1992: 167), and there is no doubt that they have Jacques Derrida’s discussion of ‘dissemination’ very much in mind here as well (they quote repeatedly, if in somewhat haphazard fashion, from Derrida’s writing in Rational Geomancy). Despite all this, the TRG are still not convinced of their capacity to read beyond the surface of the text into a pure creative presence, as they admit: ‘look, even if we went as far as to write “this phrase” out by hand in every copy of this book it still wouldn’t be the original . . . the prime, if you like, process—it would be a facsimile,—a fiction . . . they would be something like identical performances—each unique but still not truly the original processual moment’ (1992: 85 [See Figure 13.1]). Here the TRG seem to be recognising the existence of a supplement at the source of inscription, a dangerous doubling in the very act of writing itself. The TRG lament, like Johnson in Albert Angelo, the inability of writing to get to the ineffable processual moment of original inspiration, and thus reinscribing a traditional idea about privileging authorial presence in precisely the way Derrida warns against. The response within the ‘conversation’ quoted from Rational Geomancy appears from a forlorn voice who, as if to recover hope of a more viable approach to the ‘original processual moment’, asks ‘hey, what about B. S. Johnson?’ (1992: 85). This query, which ends its chapter, clearly

Figure 13.1

Inscribing the text



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In The Unfortunates B. S. Johnson deals with the largest syntactical unit in the novel: the chapter. Inherent to Johnson’s approach towards the book-machine is a rejection of the enforced consecutivity of the bound book format as being a falsifying element in the psychological presentation of character. Johnson has recognized that the bookmachine influences the syntactic features of writing which in turn helps determine the psychological portrayal of a character . . . . The implication is that . . . the bound book’s traditional ‘freezing’ of word order into a permanence may or may not be true to the psychological experience being presented . . . . so many novels deal with characters who are essentially out of control in one way or another, [yet] the experience presented is clearly not that of the character but of the narrator in the process of a controlled exposition of the character. In The Unfortunates Johnson is consistent with this orthodox exposition in so far as he determines the terminal points of the work (first and last chapters), but permits, through the random ordering of the middle sections, a psychological framework in the novel different from ones previously allowed. He challenges the premise of the author’s omniscient control with the implication that ‘we’, as readers, are in control of our own choice of narrative production. (1992: 86) The TRG underscore this implication by including photocopies of a reader’s thumbs, which seem to be holding the book in place for us as we read it, suggesting that without a reader’s presence, the text would cease to have a meaningful sequence. Yet we may also read these thumbs as a sign of readerly complicity with authorial control; the symmetrical thumbs are themselves arguably symbols of an attempt to balance and stabilise the textual surface, and thus erase its specifically spatial nature. A single thumb in one corner of the book would act as a deictic marker, a phallic presence whose intrusion into the text-space would draw the reader’s eye to a particular passage. Rather than simply ask the reader to alter his/her conception of the book’s surface as a transparent purveyor of words, the thumbs focus instead on the status of the book as a physical object to be held in place as it is read (see White 2005). The reader exerts as much tyrannical sovereignty over text space as the author, in the TRG’s view. Hence their occasional refusal of legibility, as in their gradual transformation of the hand-written line ‘had i but word enough and time’ into a squiggle no longer recognisable as language in



strikes a chord, since the next ‘chapter’ begins with another discussion of The Unfortunates:

Exemplary B. S.

Figure 13.2

From word to abstraction

any form (1992: 36 [See Figure 13.2]). The substitution of ‘word’ for Marvell’s ‘world’ is another nod to B. S. Johnson; as the TRG note elsewhere, ‘Word order is world order is the implication of traditional narrative and it is this implication that Johnson begins to confront’ (1992: 86). The word/world conflation is also a witty commentary on the perceived insufficiency of the Phallic logos as a guarantor of meaning, its loss of control over the world it was once seen to have by divine fiat; the act of writing is intended to be a supplement to make up for the lost prestige of the ‘word’ whose absolute power it once conveyed unproblematically. As a way of reclaiming the text from both writerly and readerly coercion, the TRG turn its attention away from language to the empty margins that surround it. In Rational Geomancy, we read the following handwritten question: so the question arises in any narrative what does all this blank space mean? (1992: 115) TRG offer an answer to this question that seems relevant to Johnson’s work: ‘the message of typographic space is absence (loss of speed &/or memory trace). to print a word thus has the effect of slowing down



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Figure 13.3

Slowing down reading

reading, of drawing out the moment of intake. the spacing of words on the page implies an even further slowing down actual gaps in memory’ (1992: 88–91 [See Figure 13.3]). For an illustration of this principle, we need to look no further than B. S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal where blank pages and sparsely arranged words or letters imply a degradation of memory in the characters whose minds are being explored. This imitation of amnesia, senility or even deathly oblivion is of course merely an extension of the principle some, like Derrida, have already seen as implicit in writing: that is, writing as forgetting, as the marker on the grave of memory. To space out words on a page and slow down the reading is a way of dramatising that process, while reminding us of the mental blankness that writing must both define itself against and perpetuate or enable. The fact that each page in House Mother Normal is headed by the name of the character whose thoughts (or lack thereof) are described in it also shows that, in a sense, the entire novel itself is a series of standard forms to be filled out, in which each character is allotted a certain amount of textual space, whether it is needed or not. These ideas may be applied to some of Johnson’s other texts as well; for instance, we might decide that Christie Malry keeps his books in order to forget the particulars of the insults he has endured and to sublimate them into abstract numbers whose written symbols are not especially memorable in themselves. This is by no means the only explanation of Johnson’s textual eccentricities in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. For instance, there are blank spaces in the narrative itself, gaps that open up after Christie’s metafictional questions, such as ‘Who made me walk this way?’ (CMODE: 23), the answer being: the author. These gaps suggest that Johnson is signaling his own presence in the text through the absence of writing. Not only does this expose and destroy any illusion of psychological realism (already under severe threat in this highly self-reflexive novel) it also foregrounds the same kinds of questions about blank spaces asked by the TRG. When we begin to take textual space as the primary locus of meaning, as the TRG urge us to do, we may find ourselves understanding Christie’s double-entry ledger pages as a commentary on postmodern




Exemplary B. S.

narration itself. These five pages (wherein Christie keeps track of each ‘aggravation’ inflicted on him and the ‘recompense’ he has exacted for each of these wrongs [CMODE: 47, see also 85, 119, 151, 187]) do not contain any narrative that can readily link the events in the two columns. Christie’s gains and losses are not always related to each other, though he puts a monetary value on each of them. Of course, we can recall earlier events and piece together a little two-step narrative from the entries. For instance, in the ‘Aggravation’ column we see that the nuisance of ‘Bulb importuning’ is calculated at a value of 3p, while in the ‘Recompense’ column Christie’s revenge (‘Bulb firm’s reply-paid envelope returned empty’) is also afforded a value of 3p (CMODE: 47). Here we have a single, complete and self-enclosed action that does not add to Christie’s mounting total of dissatisfactions, a little narrative that achieves closure because of its triviality and simplicity. Johnson implies that most of our lives are not wrapped up so tidily as that, however, and that Christie’s method of narrating his life to himself through his diary of double-entries is not very satisfying to him in the end. Even after thousands have died in what Christie believes is a cosmic act of appeasement, Christie has ‘written off’ no more than £350 worth of ‘bad debt’ (CMODE: 187). The symbolic character of this final act of writing is made obvious when, after we are told of Christie’s death, we see that someone has scrawled ‘Account Closed’ over the last ledger page, thus concluding the novel (CMODE: 187). With this final gesture Johnson seems to be implying that, even though novelists create their narratives as attempts to compensate for life’s disappointments and humiliations, another divine or editorial hand can come along and reinscribe their texts at the last moment, altering their messages and, in a sense, murdering the idea of the author as a divine creator whose control over his medium is absolute. The very nature of narratives is that they must occur in a textual space that is always, at least in the eyes of Johnson and the TRG, open to contestation. Thus in the double-entry book, narrative becomes interstitial, a sort of comic aporia between marks on the page. This idea is reinforced when Christie notes a ‘balance owing to Christie carried forward to next reckoning’ on each of the first four pages of his ledger (CMODE: 47, 85, 119, 151), as if to suggest that the resumption of the narrative in the subsequent pages is primarily to be understood as an effect of the world’s indebtedness to him. This amusing detail has some serious implications, perhaps the most obvious being a commentary on the condition of the modernist and postmodern novel, in which there is an imbalance between the internal life of the protagonist (which is often examined in



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great detail) and the external actions of the narrative, which are frequently seen to be minor or incidental. Action by the protagonists, in such novels, is the belated and inadequate attempt to repay the indebtedness incurred by writers who focus more on private individual emotions like Christie’s than on dramatising or gratifying their creations’ wishes. Christie attempts to rectify this, of course, by seeking increasingly spectacular and violent outlets for his anger, but even these cannot quite make up the deficit. The reader’s likely conclusion is that narrative cannot finally triumph over the writing and textuality on which it depends. This lesson is perhaps the point of the TRG’s amusingly self-reflexive photo-narrative entitled, ‘NARY-A-TIFF’ which, fittingly enough, tells the story of a fictional fatal tiff between Nichol and McCaffery (1992: 211 [See Figure 13.4]). This story begins with a panel showing McCaffery (unconscionably) using a knife to open what seems to be an early edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s work. Nichol, reaching for a book, asks a question about ‘the narrative development’ of the ‘report’ they, as the TRG, have been writing (1992: 211). McCaffery, apparently undisturbed by this query, reads a quotation that anticipates the TRG’s own equation of the book with the body, not to mention de Sade. The bookish talk quickly becomes absurdly belligerent, and they insult each other with a mixture of literary, philosophical and sexual language. The turning point in their brawl comes when McCaffery grasps Nichol’s genitals, his Johnson, as it were, and then uses the page-cutting knife to kill his former collaborator, identifying him with his masterwork, The Martyrology: ‘Stick this in goddam book 29 of The Martyrology!’ (1992: 216). The evil McCaffery rejoices that his collection of Nichol’s books will now be worth twice as much, and drags Nichol off to be buried. In the final panel of the story, Nichol re-emerges, muddy from the grave, as a complacent McCaffery congratulates himself on the ‘plot twist’ he has built in to his writing (1992: 222). The story, for all its silliness, seems to dramatise the authorial attempt to bury textuality itself (symbolised by Nichol, who is cut by the same knife used to separate the pages of a book) under the weight of narrative and serious writing. The fact that Nichol returns to haunt McCaffery shows that such attempts are bound to be self-defeating, or at best only temporarily successful. Emphasising the return of the repressed text does not entirely satisfy the TRG, who continue what they term their ‘search for non-narrative prose’, seeking a way to dissolve all ties between words and the objectionable world order they reflect (1992: 116). In this utopian quest, they construct what they call ‘Fictive Funnies’ that use the conventions of comic strips to underscore the way in which language itself can break




Exemplary B. S.

Figure 13.4

Opening of the TRG’s photo-narrative

the narrative chain and create aporias in any text. For instance, a human figure falls through a trap door, shouting ‘Hey, what’s this pun doing here?’ (1992: 111 [See Figure 13.5]). Using a pun as a pretext for evading narrative continuity makes sense; puns are themselves a ‘double-entry’ into the otherwise unquestioned homogeneity of narrative, since, as the



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Figure 13.5

Subverting conventional sequence

TRG point out, they are aimed at a ‘double understanding’ (in French, ‘double entendre’) and have a ‘double origin’ (1992: 135). At any rate, the figure’s fall into language enables him to bypass the panel to his right, which would ordinarily be the next one in the narrative sequence. This subversion of conventional sequence is minor, since he falls into a panel beneath him, where the reader expects the action to continue anyway. The panel structure begins to disintegrate altogether in the next few pages, however, as language begins to take over from images and to function as its own sequence regardless of the panels. We read the words between and outside the square panels in their ordinary sequence,




Exemplary B. S.

and although we have been made aware of the role that puns can play in disrupting narrative by the initial fall, the cartoon’s conclusion seems to be that in these pictorial settings ‘the word stays silent’, ‘shut’ in by the frames, though they fail to control textual space entirely (1992: 117). We may infer that words as visual objects on the page are still inadequate to the task of opening the book up to the world, of making it speak or become fully present. Needless to say, the examples offered by the TRG of books or texts that try to transcend this silence and closure (Hustler magazines with scratch n’ sniff panels or accompanying soundtracks) also fail, though mainly because of their crass commercialism. The TRG note that ‘the exoskeletal nature of comic strip makes it a superior vehicle for many aspects of metalanguage’, which they define as ‘a descent into the single iconic unit where frame, as boundary or self-container, is no longer necessary’ (1992: 129). We might compare the metalanguage of the TRG’s comic strips to the final handwritten statement at the end of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, where the phrase ‘ACCOUNT CLOSED’ is scrawled across the previously inviolable borders of the double-entry grid (CMODE: 187). The transgression of these exoskeletal limits at the close of the novel itself is a sign that the author of the ledger and of the book as a whole are united, since although ‘ACCOUNT CLOSED’ is not explicitly metalinguistic, it does comment on the status of the novel as well as that of the double-entry book. Moreover, this writing does transform the final page of the ledger and novel into a ‘single iconic unit’ in precisely the way TRG have described (1992: 129). The prefabricated lines that Christie uses to contain his own writing in his double-entry book function in an ambiguous way that seems to correspond to the TRG’s postmodern comic strips. These text-boxes or panels can be read vertically or horizontally, depending on whether one wants to simply total up the sums or try to follow Christie’s injuries and revenges as discrete episodes. The former is easier, since the dates of these vicissitudes do not always line up correctly, but in any case, the reader is left to decide what strategy to adopt. At times, the TRG’s affiliation with B. S. Johnson has made them all too vulnerable to the strategies and suspicions of their readers, and has reinforced the truth behind Johnson’s question from Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (which, fittingly, is quoted by the TRG): ‘What writer can compete with the reader’s imagination?’ (1992: 115). In a fragment of handwritten dialogue included as part of Rational Geomancy, Nichol recounts an amusing anecdote in which two other Canadian critics confessed that they had believed McCaffery and Nichol had made up B. S. Johnson’s name and works themselves (1992: 295).



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This misconception was perhaps understandable, given the duo’s penchant for hoaxes and general playfulness, as well as the near-perfect harmony between Johnson’s fictive techniques and their theories. To readers who have absorbed the TRG’s message of rebellion against the linear qualities of narrative, the nickname they use for themselves, ‘The Kids of the Book Machine’, seems to be an indirect homage to B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (since the children of such a machine must indeed be ‘unfortunate’). The suspicions about a hoax were also fueled in part by the fact that B. S. Johnson’s initials are also the first initials of the TRG’s two pranksters: bp [Barrie] Nichol and Steve McCaffery. Coupled with some of the other unlikely names in Rational Geomancy (the palindromic Tom Mot, as well as the odd-sounding Eugen Fink, Madeline Gins and Ferdinand Kriwet), B. S. certainly must have sounded like B. S.—a North American shorthand for a longer expression, ‘bullshit’, a figurative expression of skepticism about something already put into words. No one actually means to evoke the excrement of a bull when they say ‘B. S.’ which is why ‘B. S.’ is doubly b.s: it is a euphemistic short form displaying our mistrust of language itself. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in other words; exactly the sort of final product desired by the perpetrators of a hoax. The name Johnson too becomes suspicious both as a bland almost generic name and as a euphemism for ‘penis’. The phallic subtext readers might project onto this innocent name is understandable, given the TRG’s repeated association of narrative with potency (or a lack thereof ). Their search for a non-narrative prose is described as a quest for the ‘Holy Grail’, which was the magical cure for the impotent Fisher King. In the parodic battle between McCaffery and Nichol, one calls the other ‘impotent’ and a ‘Yorkshire pud’ as well as grasping his genitals and killing him with a phallic knife (1992: 215–16). ‘Johnson’ as a potential hoax-name also refers back indirectly to the excremental aspect of ‘B. S.’, since ‘john’ is another word for toilet. Indeed, suspicious yet careful readers might well have supposed that for the TRG, it is while we are in the john, discovering the B. S. of narrative language, that we find the phallic ‘Johnson’ of research into textuality. When we become familiar with these three writers, we see that B. S. Johnson, both as a name and as a creator of texts, is in fact a microcosm of the TRG’s broader argument about textuality and its relationship to signification. To take the point and the pun a final bit further, we might say that all three of these writers would agree that it is only when one discovers that narrative is ‘B. S.’ made possible by the suppression of language’s ambiguities that one can understand the




Exemplary B. S.

pseudo-phallic ‘johnson’ that traditional referential language offers to us in the guise of the transcendental ‘Word’. No wonder the TRG’s readers thought B. S. Johnson was a hoax, since his name seems to point to the hoax-like nature of language itself. Indeed, part of the thrill of thinking that one has discovered a hoax in a strange or experimental text is the suspicion that in uncovering a hoax one has in fact found the hidden principle around which a given text is organised. Indeed, in finding the ‘B. S.’ in a text one thinks one has found its Johnson; just as Isis fabricated the one piece of Osiris that she was missing and turned it into a divine phallic object, so do authors create the necessary parts to justify their intellectual labors. In other words, if B. S. Johnson hadn’t already existed, TRG would have had to invent him.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Steve McCaffery and the estate of bpNichol for their kind permission to reproduce material from Rational Geomancy.

Work cited McCaffery, Steve and Nichol, bp. (1992) Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine, Vancouver, Canada: Talonbooks. White, Glyn (2005) Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction, Manchester: Manchester University Press.



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Lawrence Phillips

The history of post-war London emphasises both the persisting fragments of destruction that would linger into the 1970s, and a largely triumphant reconstruction that would be both celebrated in newly reformulated locations like the South Bank, and rued with the rise of buildings fuelled by an unholy alliance between greedy property speculators and town planners desperate for a quick fix traffic or housing solution. Yet this combination of the Blitz and often ill-planned and illdesigned redevelopment fanned the gentle flames of a new fascination with London’s history particularly as represented in its architecture. The publication of John Summerson’s Georgian London in 1945 is an important landmark of this emerging consciousness charting what survived and what had been lost of one era of London’s fabric. Yet this interest was a class specific phenomenon: What had been the burning obsession of a few gradually became a lifetime investment for many. This was not so much apparent in the study of London’s buildings for study’s sake, although there was to be more of that than ever before. Rather it was the conscious decision by a substantial part of the London middle classes to seek the good life, not in the suburbs as their parents and grandparents had done, but in the very areas that had been abandoned in that first suburbanizing process. (White 2002: 63) This might suggest a resurgent confidence among London’s middle classes to counter the sense of a passing of the old order and the diminishment in civility identified by many amid the improving economic and social prospects available to the working classes. For many 175 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo and the Consequences of London


among the well-to-do middle classes, the social hierarchy of London and the country had no less than capsized. As David Hughes observed: ‘Before the war, the upper crust, still residential, attended functions in full drag; now, patriotic to the last clothing-coupon, they dressed dowdily and the spivs had assumed their plumage as well as their habitat’ (in Sissons and French 1963: 89). The Teddy Boy phenomenon, too, had initially been an upper middle class movement attempting to evoke a culture of the Indian summer of Victorian certainties in the early twentieth century, and had been subsequently hijacked by working class youths. Property, however, had long been the chosen ground of the middle class despite the long history within London of fashionable and smart property development giving way to atomisation as houses gave way to flats, then rooms and finally a period of neglect as the middle classes moved on to the latest bastion of civility and the working classes moved in, in an inexorable process that would eventually lead to the development of the outer London suburbs. The rediscovery of the fine Georgian buildings of inner London is both a reverse of this earlier impulse, but also a desire to reclaim and reassert the influence that habitation of such buildings and estates originally conveyed in a radically changed social and economic milieu. The publication of Summerson’s Georgian London also points to the post-war resurgence of the conservationist movement, which can be identified as a middle class ideology in its conservative attachment to preserving the physical fabric of the city recalling earlier—and desired—social hierarchies. Yet there is also a more suggestive politics of place indicated by post-war fiction that engages with these issues. Frederick Jameson observes that the condition of the post-war era is distinguishable from the earlier twentieth century by the logic of spatial organisation rather than time: ‘I think that it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism’ ( Jameson 1991: 16). The post-war conservationist movement and inner-city gentrification can therefore be read as an early marker of this cultural and experiential shift. The reassertion of middle class influence on the cultural and physical capital of the nation—London—appears simultaneously with the loss of ground in traditional expressions of servility or the exclusivity of university education. The re-appropriation is literal as formerly evacuated districts are ‘reclaimed’ by class migration, but also discursive in that the impetus for the phenomenon is expressed in aesthetic terms.



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Our living depends upon our ability to conceptualise alternatives, often impoverished. Theorising about this experience aesthetically critically is an agenda for radical cultural practice. For me this space of radical openness is a margin – a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a ‘safe’ place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance. (hooks 1991: 149) In housing terms this evokes the radicalisation of a beleaguered middle class identity regrouping and, in an urban context, reoccupying the physical and discursive sites of an earlier form of its hegemony, even where such sites will only be marginal among the great sea of inner-city life around them; in effect, taking two steps backward to take another branch of the road to wealth and influence. This ability to hang on, at risk, forms a powerfully symbolic ‘community of resistance’ in a post-war social context still ‘traumatised’ by the ascendancy of a Labour government. Yet the internalisation of such a sense of cultural marginalisation is at odds with the material success of this migration, since those areas that were seen as up-and-coming in the immediate post-war years—parts of Westminster (including Pimlico), Marylebone, Hampstead, Chelsea and later Islington and the docklands (White 2002: 63)—are now synonymous with well-to-do London. Gentrification also offers a model that is aspirational in both cultural and social terms. The literary representation of this new ‘old’ London suggests that re-engagement with the city that can be equally be read as post-war realignment of social and political conservatism in line with the political and cultural dimensions of space and place noted by Jameson and hooks. The protagonist of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo (1964) is a supply teacher of working class origins who desires to enter a quintessentially middle class profession, architecture. His fixation on largely Georgian architecture is his attempt to align himself with the middle class imaginary. It is clear from Johnson’s novel that architecture is a thin disguise for writing which demonstrates the slippage between the aspirational nature of a reinvested cultural capital in the bricks and mortar of a re-valued Georgian London, and the equally exclusive middle class world of letters. Yet the novel studiously works to ensure that the experiential and material fabric of the ‘real’ London exposes the risks of such a cultural alignment in the contemporary city.



Unusually, it is the reactivated middle class reading of the architecture of London that represents a ‘radical’ political position. There is a viable comparison here with bell hooks argument that


With characteristic bravura, the final section of Albert Angelo, ‘Disintegration’, turns inwards by attempting to write the author directly into the text as a form of commentary that reveals anxieties, traditionally repressed in the novel genre, over textual truth. Such textual interventions, in which the literary becomes explicitly and self-consciously autobiographical, represent something of a non sequitur in fictional terms. The move both asserts author/ity over the text and tacitly acknowledges the potential failure to communicate ‘experience’, while simultaneously challenging the author’s traditional transcendental authority by drawing that function into the text itself. As Brian McHale argues, ‘Autobiography functions in texts . . . as a distinct ontological level, a world to be juxtaposed with the fictional world and thus a tool for foregrounding ontological boundaries and tensions’ (1987: 203). In this attempt to align fictional character with the consciousness of the author, Johnson creates only another textual fiction and another level of ontological frustration, for as we learn from the same section ‘It is about frustration’ (AA 169). The grounds for that frustration, the despair over ‘truth’ in fiction, demands a close look at the analogies between architecture and poetry to which the final section draws our attention, and the spaces that both the architect and poet of this text both respond to and create—London. The experiential certainty suggested by the concrete London that the text attempts to evoke, momentarily disguises the subjective London produced by Albert’s responses to, and interaction with, the city. This is strengthened by the material-focused discourse of architectural analysis that he uses in the early stages of the novel. On one level, the use of this discourse would seem to respond to the artist’s desire for ‘truth’, and yet the London ‘constructed’ in this way does not suggest an artistic truth, but an attempt to evoke a material London in words which in itself can only be an illusory project. This is, perhaps, the source of Johnson’s dissatisfaction with the correlation between the architect/poet as a fictional gambit: —–look, I’m trying to tell you something of what I feel about being a poet in a world where only poets care anything real about poetry, through the objective correlative of an architect who has to earn his living as a teacher. this device you cannot have failed to see creaking, ill-fitting at many places, many places, for architects manqués can earn livings very nearly connected with their art, and no poet has ever lived by his poetry, and architecture has a functional aspect quite lacking in poetry, and, simply, architecture is just not poetry. (168)



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The ‘objective correlative’ here is not the equation between architect and poet (although this does have a certain resonance), but the linkage between the practical activity and discourse of the architect which the text attempts to counter the subjectivity and impressionism of the poet. It is ill fitting for the practical reasons Johnson’s textual persona identifies, but this then begs the question: ‘Why an architect to stand in for a poet in the first place?’ The anxiety here is quite possibly disingenuous for both discursively and figuratively the comparison/substitution that this intervention forces us to consider is a resonant issue within the novel, particularly in relation to the means by which fictional texts evoke the ‘material’ spaces and places of London. When Henri Lefebvre turns to consider the textual contribution to the construction of social spaces in his seminal The Production of Space, he too points to the ‘creaking, ill-fitting’ continuum between literature and architecture: Clearly literary authors have written much of relevance, especially descriptions of places and sites. But what criteria would make certain texts more relevant than others? . . . The problem is that any search for space in literary texts will find it everywhere and in every guise: enclosed, described, projected, dreamt of, speculated about. What texts can be considered special enough to provide the basis for a ‘textual’ analysis? Inasmuch as they deal with socially ‘real’ space, one might suppose on first consideration that architecture and texts relating to architecture would be a better choice that literary texts proper. (Lefebvre 1991: 14) Essentially both Johnson and Lefebvre posit the view that a textual space in literary terms is an unreliable model for achieving a material analysis. Certainly, for Lefebvre this is merely a step along the way to offering his preferred solution to this hiatus which largely ignores literature, but for Albert (and later, Johnson’s textual persona) it represents both an existential and latterly a representational crisis. Albert’s architectural flights are attempts to assert meaning and order on a world that, for him, has become threateningly mutable. Put simply, it is structure versus chaos seen in the comparison between Albert’s architectural London, witnessed by his daily traverse across the metropolis as a supply teacher, and his attempts to assert discursive structure through his lessons often over unruly and disinterested schoolchildren. In this respect, it is suggestive that Albert demonstrates a marked preference for Georgian architecture, or at least plain and well-ordered building design, against the Victorian penchant for decorative detail and more specifically, the Gothic. For





example: ‘Georgian second-ratings with mansard roofs: the pitch of the mansards is particularly well-chosen, subtle. It pleases you’ (AA 28) or later, on a night out in Stepney ‘Visually, architecturally, Cable Street, Cablestrasse, The Stresse, at night excites us: everywhere we go in this part of Stepney there are Georgian facades in all stages of repair’ (AA 51). Yet Albert’s architectural preferences are most clearly seen early in the novel when Albert casts a comparative eye over King’s Cross and St Pancras railway stations. While both Victorian, the exterior of the former has a classical austerity that contrasts dramatically with the Gothic excesses of the latter. Albert observes while travelling to his parents: I walk down the hill from Percy Circus, along Kings Cross Road, into Pentonville road, towards Kings Cross. The station has two great squat stock-brick arches, their yellow uncommonly unblackened; Cubitt, the youngest, Lewis. Then there are the pseudo-Gothic excrescences of Scott’s St. Pancras. I wonder shall I come to accept St. Pancras station, living so near? Or even like it? Perhaps it is fatal to live so near to St. Pancras for an architect? Certainly it would be to bring up children here: their aesthetic would be blighted. But it seems unlikely I shall be allowed to bring up children here. (AA 20) Through this ostensibly simple expression of aesthetic discrimination, the reader learns a great deal about Albert’s character and the thematic preoccupations of the novel. Perhaps the most obvious point to make about Georgian or, more broadly, Palladian architecture is its decorative understatement and the use of classical orders which is evident in King’s Cross station despite its Victorian date. It has traditionally indicated educated taste and discrimination. More significantly still, such architecture follows rigid design rules that allow little outward variation achieving a high degree of visual conformity. If we accept at face value the assertion by Johnson’s textual persona at the end of the novel that Albert, as aspirant architect, stands in for Johnson as aspirant poet, then the architect poet is actively seeking order, form, understatement, and, perhaps, conformity. Indeed, Jonathan Coe noted the extreme formal constraints that Johnson applied to his poetry which, despite the formal experimentation present in his novels, is clearly an undercurrent here as well (1995: 100–1). If this analogy is allowed for the moment, it suggests a preference for the way Georgian poets married a close attention to classical form with biting satire, contrasted with the baggy digressive form of Victorian realism that is both present and challenged by the experimental form of this novel.



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This figurative preoccupation with architecture is also revealing in another way. The Germanisation of Cable Street as ‘Cablestrasse’ hints at stereotypical constructions of the German national character as methodical and ordered, as well as evoking the threatening possibility for such a value system to mutate into political fascism—a resonant connection to a 1960s London still pock-marked by bomb sites—and perhaps this anticipates an underlying tendency that finds expression in Albert’s own predilection for beating more troublesome students into submission. Johnson’s friend the author Zulfikar Ghose notes of Johnson’s polemical ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs? (1973) a tendency of his more self-reflective writing to ‘betray something of the bully’ which is thematically present here in Albert’s character (Ghose 1985: 27). Further, given the association that the novel maps between architectural structure and literary narrative, the transmutation of Cable Street into ‘Cablestrasse’ also associates his aesthetic predilections with the structural, political, and social concerns of modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Indeed, Cable Street is no neutral location to link with fascism since it was the principal locale for the notorious Cable Street riots of 1936 when a coalition of numerous anti-fascist groups prevented a march by Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. The battle was, however, largely fought between the anti-fascist groups and the police who strove to clear a path for the Blackshirts whom they saw as a ‘legitimate’ political march: ‘The police, treating the crowds as ruffians, were intent on dispersing what they saw as a mere mob . . . police horses charged along Cable Street and elsewhere the crowd surged and swayed and lapped around them’ (Bloom 2003: 332). These associations reveal a certain predilection for authoritarianism, as well as a leaning towards formal architectural styles, in Albert’s character and exacerbate an increasing the tension between the varied experimentation of the novel and traditional (realist) narrative order figured in the central protagonist. Indeed, a further echo of this visual/aesthetic/political ‘style’ prefigures the journey to the final school of the novel, Crane Grove Secondary, where Albert is most challenged as a teacher and is provoked to the greatest degree of violence towards the children. Shortly before reaching the school, Albert’s architectural assessment of the area rests upon either the East or West Stand of Arsenal Stadium, both of which were built in a striking Art Deco neoclassicist style during the 1930s: ‘Only Arsenal Stadium, older-looking in its outdated modernity than last century’s houses, competes in height with the dark red brick, stonedressed schools’ (47). Note how only the neoclassicism of the stadium





challenges the solid red Victorian brickwork in authority and height. Yet, with this faux Palladian design, the pilaster-like fluted panels of the stands promises the heavy solidity and authority of stone columns, but this is only a façade, an ideologically motivated modernist echo of the real thing. Moreover, it is an architectural style that had, by the 1930s, come to be seen as intensely conservative associated with the oppressive imperial symbolism of Lutyens’s New Delhi, or Albert Speer’s New Berlin designs and the Nuremberg stadium undertaken for Hitler’s ambitions of a thousand-year Reich. The most famous example of this type of architecture in London is the looming tower of Senate House, University of London on Russell Square in Bloomsbury, not insignificantly the locale of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s authoritarian urban dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). As mentioned above, in literary terms the corresponding literary neoclassicism of the 1930s was associated with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis and with their ideological emphasis on restraint and a reactionary political programme. Albert’s architectural eye signals ideological, aesthetic and literary implications. The London of the novel is equally conflicted as Albert strives to impose order through a fascination with buildings and space while completely misunderstanding the city as lived place. The focus on architectural form—or more accurately, the formal aspect of architectural exteriors—has its echo in Johnson’s preoccupation with narrative form both here and in his other writings. While it may be rather glib to suggest a general equation between a preoccupation with architectural façade and a preoccupation with poetic/literary form, it is an issue within Albert Angelo. This has both aesthetic and ideological implications that are revealed throughout the novel. Lefebvre observes: Fascism sought to enthrone an organic fantasy of social life based on notions of blood, race, nation, and an absolute national state. Hence its use of façade, a democratic parody of which is to be found in the detached, suburban house, with its front and back – its face as it were, and its obscene parts. (Lefebvre 1991: 275) Albert’s fascination with the radically contrasting façades of King’s Cross and St Pancras points equally to the personal, aesthetic, and ideological conflict within him and, more broadly, behind the aesthetic debate that is conducted through the diegesis of the novel, that is the showing rather than telling of the thoughts or the inner processes of the central character through externalities. This is further focused on his attention to the façade of the Georgian suburban development of Stepney. While not the



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detached houses of Lefebvre’s allusion, the manner by which the graceful Palladian architectural façade radically conceals the prosaic brickwork of the house makes the point all the more forcibly. Albert’s fascination with the façade creates a false impression of order and control via an orderly face while hiding its ‘obscene’ parts. In Albert’s case, it is evidently an attempt to restrain and conceal his inner psychological conflicts and contradictions; the emphasis on aesthetic form within the novel increasingly reveals the same conflict through the frustration expressed by the self-reflexive narrative persona that subsumes Albert’s narrative in the ‘Disintegration’ section. Insofar as we are encouraged to link this to Johnson the author it bears out Ghose’s observation that for Johnson ‘to write a novel was to have a subject matter, investigate the formal problem particular to it and then to find the solution to that problem’ (1985: 27). For Johnson the mimetic plays a very poor second fiddle to the diegetic which has the potential for a more authoritarian, more authorially controlled aesthetic. In much the same way that fascism reduces politics to aesthetics, Albert Angelo reduces the ideological and social concerns most readily associated with the novel to a matter of form, of aesthetics. The result is, of course, a radical displacement demonstrated figuratively through Albert’s character. It is through this characterisation that the failure of the underlying political authoritarianism is interrogated and found to be wanting. It must be remembered that Albert’s designs scarcely make it off the drawing board and the latter part of the novel points to his inability to express himself through the need for form and structure that building design demands. There is both a lack of interest in having his designs built ‘Ought really to go in for more competitions. It’s the only way to become known, to break out of this destructive teaching’ (103) and latterly a complete block: Hell! What time is it? Seven! You bloody fool! Guilt. Guilt. Close the window. Specks of smut on my drawing, hell, London smut. Smuts. Still. Another day just frittered, as far as ever, farther because nearer death, from success, whatever that is, whatever that may mean, frittered, the worst crime, against myself, guilt. Smuts, flecks of soot, coal. Damn. Won’t clean off, ruined drawing, not that there was much to ruin, three lines of a ... Three lines. It’s not nothing, exactly. Not exactly nothing. (AA 119)





Note how it is London—London smut—that breaks Albert’s attempt to inscribe order and form on the page. Yet three lines don’t make a building so clearly the disruption, the block, exists in Albert’s mind before material London drifted in through his window. Indeed, the day starts for Albert full of enthusiasm for work at the drawing board but he is inexorably drawn onto the London streets and into various pubs leading to the reverie that brings him to seven in the evening with no work done. Despite Albert’s architectural interest in London, it is clearly the plurality of the city itself that is his major distraction and disruption. From his aesthetic revulsion against St Pancras he develops a strong desire to design in that style himself: ‘Of course, I would really like to be designing a Gothic cathedral, all crockets and finials and flying buttresses, but I must be of my time, ahead of my time, rather, using the materials of my time, the unacknowledged legislators, and so on, in accord with, of my age, my time, my generation, my life’ (107). London, it must be said, has never been a contemporary or future orientated city. Even after the destruction of the Blitz during the early and latter years of the Second World War, the infrastructure of the city remained largely Victorian as do many of the inner suburbs today. Yet the desire for renewal, for modernisation had been a major preoccupation of the then London County Council since the early 1950s initiating the very architectural competitions that Albert eschews. As Jerry White observes, ‘London needed modernising. And modernization had three key components: Comprehensive redevelopment, new roads and an architecture fit for the twentieth century’ (2002: 47). Yet there is little sensitivity in the novel to London’s modernisation when it was very much on the agenda in the 1960s with many a new carbuncle looming over the metropolitan skyline thanks to post-war property speculation. Indeed, it is the past that is continually forcing its way into Albert’s consciousness and the novel. Most obviously through his architectural stream of consciousness, but also emerging in his classroom teaching where many a lesson becomes another London disquisition which brings the associations between the physical environment, the past and the city very much to the fore: ‘You begin a geography lesson which turns into a lesson on London then into a lesson on architecture’ (43). Later, at the Wormwood Street School where the remainder of Albert’s teaching experiences in the novel are set, he is disturbed by his class reading a standard text on Gothic architecture (Paul Frankl’s Gothic Architecture of 1962) which mutates into another lesson on London’s geology (66). All this is very far from the grace, simplicity, and repetitive order of Georgian stock architecture which was, by the 1960s, far from



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the dominant architectural style in London. What the quotation from Frankl’s Gothic Architecture brings into the novel is the very absence of guiding philosophy noting a disjunction between the necessities of building a secure structure and the aesthetics of the architecture, between the pragmatic and material versus the symbolic: ‘The changes had nothing to do with the crusades, which began only later, or with the liturgy, or with philosophy. The architects were intent simply on making necessary improvements. As far as can be reconstructed, this was a process of trial and error . . .’ (66–7). London in the novel embodies this ethic of trial and error over a guiding philosophy; an unlovely city that has always given way to the pragmatic in pursuit of commercial advantage rather than the grand symbolic gesture. Indeed, there is a clear equation with Johnson’s own literary experimentation which arguably eschews aesthetic gratification for intellectual engagement (much like conceptual art). Yet London is a space that also challenges a desire for order that is even more pressing for the individual living among the conurbations of the twentieth century. As Jonathan Raban observes: ‘The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture’ (1988: 10). The apparent solidity and materiality of the city ebbs away by travelling through it. Albert’s attempts to give his existence in the city the material foundation of architectural order are doomed to fail, as exemplified by his attempts to dig further into the literal foundations of the city—its geography and geology—in search of solid ground but which are, significantly, disrupted by the inhabitants of that very same city—his pupils—whom are not seen on maps, architectural drawings or geological surveys. One’s taste, to return to St Pancras once more, is already ‘blighted’ (20). The novel, the individual, and the city are, as the final self-referential section reminds us, in a process of perpetual dis/integration. Moving from a more or less realistic mode with architectural discourse uppermost and a more or less integrated protagonist, the narrative slides into textual disintegration as Albert’s past and present increasingly point towards disorder and confusion, if not despair. The interruptions of historical London underpin this movement. Initially they are comprehensible either as part of Albert’s architectural discourse, like the mention of Cubitt and Scott, architects of St Pancras and Kings Cross, respectively, or as the search for existential bedrock through geology. Later, they appear random, a randomness given physical presence in the text and materially produce a disruption in the narrative, such as when





elements of the story of Christopher Marlowe’s murder in Deptford (an unfortunate excursion south of the river) peer through cut out windows in several pages of the text. While evident by the conclusion of the novel, this fracturing of textual (narrative) and extra-textual (disruptive reading) levels was there from the beginning. Percy Circus, Albert’s fictional residence, combines all the elements: 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. There are trees in the circular railinged area in the middle: planes mostly, but one or two oaks and a long, hanging willow, oddly twisted like a one-legged circus tumbler. There is a little grass there, too, and rubbish of various kinds littered around—bicycle wheels, bottomless enamel buckets, tins, rotting cardboard. Some of the houses have patches where new London stocks show up yellow against the older blackened ones; then you know what happened to the rest of the circus. New flats abut at an angle, awkwardly. A blue plaque tells you that Lenin once lived at number sixteen. (AA 13–14) Johnson’s textual persona points us towards the symbolism of Percy Circus ‘between built-on-the-skew, tatty, half-complete, comically called Percy Circus, and Albert, and London, and England, and the human condition’ (176). However, a direction to the reader of this sort can only be taken so far. As a symbol of ‘London, and England, and the human condition’ it is hard to miss the crookedness of the construction, the detritus and, of course, the bomb damage that has been patched up; Percy Circus is post-war London and a declining Britain. But it also mirrors the general tattiness of Albert himself as a textual construct; he is characteristically predisposed to looking backwards rather than forwards, despite his self admonishment ‘to be of my time’ (107). The appearance of Johnson’s textual persona in ‘Disintegration’ is a last desperate attempt to bring order to bear against the looming conclusion that there is, quite pointedly, no sense in the city, the individual, or the fictional narrative in traditional realist conceptions of it. The invitation to seek meaning in Percy Circus as a symbol is a last ditch attempt to encourage the reader impose an order that is not there. The hodgepodge conglomeration of urban architecture, decay, randomised bomb destruction, and discontinuous building styles has no real narrative other than the passage of time, and it is clearly no more than an



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On the one hand there is the visible city of streets and buildings, frozen forms of energy fixed at different times in the past around which the busy kinetic energy of the present swirls. On the other hand there are the subconscious currents arising in the minds of the city’s living inhabitants from this combination of past and present. (1981: 4) Meaning in the city, as in the text, comes down to an act of individual will, of imagination. What Albert Angelo points to is the contingent nature of such ‘mental mapping’—to borrow a phrase from the linguist Paul Werth—in its necessary and unavoidable abstraction from the real (1999: 7). The text/city/individual identification as imagination and therefore abstraction is caught in an oscillation between the desire to articulate the ‘truth’ and the inevitable failure to do so. The first sentence of ‘Disintegration’ is simultaneously amusing and painful: ‘—–fuck all this lying look what im really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture trying to say something about writing about my writing’. An ‘almighty aposiopesis’ (167) indeed for writing about writing is never going to deliver the ‘truth’ which literally cannot be uttered. The ‘space’ of the city, of the text, or of the individual are abstractions of language or more specifically writing. Lefebvre observes: ‘The quasi-logical presupposition of an identity between mental space (the space of the philosophers and epistemologists) and real space creates an abyss between the mental sphere on one side and the physical and social spheres on the other’ (1991: 6). This is a gap that Johnson rightly chooses not to pretend to bridge in the end; another explanation, perhaps, for those holes in the text. Now, there is some truth in that.

Works cited Bloom, Clive (2003) Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Coe, Jonathan, (1995) ‘“Oh Fuck All This Lying!” Some Notes on the Poems of B. S. Johnson’, Sunk Island Review 10, 97–104. Frankl, Paul (2001) [1962] Gothic Architecture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ghose, Zulfikar (1985) ‘Bryan’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5(2): 23–34. hooks, bell (1991) Yearnings: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround.



excerpt from a larger whole of the London setting. Burton Pike puts the dilemma of the city as image rather well:


Jameson, Frederick (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Keith, Michael, and Steve Pile (eds) (1993) Place and the Politics of Identity, London and New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri (1991) [1974] The Production of Space, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. McHale, Brian (1987) Postmodernist Fiction, London and New York: Routledge. Pike, Burton (1981) The Image of the City in Modern Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Raban, Jonathan (1988) [1974] Soft City, London: Collins Harvill. Sissons, Michael and Philip French (eds) (1963) Age of Austerity, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Summerson, John (2003) [1945] Georgian London, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Werth, Paul (1999) Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, Harlow: Pearson Educational. White, Jerry (2002) [2001] London in the Twentieth Century, London: Penguin.



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In 1974, the Welsh nationalist poet Harri Webb described B. S. Johnson as ‘the only English avant-garde writer of any consequence’ (Webb 1998: 202), and lamented his suicide as a profound loss to both England and Wales. Although Johnson was born in London and was very much an English writer, the politics, culture and literature of Wales (in both of the nation’s languages) had a profound effect on his own writing, particularly in the years leading up to his death. In the long poem ‘Hafod a Hendref ’, Johnson describes the results of this particular influence: the confusion here of images, impressions, unsureness typifies this latest experience of Wales, attempt at involvement with the Welsh (1972: 47) Inspired by what he saw as Welsh resistance to English colonial rule, Johnson’s Welsh experiences affected his later writing, a process seen in his poetry (most notably in ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ and his translations from the Welsh language poet Gwenallt), and also in his prose, particularly in the novel House Mother Normal. An important insight into this process can be seen in the twenty-first edition of Poetry Wales, published in 1971, which contains a series of letters from writers and critics congratulating the magazine on having reached what they term its ‘majority’ and commenting on its role within the Welsh literary scene. One of these letters comes from Johnson and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he is perturbed by what he sees as a lack of formal inventiveness in the work of English language poets from Wales, 189 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


‘He Would be Working at the Welsh Books’: B. S. Johnson and the Two Literatures of Wales

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‘He Would be Working at the Welsh Books’

May I, as an outsider informed (I hope) a little better than most Englishmen, outline what I consider to be the main problem AngloWelsh poets face in the future? You see, while your material is marvelous, and while you have admirable causes to spur you to write, the ways all of you have tackled it so far, the forms you have used, have been completely (and sometimes deadeningly) traditional. Now I am not saying that you should necessarily imitate or take up the advances made in English outside a Welsh context, but I do feel very strongly that you have a problem of form that no one I’ve read in Poetry Wales has really made any attempt to solve. Simply, your forms do not do your material justice. (1971: 36) Johnson portrays himself as a fascinated (and even slightly humbled) outsider looking in; he at once admires what he sees, but is not slow to attack that with which he disagrees. His respect appears genuine, but his message is not altogether friendly; he suggests that, in the same position, he would not be making the same mistakes. Welsh poets, Johnson believes, are too often conventional, old-fashioned and certainly not above criticism; they have the right ideas but the wrong technique. ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ (1972) can be read as attempt to overcome these limitations, using similar material but reworking it into his own innovative, modernistic style. Indeed, much of Johnson’s attitude to Wales and its literature can be seen reflected in the poem which meditates, in part, on his time as Writer in Residence at Gregynog, a large country house in the old county of Montgomeryshire, bought by the University of Wales. The poem again demonstrates Johnson’s view of himself as an outsider looking in to Wales, and shows how his image of the Welsh poet affected his own conception of himself as a writer. Johnson’s attempt at involvement and engagement with the Welsh needs to be seen against the backdrop of modern Wales, in terms not only of its literary tradition but in relation to its politics and history which are crucially and inextricably linked to colonialism and imperialism. Therefore, before Johnson’s writing on Wales can be assessed it is necessary to consider the background against which he was writing. The 1960s were arguably a time of change in Wales, in both literature and nationalist politics alike. A new movement of Welsh poets writing in English emerged, who became known as the ‘Second Flowering’ of Anglo-Welsh



leading him to simultaneous praise and reprove the contents of the journal:

literature (although the term Anglo-Welsh is itself problematic, suggesting such literature is not fully Welsh, leading to the adoption of the phrase Welsh Writing in English). Led by writers such as Tony Conran, Harri Webb and Meic Stephens (the founder of Poetry Wales, who first met Johnson in 1962) these new poets were often unashamedly political and defiantly nationalistic in their devotion to the safeguarding of Welsh language, culture and nation. But where the early founders of Plaid Cymru can be seen to have been on the political right (Saunders Lewis, one of the party’s founders, argued that Plaid should be seen as the Welsh conservative party, and that nationalism was incompatible with socialism and liberalism) (Davies 1993: 29–30) there was a later emphasis on the combination of left wing thinking and nationalist ideals. Indeed, many of the poets of the second flowering were radically socialist in outlook, influenced by the righteous political anger of the earlier poet Gwenallt, Johnson’s translations of whom will be discussed later. It is from this particular grouping of 1960s poets that Johnson appears to have derived his image of contemporary Welsh writing, and by which he was directly influenced. One particularly important aspect of nationalist thinking, very much current in the 1960s, was the notion that Wales is essentially a colony, and much recent criticism has sought to create a postcolonial reading of Welsh literature (see, for example, Bohata 2004). In the 1960s the newly formed Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society), drew inspiration from civil rights movements in both Northern Ireland and the United States to use non-violent direct protests to campaign for equal legal status for the language. One of their most famous campaigns involved painting over English-only roadsigns, a visible symbol of linguistic domination and perceived oppression; in such a climate, the everyday becomes inevitably politicised. The frontline between the imperial centre and the exploited periphery is not in a different continent; instead, Offa’s Dyke is a colonial boundary. This conflict is embodied and expressed within language and literature, something reflected within Johnson’s own writing. As Phillip Tew says of a passage in Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo: ‘In this exchange Albert provides several crucial responses. The reader can infer and recover the acknowledgement of language as the prime factor in subjugation . . .’ (Tew 2001: 23). Such themes can therefore be seen to have been present early in Johnson’s career, but his engagement with Wales appears to have intensified them, or at least suggested a slightly different approach, giving him a more direct example of colonialism in action. Against this background it is easy to see why Johnson, as a writer on the political left with a keen interest in attacking Britain’s imperial past,



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may have been so attracted to the politics and literature of Wales in the 1960s. Johnson can also be seen as aesthetically distancing himself from his peers back in England. However, as has already been seen, Johnson had similar aesthetic difficulties with contemporary Welsh writing, criticising what he viewed as a lack of formal innovation. He therefore needed to take the political and social themes seen in Wales and use them in conjunction with a modernist aesthetic and style. However, one aspect of Welsh poetry that Johnson praises can be seen as highly traditional; he perceived the role of the writer in Welsh society as very different from that in England. In ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ he says: In London if you should (unwary) call yourself a writer they mostly say : Yes, but what do you really do? In Welsh society, however, the writer has always had his place, accepted for himself : so was I. (1972: 50) In some ways ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ attempts to overcome this—Johnson sees himself as making a public statement on his Welsh experiences, something underlined by the publication of the poem in Planet, a Welsh periodical, and therefore to an audience interested in Welsh affairs: So this, in your public tradition, is both my way of thanking you and recording something of what I felt. (1972: 51) In Like a Fiery Elephant, Jonathan Coe quotes Glyn Tegai Hughes, warden of Gregynog at the time Johnson was writer in residence there, explaining further this notion of Welsh writers being closer to their audience: He took part very vigorously in anything that went on. When the Welsh literary group met six times a year, and one of the things I remember very well was after one such meeting where the speaker was Kate Roberts . . . . we all knew about her work and a lot of us knew her personally. And I remember Bryan [Johnson] saying to her, “Here I am, I’ve been writing for ten years and I get practically no feedback, my readers don’t know me. And here are you in a group which not only knows the background to your work, and the work



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Johnson appears to feel the lack of such a community in his own setting, and seeing that a different style of literary tradition potentially existed in Wales made him feel his own perceived isolation more keenly (although the nature of Johnson’s writing perhaps alienated many potential readers). Equally, he felt cut off from past English literature, again in contrast to Wales; elsewhere in ‘Hafod a Hendref ’, Johnson reflects on the continuity of the Welsh literary tradition, which is still a key influence on modern day Anglo-Welsh poets: But the point is that Dafydd speaks across six hundred odd years to you Welsh today in a way which is inconceivable in England: for what fourteenth-century poet is even understandable to most English now? (1972: 51) This refers to Dafydd ap Gwilym, one of the best known of mediaeval Welsh bards, and perhaps the greatest poet to have emerged from Wales. It is true that Welsh has changed less than English, so that mediaeval literature is still comprehensible to non-specialists, and that modern-day English language writing from Wales can be directly influenced by this older literature. There is thus a continuity and strength to this tradition, and it becomes plausible for contemporary writers to view Dafydd ap Gwilym in the fourteenth century, or even Aneirin in the sixth, as their direct precursors. For example, Tony Conran’s 1982 ‘Elegy, for the Welsh dead, in the Falkland Islands’ explicitly refers to Aneirin’s ‘Y Gododdin’ in its opening and repeated line ‘Men went to Catraeth’ (Abse 1997: 155), comparing the Malvinas conflict to a centuries old massacre at the battle of Catraeth, possibly Catterick in Yorkshire (for a translation of extracts from Aneirin’s elegy [see Conran 1967: 75–8]). Welsh Writing



itself but they actually know you as well.” That was one of the things that appealed to him most strongly: there was a feeling that the writer here had a community, a background. (Coe 2004: 288)


in English can therefore be seen as a separate literary tradition to mainstream English literature, influenced by the Welsh language past, and Johnson sees this as a source of immense strength. Importantly, Johnson links this notion of a long tradition to the political situation, seeing Wales as the scene of many centuries of resistance against imperialism—the Act of Union was signed in 1536, but the conquest of the nation is often dated to the killing of Llywelyn the Last in 1282. Johnson applies this notion of colonial resistance to a wider global framework: are you certain you know from which direction the enemy now comes? Can you in turn understand that how you feel about the bastard English I feel about the Americans? For perhaps our time has come to start the resistance, learn how to survive, burrow in, prepare for the long siege! (1972: 53) Johnson therefore suggests that Welsh resistance to English domination can be used as a model for resisting modern day US neo-imperialism (a concept still highly relevant in the 21st century), placing the Welsh experience at the centre of world politics. Wales is not peripheral, but a place where a conflict with a far deeper resonance is still being fought everyday through culture and language, and where modern literature is a powerful example of this process. Welsh Writing in English therefore has a deeper significance, and becomes a way of reconsidering the cold war and global politics afresh. These themes can also be seen in Johnson’s translations, in collaboration with Ned Thomas, of a number of poems by the 20th-century Welsh language poet Gwenallt. Thomas, writer of the hugely influential book The Welsh Extremist (see 1991), and editor of Planet, can be seen to represent the new breed of highly radicalised left wing nationalists who came to prominence in the 1960s, and drew inspiration from the Welsh language. Jonathan Coe, in Like a Fiery Elephant, describes the lengths to which Johnson went to pay tribute to Gwenallt: On the sitting room wall downstairs, he had hung a portrait of the great Welsh poet David James Jones (‘Gwenallt’), whom he had come to revere for his pacifism, socialism and commitment to the Welsh



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In a footnote on the same page, Coe notes that In the last years of his life, Johnson was working on a series of translations of Gwenallt’s poems, in collaboration with Ned Thomas, editor of Planet. At least five poems were translated: none was published. (2004: 321) This is not quite correct; in fact, eight poems translated by Johnson and Thomas appeared in Planet following Johnson’s death, and Thomas’s preface states that others were in progress but incomplete at the time of Johnson’s suicide. These translations demonstrate both a willingness to engage with Welsh language culture and, arguably, a desire to work within a different literary tradition. Gwenallt was the bardic name of David James Jones, who was born in 1899 in the village of Alltwen (from which he derived the name Gwenallt), near Pontardawe in the Swansea Valley, a heavily industrialised area, but still also rural, area of south Wales. His poetry is marked both by religious themes, and also what D. Densil Morgan refers to as ‘searingly realistic descriptions of modern industrial Wales’ (2000:47). Gwenallt’s poems are indivisible from their political, social and cultural background in industrial working class south Wales, and this includes the Welsh language in which they are written. He could be described as a Marxist Christian Nationalist, an uncompromising position that combined commitments to God, to his class, and to his nation. He was an undeniably political poet, and one absolutely associated with a specific working class community. In his introduction to The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry John Rowlands argues that a new spirit entered Welsh poetry after the First World War, rejecting 19th-century lyricism: Gwenallt is the poet who best exemplifies the new spirit. His roots were in rural Carmarthenshire, but he was brought up in the industrial Swansea Valley, and was a committed socialist of the Marxist variety during his youth. He stood as a conscientious objector during the First World War, and he was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs and Dartmoor. But his militant socialism became gradually translated



nationalist cause. In a subsequent note he would write of his mother’s last summer in that sitting room, with the ‘accused, painracked face of Gwenallt looking down on her’. (2004: 321)


into an ironic Christian nationalism. His mature religious poems are sharp and acerbic, and he finds a place for the ‘fist of Karl Marx’ in the Christian church. As for his poems about Wales, they lash out with harsh vehemence, and have nothing of the idyllic idealisation which earlier lyricists were prone to.’ (Rowlands 2003: 20–1) So Gwenallt reacts against earlier Welsh tradition to reflect his own anger and realities of 20th-century Wales, utilising anger and outrage to protest at social conditions. In this context, it is easy to see how Johnson may have been attracted to Gwenallt’s work, and many comparisons can be drawn between Johnson’s aims as a writer and what Gwenallt came to represent. For the new writers of the 1960s, Gwenallt was a revered figure—both Meic Stephens and Harri Webb wrote elegies on his death—and in this sense Johnson is following the lead of his Welsh contemporaries. The first of the translated poems is entitled, in the original ‘Y Meirwon’, and rendered into English as ‘The Dead’: When a man is past fifty he can see fairly clearly The people and background that gave his life its shapes And the steel cables that bind me closest to them now Are two cemeteries of a village in the south: and their graves As we rode on scrap bicycles stolen from the tip And used pigs’ bladders to play rugby for Wales I never dreamed I should learn how two of these friends Had retched up their grimy-red lungs into buckets. They were neighbours of ours, a family from Merthyr Tydfil, And the nickname we had for them was ‘The Martyrs’. The cough of five in turn of them shot over the garden hedge, Breaking off our conversation and shadowing our friendliness. We would slip into the bibled front parlours to stare In the coffin at charcoal-flesh, on the ashes of a voice; Above lids screwed down before their time we learnt The collects of red rebellion and the litanies of violence. It was not the natural death that walks like a warder And warns of his coming by the clanking of his clammy keys,



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Death hootering: death dusty, smoky, drunken; Death that has a blue flashpoint as its terrible source: Pit explosions and floods would sometimes turn us into savages, Fighting with catastrophic, primitive, evil powers. The wives: dumbly courageous, gripping a fistful of bloodmoney, And with a bucketful of death to remember for the rest of their lives; Fetching coal, splitting firewood, tending the garden And more frequently reading the tale of the agony on the cross. Upon their graves Palm Sunday I would lay the weight Of lilies (paler than gas) and silicotic roses, And I would repeat the funeral curses and blasphemies There among the premature and unweathered stones. They have all gone from the summit of Gellionen: Utopia, Abstract humanity, a world classless borderless; And today nothing remains in the slag of my memory But family, neighbourhood, man’s suffering and sacrifice. (Johnson & Thomas 1975: 20) This is in many ways a terrifying poem, which is unsentimental in its depictions of the brutalities of working class life during the 1930s. Combining Christian imagery with unashamed politics, Gwenallt created a hugely powerful style built out of anger and social protest; the attraction to Johnson seems clear. The connection of the poem to a specific community is vital, and can be seen as an important aspect of much Welsh literature. Harri Webb said of the new poets of the 1960s that ‘. . . they are involved, in anger and pity, with their community and environment; most of them have come to terms with nationalism . . . . They are thus fulfilling the function that our Welsh society has decreed for its poets from the earliest times.’ (1998: 72) Where in ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ Johnson merely reflects on such an idea, by translating such as Gwenallt into English Johnson can be seen as attempting to change and affect the English literary tradition, in a way which could be seen as genuinely radical. In an English context where romantic individualism perhaps dominates, he is attempting to fashion a new form of radicalised, socially connected English poetry. As Writer in Residence at Gregynog,



But the industrial leopard that slyly and suddenly leaps From fire and water on to men bent at their labours.


Johnson could have seen himself as the bard of a small, closed community, acting out this very notion. ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ makes clear that his time in Wales affected his own writing; these translations are one aspect of this, and it is perhaps possible to see Johnson’s later work as explicitly socially and politically connected in a way his earlier novels were not. Interestingly, Gregynog itself makes an appearance in the Sioned Bowen section of House Mother Normal, in which the character recalls her time as a servant in a house that incorporates aspects both of the history of the house (the two Davies sisters) and its physical appearance: walking from the village with Megan Williams along the galloping drive, miles of rhododendrons, suddenly you could see a top corner of the house, black-and-white, but big, bigger than any other black-and-white I’d seen, though when you were nearer you could see it wasn’t wood, it was a blackand-white pattern in plaster or something like that but it was a lovely house, I forgave it that cheating. (HMN 125–6) This can be read as a comment directed from Johnson straight to the reader asking to them to forgive him for the ‘cheating’ of creating an elaborate work of fiction, the literary equivalent of a mock-tudor mansion, as well as a comment on modernist architecture. However, it also Johnson, insistent on truth, combining autobiographical information into his fictional narrative to comment on his own Welsh experiences, and on the political situation he witnessed there: Mr David worked in the Small Library. I would take coffee to him, with biscuits on a tray from the still-room or the kitchen He would speak to me in Welsh, which I did not usually use among the other servants . . . (HMN 127) Again, this can be read as autobiography, as Jonathan Coe states that Johnson in fact worked on House Mother Normal in this library. Surprisingly, for all of Sioned’s assertion that she despised being a servant, class struggle in the piece is not straightforward; indeed, Johnson moves



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sometimes he liked to talk to me, made me feel proud of being Welsh the other servants were all trying to ape being English, there was very little Welsh spoken in the kitchen The Factor hated to hear Welsh spoken, he swore and bullied us if he heard us. (HMN 127) The Factor, a fellow servant, shows no solidarity of any kind, treating the servants harshly and, we learn elsewhere, stealing from his employers. Mr. David, on the other hand, treats Sioned with kindness, acknowledging their shared Welshness, suggesting nationality as stronger than class consciousness. This passage demonstrates Johnson’s growing sympathy for Welsh nationalism, and again demonstrates the role of culture and language in the workings of imperialism. This is a theme made even more explicit in the later monologue of Rosetta Stanton, which is primarily in the Welsh language. Rosetta Stanton’s failing mind is perhaps analogous to Johnson’s own level of competence in Welsh; each are unable to move beyond a level of linguistic simplicity, and this explains why Johnson makes this Welshthinking character the most senile mind in a book populated by characters suffering from senility. The chapter contains 61 Welsh words, many of which have positive, or indeed religious, associations. However, they appear not to be connected to what is happening around the character, and looking at their location on the page in relation to events revealed by other monologues (each line of text representing a specific period of time) yields nothing but random and arbitrary results. They also embody an elaborate in-joke, with the initial letters of the Welsh words spelling out a series of names, starting with Glyn Tegai Hughes, then warden of Gregynog, before moving on to members of his family. This again suggests the arbitrary nature of the chapter, with the words selected to fit a pre-arranged pattern, rather than being related to the rest of the book. Therefore, Rosetta Stanton is in her world, thinking, although not very lucidly, in her own language, for the most part oblivious of her surroundings except for one final moment of self-awareness. Responding to Ivy Nicholls’s rhetorical ‘Don’t get any lighter, do you, Mrs. Stanton?’,



beyond class to consider nationalism, as seen in his sympathetic portrait of Mr. David:


as she is being pushed in her wheelchair, she lurches into a suddenly semi-lucid expression of utter despair dramatically scattered across the page: ‘No, I do not get any lighter Ivy, I intend not to get anything anymore no mor’ (HMN 176). Despite thinking previously in Welsh, suggesting that this is her preferred and natural language, she changes to English in response to Ivy’s comment; forced to live, like Sioned Bowen, in a non-Welsh speaking environment. This may be the moment of the character’s death; while House Mother is performing her final entertainment for the residents, she remarks that they are ‘All watching, except Mrs. Stanton, asleep or dead – does it matter?’ (HMN 202). Rosetta Stanton therefore dies in a language that is not her own, suffering cultural dislocation right up until her final breath, the destruction of the Welsh language and culture by imperialism embodied in the neglected end of a mentally and physically decaying woman. However, the final truncated word ‘more’—‘mor’—can suggest an incomplete English world, left unfinished by death, the character in fact being no more, but ‘mor’ is it itself a Welsh word, used as an intensifier like the English word ‘so’, or to express two quantities being equal. It is possible to suggest that Mrs. Stanton is finally able to return to her own language at the moment of death. In this way, the chapter is one of Johnson’s most fascinating and subtle reactions to his Welsh experiences, and Johnson is able to embody within House Mother Normal the political concerns, and the themes of colonialism and post-colonialism, which he saw in modern Welsh writing. In conclusion, therefore, this novel, as well as ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ and Johnson’s translations from Gwenallt, demonstrates precisely what he viewed to be the ‘marvellous material’ available to Welsh writers, and shows how Johnson’s engagement with Welsh culture affected his literary output. While Johnson remained an outsider looking in, slightly unsure of his position, he can be viewed as an honorary Anglo-Welsh writer; one who reflected on the issues facing modern day Wales and was deeply influenced by Welsh culture. By combining the sense of a longstanding tradition with his own distrust with conventional literary forms, Johnson came close to creating a hybrid style of his own, which avoided what he saw as the overly conventional nature of Welsh literature, but still reflected on the same powerful themes. Inspired by the radical politics of the time, post-war Wales demonstrated to Johnson a particular form of political writing and an ability to reflect on and use earlier literature in a manner that was aesthetically acceptable to him; in this way, Wales had a profound impact on his work.



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Abse, Dannie (ed.) (1997) Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry, Bridgend: Seren. Bohata, Kirsti (2004) Postcolonialism Revisited, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Coe, Jonathan (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Conran, Tony (ed.) (1967) The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, London: Penguin. Davies, D. Hywel (1993) The Welsh Nationalist Party 1925–45: A Call to Nationhood, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Johnson, B. S. (1971) ‘Letter’ in Poetry Wales, 7(3): 36. ——— (1972) ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ ‘Living in Wales 3’, Planet, 10: 47–54. Johnson, B. S. & Thomas, Ned (1975) ‘Gwenallt: Nine Poems’, Planet, 29: 19–25. Morgan, D. Densil (2000) ‘Gwenallt: Poet of Flesh and Spirit’ in Donald Allchin, D. Densil Morgan & Patrick Thomas, Sensuous Glory: The Poetic Vision of D. Gwenallt Jones, Norwich: The Canterbury Press. Rowlands, John & Elfyn, Menna (eds) (2003) The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thomas, Ned (1991) The Welsh Extremist, Talybont: Y Lolfa. Webb, Harri (1998) A Militant Muse: Selected Literary Journalism, Meic Stephens (ed.), Bridgend: Seren.



Works cited

Philip Tew Johnson charts aspects of post-colonial experience in ordinary life at the colonial centre in Albert Angelo (1964), and he offers a critique of colonial language and its ideological processes in See the Old Lady Decently (1975). In both novels he seems attuned to recognising and critiquing the power and hegemony of the imperial/colonial narrative and its collapse, offering no trace of nostalgia for the lost bourgeois stability of imperialism that, to some degree, permeates even supposedly radical novelists touching upon similar contexts or cultural motifs, often marking the co-ordinates of a novelistic bourgeois self-identification both familiar and repulsive to Johnson. In Homi K. Bhabha’s terms, expressed in The Location of Culture (1994), understanding post-coloniality means recognising hybridity as ‘intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary – the very act of going beyond – are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the “present” which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced’ (4). This is a position reminiscent of Bhabha’s sense of the interstices as ‘an expanded and ex-centric site of experience and empowerment’ (4). Albert Angelo charts the experience of the eponymous protagonist through a period of personal trauma thematically stressing conflict and the vicissitudes of inner-city, multi-ethnic life, particularly the microcosm of the school environment. In the ‘Prologue’ Albert is moving into North London accommodation, sharing the world of young male lodgers. The section’s dramatic layout—with an intersecting verbal refrain concerning the mundane and domestic— emphasises the multiplicity of voices, and their overlapping versions of the real. Albert has replaced a former tenant, Graham, who does not appear, but emerges as one of many marginalised presences after 202 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Otherness, Post-Coloniality and Pedagogy in B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo (1964) and See the Old Lady Decently (1975)

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Joseph said: Cocoa needs cooking in a saucepan. Luke said: Don’t be comic. Albert said: They put hormones and silicones or stormcones or something in it now so’s it’ll mix easily in the mug. Joseph said: Whose cocoa is it, then?. . . Luke said: Did you know Graham then? Albert said: Oh, yes, I knew Graham. Well. Joseph said: Graham once called me a pathetic pseudodisciple of Them. (AA 11) Although this scripted exchange is short, a picture emerges of Graham with his ‘strange’ music, ‘prayers with beads’ (12), establishing what was an alien presence for his fellow tenants, so much so that Albert assures them of his own neutrality. The remaining tenants’ version of Graham’s cultural practice is narrated as odd and different, an unassimilable if tolerated alterity, although the question of his ethnicity or origin is skirted and left unstated. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty says in Sense and Non-Sense (1964): ‘Language must surround each speaking subject, like an instrument with its own inertia, its own demands, constraints, and internal logic, and must nevertheless remain open to the initiatives of the subject’ (87). With Albert’s arrival the others establish certain social and linguistic codes, judging Graham in his absence. Curiously Albert appropriates the physical residue of his presence in an act of symbolic consumption. ‘Albert said: I’ll cook while you sustain us, then. I think Graham’s left some odds and ends’ (11). If one scrutinises the casual exchange in detail, some major themes and motifs underlie its comic inconsequentiality. This odd preamble creates the first in a series of patterns of a repetition of key themes in the most quotidian and apparently uninspiring minutiae of everyday life. One can recover a number of elements: the question of the classic colonial product—cocoa—and its ownership; the advanced scientific and industrial process and its intervention into the natural realm; the issue of cultural and ideological conformity; the immediacy of normative structures even (or particularly in) the domestic realm to which Albert adheres immediately; and, a partial suggestion of Graham’s accusation of Joseph’s



his political credentials have been indicated in these opening exchanges:

Otherness, Post-Coloniality and Pedagogy

conformity to an ideological process alongside Albert’s invocation of art by his punning reference to Hamlet’s Yorick speech. Johnson’s nuances are so subtle and sedimented that the drawing out of any particular signification is prone to the objection of any such reading being an overdetermination. How could one read so much into the simple mention of cocoa? I contend only a close reading of the myriad elements of his novels and an open account of their overall effect can do full justice to his literary practice. Johnson creates textually what Paolo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), describes as a critical consciousness or conscientização. The novel itself in its narrative style in both reflective and descriptive sections analyses the significance of particular words, not merely in a verbal sense, but evoking a social context as elaborating meaning itself. Johnson indicates an awareness of the potential density of signification of apparently neutral terms and events and the perpetual incompletion of that process. In its interstices lies a process of ideological socialisation that can be reconstituted, for as Freire insists ‘Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men, but men in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it’ (69). Johnson here seems close to Merleau-Ponty’s contention that linguistically ‘we are condemned to meaning’ (xvi). In this initial dramatised exchange, Johnson foregrounds in the passage’s manner of presentation a demonstration of how a collaborative community of discourse works in miniature. It is precisely geographically and culturally centred, preceding Johnson’s description of the environment of Percy Circus with its pre-Victorian architectural markers of an Imperial Age of which this group of fellow residents are the somewhat down-at-heel inheritors. Albert exhibits reclusive tendencies and remains indifferent to his upstairs neighbours in the lodging house, excluding them as other, negating their specificity: ‘He heard the toings and froings, but did not worry himself with identities. It was enough, for Albert, to know that someone lived upstairs’ (15). Given his own reassurances to his fellow lodgers over his future behaviour, Albert must recognise at least instinctively that a negative cultural semiotics is in practice, a process Johnson makes clear later when establishing and acknowledging encounters with pupils from the social and geographic margins as established by the ‘pathetic pseudo-disciple[s] of Them’ which can be taken to refer to the kinds of hegemonic nature of authority of which colonial ideology was a central dynamic. Subtly, in his creation of otherness, of separation from his community, Johnson implicates Albert in one such hegemonic structure despite his character’s apparent liberal tendencies.



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The interplay of these elements create much (although not all) of the tensions of the novel that underpin its narrative. The world created cannot satisfy the hollowness of its stated centralities, but in Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994,) describes such conditions in a different context which ‘represents a hybridity, a difference “within”, a subject that inhabits the rim of an “in-between” reality. And the inscription of this borderline existence inhabits a stillness of time and a strangeness of framing that creates the discursive “image” . . .’ (13). Despite his apparent qualifications as an architect—a complex issue in terms of this detail’s later significance in the text [see Phillips in this volume]—Albert works in inner city schools as a supply teacher and at night trawls through the city with friend Terry. Significantly both are suffering intensely from a period of post-relationship angst that creates a kind of male camaraderie. Superficially, although these might appear angry young (white) men figures, more is going on in Johnson’s text. They create and establish the potentially threatening alterity of women, but in their nocturnal meandering they face the diasporic realities of another form of alterity, the nocturnal colonial presence in the underprivileged quarters of London, Cypriots, West Indians and Africans in particular. The technical complexity of the novel form renders more than a naturalistic account or a notion of liberal intervention. Its interrogative structure suggests a broader intersection with these everyday realities of urban existence. London is narrowed to the mundane consciousness of individual intersubjectivity rather than any grand narrative. The narrative of Albert Angelo is highly experimental in form and its most famous feature—for which the author is both remembered and dismissed—is Johnson’s breaking the frame of the literary device, fragmenting the separation of narrative and real-life identifications with ‘an almighty aposiopesis’ (167) using the explosive phrase, ‘OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING!’ (163). This interjection is followed by a ranting confession of authorial intention. Through this shock Johnson can represent a critical awareness. As Bhabha says, ‘The image is only ever an appurtenance to authority and identity; it must never be read mimetically as the appearance of reality. The access to the image of identity is only ever possible in the negation of any sense of originality or plentitude . . .’ (51). Subsequently in the novel, Johnson admits that Albert has been a device for representing himself and that the architectural profession was similarly an ‘objective correlative’ for poetry and the need for the poet to work outside of his commitment to art, pointing out that ‘this device you cannot have failed to see creaking, ill-fitting at many places, many places, for architects manqués can earn livings very nearly connected



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with their art, and no poet has ever lived by his poetry, and architecture has a functional aspect quite lacking in poetry, and simply, architecture is just not poetry’ (168). Having established that the characterisation and the paradigm of creating other identities are imperfect and the saying of things obliquely prone to error and failure, what remains in the novel is the social context and the ideological basis of human interaction which Johnson observes closely. His dismissal of his failed parallels indicates an irritation with being concerned about the notion of the artist being committed to art for its own sake, when what is significant is people being forced by labour and capital requirements to conform. This is a general condition highlighted by the artistic struggle within its political reality. Once he has abandoned the characterised mediation of Albert’s identity, Johnson uses the revelation as an opportunity to hector his reader as if engaging in a one-sided ideological harangue with the intellectually resistant: —–So it’s nothing to you that I am rabbeting on about being a poet and having to earn a living in other ways: but what about your own sector of the human condition then? Eh? Eh? Eh eh eh! —–It is about frustration. —–The poetry comes from the suffering. (AA 169) The author figure’s bullying manner mirrors childlike behaviour and school conditions, imposing a will inferentially upon the reader. However, additionally its hectoring masculinity serves as a parody of the fundamental infantilising underlying the imposition of colonial relationships. The aposiopesis itself as an extreme aesthetic act is well-noted by critics, but the novel’s broader contexts and range of elaborations of ideological motifs passes unnoticed in the main. The break in the fiction is taken as an act of critical apoplexy or frustration, and the nuancing of world conditions that has led to this rupture have been effaced or made marginal. The condition of being within social contexts is both structurally and thematically foregrounded so that Johnson’s novels balance the personal reflection with a sociological account of urban living. Far less commented upon than the almost infamous aposiopesis is the plural, conflictual and transitive society in which Johnson locates his characters of various origins and cultures. From recounting his own working class West London origins in a quasi-Beckettian pastiche, failed architect Albert conveys impressionistically the trauma of imposing an authority as a supply teacher in which he cannot believe.



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In his classroom duties, Albert’s faces what appear to be practical difficulties in supply teaching and has to confront the conflictual normativity of a classic inner-city London school setting, with adolescents between cultures. In describing the problems to a friend he opines his fate and negates the romanticism of ethnic presence and doubts the veracity of E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir With Love (1959): I told you the sods pinched my pen a couple of weeks ago? I was reading this novel recently about a teacher in the east end who won over the kids by love and kindness, morality and honesty, against tremendous odds—talk about sentiment and wish-fulfilment! I can just see my lot coming up to me at the end of term with a present— or even my pen back—addressed to sir, with their love! These things just don’t mean anything to these kids in this school: that’s what so frightening, and I’ve not been frightened in a school before. Not frightened by their violence, though that’s bad enough, but just by these unknown forces of character. (130) Subtending the critique of Johnson’s world is both his recognition and avowal of the cycle of violence and his indication of the bourgeois complicity in maintaining this pattern, a framework from which that class profits. In his engagement with the reality of playground violence, of immigrant cultural self-identification and as he says in Albert Angelo with ‘the enormous detail, vitality, size, of this complexity, of life [. . .]’ (170), Johnson’s literary critique of the transitions within colonial and post-colonial contexts can be said to represent an understanding of the marginal and yet to posit a positive element expressed in the term post-coloniality, a social and ideological space that can convey both a critical awareness of those imperial/colonial structures and their continuing significance in social relations, identity formation and the consequent potential for radicalising critical interventions. Another obstacle to his teaching is the requirement to integrate four Greek Cypriot children into his classes who have no English language skills. His response is to ‘Give them games to play in the formal lessons, books to look at, and personal coaching, ha, and try to give as many lessons as possible that do not involve reading or writing without depriving the other children. Like painting’ (33). The protagonist calls the register in real time, displayed in double columns with though-responses italicised alongside the curt, realistic exchanges allows Johnson to mark this process of naming and response, the cultural location and preference



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within which the teacher is implicated. In this scene Johnson conveys a dialectical interplay that Freire summarises when the latter says, ‘The word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must seek its constitutive elements. Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed—even in part—the other immediately suffers’ (75). “Eray Mustapha.” “Yes, sir.” “Eray? Which one’s Eray? Can you understand any more English, Eray?” “Yes, sir.” Accent like any other North Londoner’s. Must have been born here. “Good. John Nash.” John Nash and Regent Street and the Quadrant and All Souls’ and the Prince Regent and the Haymarket Theatre and bits of Buckingham Palace, you think, John Nash. “Yes, sir.” “Andreas Neo . . . Neophytos.” “Yes, sir.” (AA 36) Albert’s commentary set beside the verbalisation implies several crucial responses: the acknowledgement of language as the prime factor in subjugation, the cultural density of environment and history and, in Albert’s final hesitation and uncertainty, he divides the literal approval, the marking of presence of the pupil and so his ability to redeem their presence. Johnson, by this juxtaposition on the graphic surface of the page and the novel’s architectural motif, demonstrates the inscription of power upon a culture, the appropriation of naming by royal and privileged discourses, the hegemony of the familiar, and the barriers to inter-penetration that culture and authority create. The architectural reminders of the imperial expansion and its profits are overlaid onto his consciousness and that of his value system. The primary conflict is between Albert as an albeit-unwilling agent of those cultural forces and the children themselves. These disruptions and subjugations are the central characteristics of the novel against which Albert charts



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A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. (1970: 57) This is true of all Albert’s attempts to interest and involve his students. Furthermore, it is the disruption of the practices and conformities of the narrative practice that motivates all of the pupils of this urban and anarchic environment. The fact of this very disturbance might suggest itself as a radical act but, as Freire explains, disruption that appropriates the violence by which the oppressed have been subjugated fails to transcend the dynamics of that ideological curtailment. Hence certain dominant pupils ape military drill and threatening behaviour as a bonding of their own. This provides the irony of Johnson’s novel given the good intentions with which Albert begins, and the violence in which all agents are implicated by the end. Despite the divisions created in his and the reader’s mind in the act of registering the class, some of the boys cohere and form a matrix of resistance and appropriation of function and purpose. In his painting class where in his role as the teacher Albert assumes authority and sketches an exemplary piece with ‘a Doric portico flanked by colonnades’ (38), the children’s instinctive resistance and subversion of language imposition by the synthesis of the visual and vernacular amuses Albert, a response he has to suppress as the extension of structure and power: A group of boys. They quickly split up, and one tries to hide a painting as they see you noticing. You walk slowly and demand the painting. In the foreground are hardly identifiable animals with television aerials on their heads, yoked to a sleigh. Underneath each is a series of brown splodges, and, leaving no room for dubeity as to what was represented, an arrow and the word shit. You conceal your amusement with difficulty, confiscate the drawing for your collection, and stand the boys out in the front facing the board. (AA 38)



the potential for collective, plural dimensions. In one sense Albert is doomed to failure and he cannot move beyond the structured domain of the educative process. As Freire reflects:


Albert’s artistic reflection of classicism is defied by the boys’ more atavistic, expressive art. The confiscation and ordering by Albert as the authority figure make clear that the symbolic sphere and the re-appropriation of language forms by sub-groups has to be marginalised and resisted. Nevertheless responding to the headmaster’s correction of table manners Albert reflects: ‘These children and their manners are the product of their environment, and therefore suit that environment. You are not sure enough of your own standards to take the responsibility of imposing them on these children for whom they would probably be quite inappropriate’ (40). Albert’s contradictions delineate the ground of his growing awareness, the limitations he feels as to transforming his responses and the limitations of transcending them that come up against his own prejudice and incomprehension: ‘You set the rest of your class to read, and have the Cypriots out as a group. Eray Mustapha, whom you had hoped to use as an interpreter, you find speaks Turkish and can no more communicate with the Greeks than you can’ (44). Experientially the narrative can be understood as exemplifying a process that can reconstitute how the social order is established and maintained, as described by Merleau-Ponty; The basic task of phenomenology is to overcome this ‘préjugé du monde’ by describing the way experience develops, uncovering the steps by which perception hides its activity of organization [. . .] Phenomenology, then, is not simply the study of how objects appear to common sense but is a description of the way objects arise. [. . .] Our experience is always meaningful yet always menaced by disorder and non-sense. (1964: xiii) The mood of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis can serve to summarise the basis of thought that underlies Albert’s educational experiences serve to uncover the hidden meanings underlying the social practice of the school, and through a close phenomenological reading perceptive reader can recover the complexities of Johnson’s novels. The school management is indifferent to, if not antagonistic towards, Albert’s queries as to what special provision has been made for the pupils who have no access to the English language. Johnson in the character of Albert, despite the protagonist’s polemical indignation, does not seek to mediate these realities by any raising of the contingency of resources and limitations of local, intermediary authority that are the key ideological issues. Nevertheless in contrast to Albert, whatever his obvious limitations, managerial indifference is telling. Johnson’s thematics of the response to these migrants is complex and elusive without a charting of



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the quotidian detail. As the plot advances both Albert’s liberal concern and his fatigue at drawing on a limited vocabulary of classical Greek in his attempt to help these pupils is brought to an end and negated by his transfer to another school. Power lies beyond his intercession, and yet Johnson chooses to continue this social reality in a manner that implicates Albert in non-comprehension of his own. In a subsequent school with a predominance of Afro-Caribbean’s he comments of his pupils that they are ‘Blacker than you would think possible, starred by teeth white as the weathered western face of Portland stone, eyes brown as brazil nuts.’ (45) He teaches in a classroom with ‘A lean budgerigar in a rusting cage making untimely interruptions’ (45). By the very paucity and clichéd nature of Albert’s metaphoric comparisons, Johnson highlights the protagonist’s unfamiliarity with such figures and the very western range of co-ordinates that create both his aesthetic and everyday understanding. The boys are objectified, appropriated to natural elements of a pre-rational presence, a move that serves as a reductive ratio of understanding for their blackness, their otherness, a familiarising process that has an implicit trope of western, Eurocentric placement. The budgerigar reminds one comically of the piracy involved in the colonial process, both as an imported product of that process that domesticises the exotic, and as an ersatz, scaled-down version of the filmic convention of a parrot and pirate. Its comments both mock and subvert Albert’s assumption of authority. In the unruliness of the classroom the apparently liberal Albert reverts to a violence that depresses him, but he reflects: ‘You feel guilty, but suppress the feelings’ (46). The emotional and intersubjective response is subordinated, nevertheless ‘Even when you try to entertain you evoke little response from the boys. Yet you like them. You hate yourself’ (46). What is difficult to explain or identify critically about such details of observation of the budgerigar is the range of humour such detail adds to the interplay of narrative and ideological signification. There is a poignancy inherent in this collective disempowerment and thrusting to the margins of practicability Albert’s compassion and authentic engagement. Albert moves on yet again, in this recursive round of new environments, empathy, disillusionment and hostility. He enacts the limitations of liberal concern and perception. After two days Albert’s sense of psychic rootlessness recurs when he is sent to his third school in a week off Holloway Road, in a run-down North London where ‘The five- and six-storey schools in this part stand above the three-storey streets like chaotic castellations’ (47). His powerlessness and part in ‘trying to help to teach to take places in a society you do not believe in, in which their values prevail rather than yours. Most will be wives and husbands, some will be whores and ponces: it’s



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all the same; any who think will be unhappy . . .’ (47). Conventional roles, patterned hegemonic behaviour and the limitation of its subversion are key to Johnson and Albert’s notion and thematising of power structures. The school and its educative process like the castle of the image Johnson uses symbolise itself as a paradigm of modernity and the colonial urge. After the weekend break he talks of religion, the human condition and ‘How can you think that God is good when you learn in History lessons about terrible wars which have killed thousands of people, and made thousands more, and even millions more, suffer?’ (55). After this extended initiation into the inner-city school system, the narrative follows Albert on his nocturnal, meandering that chart the new subterranean city as if to ironically negate the Victorian philanthropic charting of the under-classes. From all-night cafés in Cable Street that evoke the stand against fascism and where ‘There must be cafés for ten or a dozen nationalities—Maltese, West Indians, Somalis, West Africans, Turkish and Greek Cypriots, and so on. . . .’ (51). In contrast to Albert’s feelings of commonality the children describe their lives in terms of racial prejudice and violence in ill-written essays incorporated in the narrative but which culminate in the violence of the teacher figure. Ironically in an atmosphere of growing conflict, where a band of boys from different cultures who call themselves the Corps drill militaristically, Albert re-enacts this descent into control and victimising others by adopting violence himself, adding to an ongoing spiral of subjection and objectification. In the representation of a staff-room debate between Albert and Miss Crossthwaite, another teacher whom he desires, the verbal exchange is marked by the cartographic crossed-swords symbol for a battle the idea of lines drawn and entrenched conflict supersedes all other senses of differentiation. The control of the past and history is essential in this process of domination since as Albert ruminates: The past of a man’s life could always be controlled in this way, be seen to have a fixed order because it was passed, had passed: almost always, that is, for when it could not be controlled then madness was not far away. When something was passed, it was fixed, one could come to terms with it; always the process of imposing the pattern, of holding back the chaos’. (AA 133) Significantly, in Albert Angelo the protagonist is not the author; Albert is not Johnson per se despite the dissolution or suspension of the narrative and the emergence of an author figure from the wings. There is a subtle



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distance—perhaps most clearly in narrative exposition of his flaws—of Albert from Johnson. In terms of the migrants he encounters Albert’s irritations are general social ones, but there is an undercurrent of authorised response despite his liberalism. Of his pupils’ unruliness he complains: ‘You have to establish your own set of rules, let alone your own obedience of those rules, your own discipline. Which takes all the time and an incredible amount of nervous energy. It’s like I’m working at the frontier of civilization all the time’ (AA 132). It is clear that Albert is part of the social process engaged in establishing a hegemony that absorbs all cultures and identities, a process explored far more comprehensively is Johnson’s last novel. In See the Old Lady Decently Johnson returns to this dialectic of chaos versus control and applies it beyond the individual to demonstrate how erasure and effacement shape larger cultural and social processes through colonial discourse. The novel is formally complex and perhaps his most experimental in form. It depends upon an elaborate organising principle, one that defers and reconfigures narrative. Johnson brings together a series of fragmentary elements using a both random and erratic schema with different periods and themes represented by different kinds of lettering as keys. The content of the various sections is wide ranging: he reflects on the process of attempting to write, the central narrative of recovering his deceased mother’s life, but there are some striking sections that chart the creation of a narrative of Empire and power that he fragments and undermines, literally. Using the fact of the First World War he attacks the process of order and domination, but the insidious power of colonial narrative is engaged with through his Broader Britain (BB) sections. These appear to be Imperial narratives reflecting places and environments under Imperial rule. However, Johnson fillets them, removing both place names and whole sections of sentences, making the narratives oddly formal and incomplete. From what should or might suggest itself as nonsense, the hegemonic qualities and assumptions of superiority of cultural voice come through, vaguely absurd, yet threatening. In ‘BB4’: The largest of the geysers a native close to riddled with thermal of various cook your in one, take a delicious in and be scalded to in the third throws up its column of steaming from a cone of siliceous all about seethes and hisses under your head foremost into a mud-hole or boiling if you in the vicinity you feel the rising from the ground your finger beneath feels hot enough to boil and



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they even bury their dead in a life of ease and luxury on the income derived from Government rents this marvellous land from the natives and a fixed scale of charges for showing has been drawn. (STOLD 61) The foreign, the other, becomes objectified by the passage as a site of wonderment and strangeness. The Eurocentric eye and voice creates cultural and literal capital; it appropriates the scene, its signification and literally possesses both the land and the experience despite its clearly incomplete and partial nature reflected in the style and structure of the passage itself. The more impressionistic and fragmentary, the more dismissive of otherness the voice becomes: Perhaps the most situated town in all the, how is it that it is clearly not further? It is due to the mixture of. They are lethargic and unprogressive. The descendants of slaves brought by the are without energy and leave as much work as possible to be done by the women. (STOLD 62) By not naming in specific terms, by his lacunae and imprecision Johnson conveys the effectiveness of the male discourse of colonialism, its resistance and adaptability and its contempt for variation. As Michael Bakewell explains in his untitled ‘Introduction’ to the novel ‘The GB and BB bits are intended to involve the reader – he has to supply information himself – what he knows of the Empire’ (10), and makes clear Johnson’s disapproval of these ideological and historical influences. The excisions serve much like the disruptions within the type of post-colonial poetry described by Bhabha and categorised through its effect on the reader that could be equally applied to Johnson’s novel: ‘That disturbance of your voyeuristic look enacts the complexity and contradictions of your desire to see, to fix cultural difference in a containable, visible object. The desire for the Other is doubled by the desire in language, which splits the difference between Self and Other so that both positions are partial; neither is sufficient unto itself’ (Bhabha 1994: 50). Johnson’s disturbance foregrounds by a strategem of invisibility that makes evident the inadequacy of the partiality that centred egocentric, traditional colonial narrative. This is offset by a reminder of its previous efficaciousness, the concrete historical oppressions effected by a verbal ideological intervention.



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See The Old Lady uses its different contexts to demonstrate how much, or how little, colonial structures impinge upon people’s lives, especially of the working classes. In Johnson’s mother’s case the unusual is absorbed as shocking in contrast with the quotidian. There is a notion within this teleological and historical placement of the change in experiences and in political structures. Johnson moves his scenes from those expressive of the traditional discourse of his mother’s time, with a focus on her own early experiences from school to work as a skivvy in a hotel where she is distressed at an encounter—‘There she saw her first black man, there he was, in the washing-up galley, his back to her, what fierce features he must have, she thought, a black man like one of those in the Glorious British Empire books we had at school!’ (18)—to that of his own ironic critique of the broader overview of the process in ‘BB1’: ‘Greater, ever greater, broader too, not Empire, not Imperial, but by linguistic extension part of ourselves, our Broader Britain’ (32). By withholding the names of specific sites of colonisation in the BB sections, implying that each could be one of many and that its real identity has been effaced by the process (as his mother’s given Christian name was altered by her wealthy employers), Johnson demonstrates the co-ordinates of linguistic and spatial patterning and appropriation: Was named in after by Governor, and laid out and the streets named at the same period. The streets are built at right angles to one another, and the principal thoroughfares are intersected by smaller streets bearing the name of the great thoroughfares with the prefix ‘Little’. On two hills. Along its course stand the chief clubs, insurance offices, banks, and the Town Hall. In eighteen there were thirteen buildings: three weatherboard, two slate, and eight turf huts. (STOLD 33–4) The anonymity suggests the replication of the ordering, the ideological core at the heart of the process itself. The aestheticisation and its traditions are neither immune to nor separate from this discourse. Johnson creates the image of responding to natural forces which are then coerced into the vision of value, worth and purpose by which nature is suborned: Generations of enthusiastic have left few expressions of admiration worth. Mankind is dumb before such a. Not only are words



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inadequate to, but is the last thing anyone thinks of turning the mind away to abstractions, to God and articulate expression, the roar of cannon too convincing to be inspiring, a feast for the senses and a source of dumb awe, always something besides a sublime. (STOLD 47) That the aesthetic can appeal to a supposed dumbness or quality of the sublime makes it suspect. As Freire says, ‘Self-sufficiency is incompatible with dialogue. Men who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world’ (79). Naming cannot be imposed since it ultimately must be continually recreated and depends upon collectivity rather than coercion. Moreover, as Freire insists ‘Dialogue requires an intense faith in man, faith in his power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in his vocation to be more fully human . . .’ (79). In every sense this is completely opposite to the dynamics that emerge in Johnson’s novel in terms of another nameless environment that is featured in lapsarian style ‘BB3’ where in spite of the lack of specificity and reference one senses the power to subvert faith both within the subjected themselves by denying faith in them as a categorical notion: Long since ceased to live according to their lawless fancy, placed under the charge of superintendents appointed by the authorities of the, amply supplied with all the modern machinery of education, nothing but their inherent incapacity prevents their attaining complete equality with the. But the disability exists, and all that the most philanthropic can hope for the natives is their gentle diminution, followed by their peaceful extinction. (STOLD 50–1) Johnson knows well how to convey the inhumanity of the imperial/ colonial processes, incorporating a critique or critical intervention similar to Freire’s comment of a class that refuses dialogue because it: ‘start[s] from the premise that naming the world is the task of an elite and that the presence of the people in history is a sign of deterioration, thus to be avoided . . .’ (1970: 78–9). By extracting the signifiers of any particularities, Johnson savages the generalising rhetoric of colonial destruction through its own assertive vocabulary and voice, its appeal to ‘Englishmen who had founded their idea of the upon the romances



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of and his followers . . .’ (STOLD 51), being a cultural dynamic and ideology. Colonialism is a world of claims such as ‘A successful experiment in culture was made in the Municipality, from English spawn. Four members of the House are Natives, attracted by Nicholson, as the fort used to be called . . .’ (STOLD 71). Both Johnson’s text and the historical realities from which it implicitly draws serve to determine quite how liminal the process of power can appear, powerful enough to articulate its threat without naming or detail or historical rootedness. Reality haunts the rational concept of things as an often unwritten, obscured form. The apparent collocation of the BB commentary becomes increasingly incoherent, its fragmentation showing the centrifugal quality of power, but implying the persistence through time of its effects. Power, ambition and oppression persist. The passages could be of any period, quaint in phraseology, destructive in effect and myopic. ‘BB7’ commences with typical Western colonial dismissiveness: ‘The natives are very low down in the scale of humanity, and yet they use a which has puzzled the wisest mathematicians of. The is not such a mysterious engine as the, but the skill with which they use it is astonishing. ’ (STOLD 81). Without the specifics together the BB sections imply the totalising quality of colonial discourse, the separation of cultural values from factuality. Imperial force and the colonial impulse constitute an ideological force that contains a cluster of effects and attitudes that are subversive of both legitimate meaning and freedom. Through his strategy in these sections Johnson demonstrates how the removal of content markers leaves the co-ordinates of a mediating structure which in some senses stands alone formally and ideologically as an incursive frame. Consider Jürgen Habermas’s comment in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity on the methodology for an effective critique of modernity that reveals the nature of its ideological processes, a ‘decentered understanding’ in an environment made apparent by the application of a critique of such ideology: Only when contexts of meaning and reality, when internal and external relationships have been unmixed, only when science, morality, and art are each specialized in one validity claim, when each follows its own respective logic and is cleansed of all cosmological, theological, and cultic dross – only then can the suspicion arise that the autonomy of validity claimed by a theory (whether empirical or normative) is an illusion because secret interests and power claims have crept into its pores. (1990: 115)



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If one reviews what Johnson has done to certain sections of his narrative that pertain to the imperial/colonial contexts, Habermas’s words cited above could well describe the literary and cultural processes that Johnson invokes. This formal conception of lacunary expression serves as much more than a formal device. For on one level, in a narrative sense, Johnson challenges any autonomy of validity that might have been understood to have somehow attached itself to imperial/colonial theories and structures, or their residuum in texts and accounts, and on another level Johnson reminds his reader of the danger of the palpably absurd, prejudicial and conspiratorial secretions of power. Johnson’s critique is indicated by the realisation that a central truthfulness can be recovered from such accounts themselves once, in Habermasian terms, unmixing and cleansing has been undertaken. This is inherent in the BB sections that conclude with an admission of their genocidal tendency, which serves to offer the reader a bald incentive for critical readings of social discourse, a pricking of moral consciences. Johnson’s strategies leave these colonial, hegemonic discourses with the baldly disingenuous and yet plainly disturbing declaration towards the end of the novel: ‘There are no aborigines now left in the island’ (116). The sense and structure that have been confused, deconstructed and mixed together reassert themselves in an admission of the full horror of method and intention. Johnson demonstrates in narrative something that resembles Bhabha’s recognition that ‘Postcolonial critical discourses require forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications’ (Bhabha 1994: 173). Although Johnson uses the novelistic frame as a boundary within which he constructs an internal mechanism, nevertheless he attempts to signify a world beyond the text (the author’s biographical inclusions confirm this intention). Thus Johnson invites the reader to appropriate his method and apply its dialectical incursions as an exemplary critical practice. In this sense both Albert Angelo and See the Old Lady Decently are critical-pedagogic cognitive guides. Johnson would surely find no objection in Freire’s suggestion that ‘Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information’ (1970: 67) since such acts of cognition inform the intentionality of his texts. In this sense, key motifs of the two novels not only articulate concerns about oppression and the educative process, similar to Freire’s, but in textual practice radicalise narrative in various fashions so as to demonstrate that even in the novel we perceive that ‘Cultural action either serves domination (consciously or unconsciously) or it serves the liberation of men. As these dialectically opposed types of cultural



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action operate in and upon the social structure, they create dialectical relations of permanence and change’ (Freire 1970: 180). It is these fluid dialectical relations that Johnson attempts to exemplify in his fiction as form, content, characterisation and motif that cannot neglect the social concerns of his time, including colonial/imperial residues and continuations. In this sense, Johnson points towards both issues concerning a general liberation and a need to recognise the new conditions of postcoloniality by charting the dimensions and structures of oppression.

Works cited Bakewell, Michael (1975) ‘Introduction’ in B. S. Johnson, See the Old Lady Decently, London: Hutchinson, 7–14. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. Habermas, Jürgen (1990) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Cambridge: Polity Press, trans. Frederick Lawrence. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964) Sense and Non-Sense, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus.



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Annotated Bibliography




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The bibliography that follows reviews academic essays and larger works in English that are substantially about B. S. Johnson; reviews, mentions, asides, brief paragraphs in general surveys and broadly comparative summaries are not included. The essays and other works reviewed are grouped under the names of their authors who appear, non-alphabetically, in chronological order of their first publication on Johnson and not, therefore, necessarily their most well-known publication on Johnson. If this introduces an element of unpredictability to the order, so much the better. In the summaries below I have tried to give some indication of the thrust of the argument in the source referred to, the particular nature of the content covered (where this is not made clear by the title) and where the source might offer new or distinctive ideas or information. Recurrent issues include the author’s relationship to postmodernism, the status of his experimentation and which novel is Johnson’s best work. It is, however, inevitable that the results are partial and this piece does not replace diligent study of the works mentioned. It is merely a starting point.

Pacey, Philip (1972) ‘Merely Human – the writings of B. S. Johnson’, Stand 13(2): 61–4. (1974) ‘I on behalf of us: B. S. Johnson’, Stand 15(2): 19–26. These two pieces reflect two key moments in the reception of Johnson. The first, written in 1970, deals with works up to and including The Unfortunates. The second piece attempts to deal with the lifetime’s output in the grim light of Johnson’s recent suicide. Pacey, a poet and friend, makes attempts to promote Johnson’s poetry as a way in to the 223 10.1057/9780230286122 - Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, Edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White


Annotated Bibliography of Johnson Studies


novels; a tacit admission that they were already perceived as difficult. He describes them as ‘like buildings in which there has been no attempt to hide the construction’ (63) and also points to Brecht. Yet at the same time Pacey is aware that ‘Books as personal as these exact a personal response’ (64). The second article is impressed by Johnson’s collaborative work, Street Children, and also gives an indication of the origin of the ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young. Of the novels, Trawl is ‘the bravest’ (24) and remains the exemplar. While praising Johnson as a creative craftsman (25) and an inspiring ‘writers’ writer’ (22) he revisits their arguments and continues to advocate fiction and imagination against Johnson’s view of them as an escape. This leads to the inevitable ‘imprisoned in his own theory’ (20) and a rejection of both Christie Malry’s inhuman accounting and Johnson’s dialectical worldview of truth versus fiction and order versus chaos. Arguing that See the Old Lady Decently would have been a return to compassion and political commitment, the last page sees clearly that Johnson’s work depends on unresolved contradictions and acknowledges that ‘the writing is not separate from the man’ (26).

Ryf, Robert (1977) ‘B. S. Johnson and the Frontiers of Fiction’, Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 19(1): 58–74. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism (1978) 299–302. An influential complete survey from an American source, which notes Johnson’s work ‘has received curiously little attention’(58). Ryf traces the consistency with which Johnson uses his self as subject against the backdrop of his view of life as chaos. He sees Johnson’s work as a dialogue with his reader using the book as artefact but tends to see the varied use of forms as ‘arbitrary’ (65) and ultimately ‘tedious’ (73). This is because Ryf can only conceive of them as devices designed to alienate the reader from their literary representations. In his survey Ryf points out contradictions in the ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young, has trouble with the randomness of The Unfortunates and finds Christie Malry ‘a disturbing book and, it may be, a disturbed one’ (65). Despite his tendency to reiterate the judgements of Johnson’s British contemporaries, Ryf is clear about there being no more point in trying to change Johnson’s approach and concludes: ‘If he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fist-shaking and nose-thumbing, he was also, at the same time, steadily pointing with his other hand toward the frontier’(73).



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(1977) ‘Pilgrim’s Progress: The Novels of B. S. Johnson (1933–73)’, Critical Quarterly 19(2): 45–59. Reprinted in Parrinder, Patrick (1987) The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Fiction, Brighton: Harvester, and abridged in Contemporary Literary Criticism (1978) 302–6. A shrewd analysis of an identifiable puritanical strain within Johnson’s work that was the most influential piece of British academic criticism of Johnson for some years, this essay offers an interesting counterpoint to Coe’s revisionist biography and new criticism that foregrounds Johnson’s pagan muse. Parrinder repeats the early critical consensus about Johnson being ‘a brilliant writer thrashing around in a trap of his own making’ (45) but then develops comparisons with Puritan self-scrutiny (usually in private diary form) despite Johnson’s ‘aggressively anti-religious’ stance (47) to argue that the books offer ‘a continuous moral vision’ (50). To some extent this approach boils down to the conclusion that, for Johnson, ‘experimental writing was the authentic expression of a deep-rooted artistic individualism’ (59). Psychology is as, if not more, important than the nature of the texts and surprisingly, despite introducing the approach through the personal diary, Parrinder prefers not to analyse Johnson’s more autobiographical novels. The Unfortunates radical form is disparaged (‘not a truly random work’ [55]) and then rejected because the ‘clarity of an explicitly “fictional” intention is lacking’ (55). Parrinder places House Mother Normal as Johnson’s ‘finest work’ (53), taking the character of the House Mother to be a critical self portrait, comparable with the author figure in Christie Malry, and argues that these anti-selves provide these novels with ‘a fictional structure akin to traditional comedy’ (56). In this way the essay partakes quite fully of the early critique of Johnson as a writer hamstrung by his own opinions but gives it solid shape and moves towards rehabilitating some of his later work which has identifiable elements of fiction within it. When Johnson was first republished, in the mid-1980s, it was Christie Malry and House Mother Normal that were the selected works.

Levitt, Morton (1982) ‘The Novels of B. S. Johnson: Against the War Against Joyce’, Modern Fiction Studies 27(4): 571–86. (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson’, Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 14: 438–44.



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Viewing Johnson from an American point of view, Levitt’s works are both, in slightly different contexts, generally positive surveys, continually impressed by Johnson’s formal inventiveness and his ability to involve and move his readers. Levitt’s reading of The Unfortunates (1982: 580) is admirable in pointing to the problems and felicities of his specific encounter with the text. A flaw of Levitt’s work across both his pieces is that, although his readings are subtle enough to see a distinction between implied and actual Johnsons, he sees the author’s ‘death as a judgment on the state of the contemporary novel in Britain’ (1982: 585) and ‘the fulfilment of his life as a novelist’ (1985: 439). This slippage means that in Albert Angelo’s Disintegration ‘Johnson intrudes’ (1985: 441) and that Johnson ‘becomes a character in his own fiction, B. S. Johnson and Albert Angelo blurred, a strange compelling mix of objective and subjective . . . .’ (1982: 577). The retrospective logic of death as fulfilment may also contribute to Levitt’s identification, across both pieces, of See the Old Lady Decently as his ‘most successful novel’ (1985: 443) and ‘one of the triumphs of self-reflexive technique in the postmodernist novel’ (444). There is a clear move here towards identifying Johnson as a postmodernist and this is how he has subsequently been understood by most American academics who have acknowledged his work.

Ghose, Zulfikar (1985) ‘Bryan’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 23–34. A substantial memoir of his long and close friendship with Johnson from 1959 to Johnson’s death which draws on their own correspondence now held in the archives of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas, Austin. A revealing and ultimately moving piece of writing drawn upon by all subsequent biographers, it confirms the impression that, in terms of commitment, Johnson was ‘very much a totalitarian’ (26).

Mackrell, Judith (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson and the British Experimental Tradition: An Introduction’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 42–64. This is a substantial survey of Johnson’s experimentation and his arguments, good at identifying the fundamental contradictions. The ‘doubling up of the self-reflexive and the mimetic’ noted with regard to Travelling People (46) proves serviceable throughout and is described as



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an ‘alternating commitment to a painstaking form of mimesis and a radical denial of the mimetic’ (58). Mackrell has little time for Johnson’s theorising (‘His aggressive polarisation of truth and fiction, order and chaos is never supported by any argument’ [44]) and for those experiments of his that are the most ambiguous (the black page in TP, the hole in AA) yet argues for his importance, despite what she sees as irresolvable paradoxes. The conclusion argues Johnson’s significance is that he prepared the way for ‘Ann Quin, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon and John Fowles and many others’ (63) though this might appear odd when, today, only Fowles is likely to be known as a novelist and, arguably, did not need Johnson as a trailblazer.

Figes, Eva (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 70–1. A somewhat embittered former associate remembers Johnson but argues against his widely remembered equation of fiction and lying by arguing that ‘the only way to tell the truth is by lying, and that is the real starting point of meaningful fiction’ (76).

D’Eath, Paul M. (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson and the consolation of literature’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 77–81. D’Eath argues that Johnson’s work offers discomforting ‘postmodernist realism’ (80) rather than the type of consoling ‘Middle-class novel’ (80) that denies the truth of contemporary life. Suggesting that the better criticism of Johnson to this point has been American (Levitt, for example), D’Eath’s take on the British critical reaction to Johnson is particularly damning: ‘Johnson’s dismissal of the ideological core of the traditional novel won him few friends amongst the defenders of the old faith who rejected his works as “experimental” without properly evaluating them, or evaluating their evaluation of them’ (80–1).

Thielemans, Johan (1985) ‘Albert Angelo or B. S. Johnson’s Paradigm of Truth’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 81–7. Like D’Eath, Thielemans sees Johnson in conflict with ‘petty social realism’ but he believes Johnson sought out ‘an embattled position’ (82). He argues that in the ‘Disintegration’ section of Albert Angelo Johnson



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destroys conventional fiction in order to attempt to make the novel work: ‘The rejection is also a recuperation’ (84). The tendency is therefore to overplay ‘Disintegration’ by not acknowledging the clues that prefigure it in the text. In line with other criticism of The Unfortunates (see Parrinder), Thielemans sees ‘a brave gesture leads to a rather tame text’ (85) and suggests that the ‘novels have something of abandoned ruins’ as monuments to Johnson’s ‘pursuit of his truth’ (87).

Kanaganakayam, C. (1985) ‘Artifice and Paradise in B. S. Johnson’s Travelling People,’ Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 87–93. After noting Johnson’s links to Robbe-Grillet, a key point is made about the lack of critical consensus over what might be Johnson’s major work (89). Despite some inaccuracies about House Mother Normal (89) Kanaganayakam correctly notes the collage of styles in Travelling People and, without attempting to set up this not-to-be-republished work as Johnson’s key text, suggests the principle of process over product informs Johnson’s later novels.

Splendore, Paolo (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson’s Intransitive Performance’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 93–7. Splendore makes an argument for See the Old Lady Decently being the culmination of Johnson’s work: ‘a self-ironical celebration of the burial of the traditional text’ (97).

Tredell, Nicholas (1985a) ‘Telling Life, Telling Death: The Unfortunates’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 34–42. (1985b) ‘The Truths of Lying: Albert Angelo’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 5(2): 64–70. (2000) Fighting Fictions: The Novels of B. S. Johnson, West Bridgeford, Nottingham: Paupers’ Press. Tredell’s major work on Johnson (2000) combines his pieces from Review of Contemporary Fiction (1985) and a 1987 two-part, nine page PN Review article. The 1985 articles on Albert Angelo and The Unfortunates are well focused and the latter does a particularly good job of defending the text against misunderstandings of what its radical form was meant to



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achieve. Having been part of the mid-80s near revival of Johnson, Tredell (2000) is keen to usher in the new era and anticipates Coe’s biography and the Omnibus by the end of the year. Clearly a small press publication in its production values, this volume gives a good indication of what the status of Johnson Studies was at the date of publication. Tredell’s writing is accessible and offers a straightforward survey of the novels with a short overview (1–7) of the original negative criticism of Johnson and later references to him. The critical approach is openly eclectic and brings mixed results in the chapters on the novels. There are good observations in individual chapters, but they are often not taken forward. Tredell sees how Travelling People attacks literary convention in the cause of improving representation, for example, but continues to reverse this in other chapters by stating how Johnson’s graphic devices draw attention to the book as artefact (e.g. 59, 91) and therefore away from representation. In discussing Christie Malry this becomes ‘devices foregrounding themselves’ rather than ‘the fictionality of the story’ (131) but ultimately this strand is given up in the ‘anti-conclusion’ with a claim for Johnson as the anticipator of hypertext (160). Tredell’s strength is in continually returning to the questions posed by Johnson’s ‘open, broken, unfinished’ novels (161) and their various challenges to literary convention and the political status quo: ‘Johnson’s novels are not, in naive poststructuralist fashion, endorsements of instability; they present instability as disorientating, displacing, and, to some extant at least, threatening’ (157). This allows him to sum up the terrorism of Christie Malry particularly well and spot critical attempts to limit it (139). On the other hand, there is a flaw in the form of repeated critiques of Johnson from a politically correct perspective on gender. In pointing to patriarchal discourse as one that Johnson apparently does not directly question Tredell has a point but its application often appears at the end of a chapter as a trite afterthought not integrated into the preceding analysis. Considering the society in which he grew up and the intensely personal (and thus male-centred) nature of Johnson’s work these are easy points to score but are better dealt with in Coe (2004) as a(nother) character flaw. Despite noting that The Unfortunates offers ‘thin pickings as a social document’ (1999: ix) Jonathan Coe points out that ‘the grim sexual politics of the period a faithfully preserved here’ (xii–xiii). And to do justice to the novels as a whole, they point to cultural taboos, the areas where man was not meant to know (Albert’s mishandled encounter with teenage menstruation in AA), and they certainly portray the lack of communication within male–female relationships (T and U ). Furthermore, despite its female villain, House Mother Normal portrays



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Hassam, Andrew (1986) ‘True Novel or Autobiography? The Case of B. S. Johnson’s Trawl’ Prose Studies 9(1): 62–72. (1988) ‘Literary Exploration: The Fictive Sea Journals of William Golding, Robert Nye, B. S. Johnson and Malcolm Lowry’, Ariel 19(3): 29–46. (1993) Writing and Reality: A Study of Modern British Diary Fiction, Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Hassam’s work on Johnson focuses mainly on Trawl which he describes as ‘a non-fictional form in a fictional frame’ (1988: 40) and a ‘quasi-diary’ (1988: 45). The most in-depth piece is the 1986 journal article. The line of argument is to decide whether Trawl is to be classed as autobiography or as a novel (as Johnson claimed). In particular, Hassam looks at the conceit that Trawl is thought, not written, and compares its status with the extract made from it for The Evacuees. Hassam’s particular concerns are productive since he focuses on how a critical approach via Johnson’s experimentation is sabotaged by the presence of the author: though literally dead, and theoretically so after Barthes, Johnson refuses to die. Working without a biography and using only internal evidence Hassam deduces Trawl is written in 1965 using the basis of a trip undertaken in 1960 (according to Coe 2004: Hassam is half right: the book being written in 1965 but the trip taken in 1963). Trawl proves to be revealing about the way autobiography privileges the moment of writing, not the moment remembered, as so often in Johnson’s work. Ultimately, by examining reading conventions, Hassam undermines Johnson’s position that fiction is lying, pointing out that fiction does not make the truth claims of biography and history and neither does autobiography. Hassam concludes that while Johnson’s pronouncements are more polemical than critical his practice is actually even more subversive than he claimed; offering autobiography without the customary autobiographical ‘pact’ (66).

Coe, Jonathan (1995) ‘Oh Fuck All This Lying! Some Notes on the Poems of B. S. Johnson’, Spleen, Sunk Island Review 10: 97–104.



female characters of great dignity, and there is a striking investment in attempting to reconstruct the psychology of the young Emily Lambird as a character in See the Old Lady Decently.

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(1999) ‘Introduction’ to The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson, London: Picador, v–xv. (2004) Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador. Coe first published on B. S. Johnson in 1995 with a piece on the largely neglected poetry (which is still the best consideration of that aspect of Johnson’s output) but also manages ‘to raise the subject’ (97) of Johnson’s wider status, lamenting his being out of print in Britain but with six novels available in German. Tellingly, Coe is clearly unsatisfied by the ‘scanty biographical evidence which is in the public domain’ (99). He concludes that Johnson’s writing is all of a piece’ (104) and disputes the familiar ‘trapped in theory’ summary of Johnson: ‘What unites all of his work, in whatever form, is its burning commitment to personal experience and to truth: a combination which may have restricted Johnson in scope, but which nonetheless provoked him to ever more energetic feats of formal innovation, and so proved, in that sense, to be profoundly liberating’ (104). Coe’s Introduction to the Picador edition of The Unfortunates is a beautifully written recommendation of this ‘unique and wonderful book’ (xv) that argues: ‘It’s time to reclaim B. S. Johnson for the mainstream’(vi). Coe provides a translation of the introductory note Johnson wrote to explain how readers might to randomise the bound Hungarian edition of the novel (xi–xii) and reveals his current thinking on his biographical subject, highlighting the notion that it was the candour of Johnson’s work as much as its formal experimentation that alienated him from the British literary establishment (xiv). Coe’s biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, exploits unique access to Johnson’s papers as well as interviews with many who knew him. The long-awaited product of what became seven-years (nonexclusive) work is an original, innovative biography and a pleasure in its own right. It begins with an introduction outlining Coe’s relationship to his subject and why he finds his task necessary, despite sharing some of Johnson’s suspicion of criticism. It comes down to attempting to answer the questions Johnson’s life and career asks about the novel itself: ‘about what it can and can’t achieve?’ (8). ‘A Life in Seven Books’ follows, an eighteen-page survey of the novels which summarises, compares and makes clear which Coe prefers and which will be most relevant to the biographical task in hand. The bulk of the biography follows as ‘A Life in 160 Fragments’, numbering the quotations it uses. Towards the end the author breaks the biographical frame to note his discomfort with suicide as the climax



Glyn White


of the narrative (375–6). The biography then continues with a fascinating collage of quotations from interviews conducted during the project, ‘A Life in 44 voices’. A 33-page ‘Coda’ follows in which Coe investigates Johnson’s mysterious last meeting and uncovers the original beginning of Albert Angelo, which he includes (437–45). This is a document especially reminiscent of Beckett’s Watt rather than the novel we now have, replete with musical notations and authorial interventions (intended) but also including ellipses and their markers that would have been eliminated in typed drafts. Noting that the cutting of this section and the relationship it reflects may have inspired the cutting out of the famous holes in the pages, Coe admits the whole story of Johnson’s early sexuality ‘appeals to the novelist in me’ (447). He wisely does not claim to have found out the cause of Johnson’s suicide and notes ‘There will always be a matrix of reasons’ (422) but the new discoveries are nonetheless revealing. They allow Coe to reject the B. S. Johnson that appears in the ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs as unrepresentative of the less certain, innovative and creative Johnson, and to validate the questions Johnson asks in his works rather than the answers he gave in public statements: ‘his novels challenge our most fundamental beliefs: our belief in the integrity of ‘fiction’, our belief in the usefulness of storytelling when the daily truths thrown up by our misbegotten world cry out for immediate practical attention. The challenge is posed not just by his work as a whole, but by each novel individually’ (454).

Burns, Alan (1997) ‘Two chapters from a book provisionally titled “HUMAN LIKE THE REST OF US: a life of B. S. Johnson”’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17(2): 155–79. These sample chapters from an otherwise unpublished biography by Johnson’s ‘friend, comrade, exemplar’ deal with the making of his memorable television essay Fat Man on a Beach and his suicide. Heavily illustrated with facsimile letters and photographs, the chapters draw on published sources such as Ghose (1985), and interviews with Johnson’s agent Diana Tyler and others. The second chapter concentrates on marital difficulties and sets up the mysterious last meeting that Coe (2004) elucidates. Burns donated his research materials to Coe during the latter’s project.



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(1998) ‘Contextualizing B. S. Johnson (1933–73): The British Novel’s Forgotten Voice of Protest’, The Anachronist, Budapest: Eotvos Lorand University, 165–92. (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (2001b) ‘(Re-) Acknowledging B. S. Johnson’s Radical Realism, or RePublishing The Unfortunates’, Critical Survey 13: 37–61. (2002) ‘B. S. Johnson’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 12(1): 7–58. (2005) ‘B. S. Johnson and the BBC: The Initial Contacts’ in Reading Without Maps: Cultural Landmarks in a Post-Canonical Age, Christophe Den Tandt (ed.), Brussels: Peter Lang, 119–33. Tew’s published work on Johnson begins almost as a voice crying in the wilderness after several years of nearly complete academic neglect. His 1998 essay argues that any picture of the 1960s literary world that leaves Johnson out can only be partial and begins to theorise Johnson’s articulation of consciousness and experience (190–2). The first critical book on Johnson from a major academic publisher offers an important landmark in his reappraisal. Written with the unashamed intent of creating ‘renewed debate about the aesthetic and critical significance of Johnson’s work’ (xiii), Tew’s first two chapters offer an overview of the career and the key issues that will be pursued in the study. Later, Tew deals with particular points of comparison to Johnson’s work and does a good job of explaining why the almost ritualised connection of Johnson and Christine Brooke-Rose as representatives of the embattled 1960s British literary avant-garde is misplaced and unhelpful to the study of both authors. In the core of the book Tew delves into the grounding of Johnson’s critical thoughts on the novel, uncovering and expounding their viability and working against Johnson’s nomination as a postmodernist. Page 74 outlines the theorists most drawn upon, including Roy Bhaskar, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Bordieu and Edward Pols. Pols, in particular, comes to the fore arguing that language and theoretical concepts are not synonymous and that therefore undermining one (language) as poststructuralism has done, does not necessarily undermine the other. As Tew puts it: ‘discourse cannot validate itself, [but] nor can it exclude reference to that which lies beyond’ (94). This is another way of expressing Johnson’s ‘notion of an ontological authenticity and its anchoring in perceptual reality . . . the bedrock of his conceptual understanding and



Tew, Philip


critical development’ (xii). Thus Tew establishes that the postmodern instability some critics believe Johnson to embrace is only half the story. The paradoxical combination of instability and stability informs the dialectics embedded in Johnson’s work and, though these have been visible to many commentators previously, they have often been problematic for their analyses. Tew argues in his Coda: ‘to redeem Johnson’s work as plural, critically realist and innovative in its own right, this study has confronted [this] kind of dualistic reservation’ (246). He contends that the dialectical tensions in Johnson’s works are not meant to be easily resolved and that ‘the impulse to reflect a random chaos . . . is offset by a radical political awareness of praxis and a broad notion of engagement’ (xii). The final chapter looks at the materiality of life and literary form and how Johnson’s works create author–reader ‘intersubjectivities’ (207–243). Tew (2002) distils and adds to the first two chapters of his 2001 monograph, producing the most fulsome short survey of Johnson’s career. It establishes the significance of his ‘indigenous working-class, everyday experience’ (20) and notes his alienation from the youth culture of the times in which he was writing (13). It also offers a stronger reading of Albert Angelo’s ‘Disintegration’. While theoretical intertexts are kept to a minimum, the essay does introduce Bhabha to Johnson showing the beginnings of the approach used in this volume. Tew’s 2005 article draws on original research in the BBC archive at Caversham to deal in critical depth with the early part of Johnson’s relationship to the BBC as he attempted to gain status in the literary world.

White, Glyn (1999) ‘Recalling the Facts: Taking action in the Matter of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 5(2): 143–62. (2005) Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction, Manchester: Manchester University Press. White’s first piece comes from the point when Johnson’s republication had just begun and Coe and Tew’s major publications were on the horizon. It suggests that Johnson’s being represented in print almost exclusively by the ‘Introduction’ (to AYRY ) ‘to the extent that it has almost become B. S. Johnson, in his absence’ (1999: 144) has served to obscure the novels themselves. Other obstacles to a full reappraisal in criticism are highlighted including the fallacy that Johnson’s rejection



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of conventional realism is (therefore) a rejection of mimesis per se, and the tendency to try and reconstruct Johnson’s psychology from the novels. The bibliography contains a listing of the German translations of Johnson. In his 2005 monograph White makes a significant contribution not only to Johnson studies, but to literary studies more widely, by outlining the importance of the literal presence of the book in the aesthetic and readerly relations of the text. In his substantial chapter on Johnson, White focuses upon what he describes as ‘graphic mimesis’ (11) in three of his novels, Travelling People, Albert Angelo and The Unfortunates. He positions Johnson in an innovative tradition that includes Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien, but examines how a concept of the ‘graphic surface’ (85) of the novel allows Johnson to set new standards of mimesis that are not within any code of existing realism, but as an aesthetic of theoretical truthfulness, with an engaged mode quite different from his precursors. White conveys many of Johnson’s novel’s unique qualities, from using a veil of asterisks to reanimate ‘The dead metaphor of drawing a veil over a scene . . .’ (89) in Travelling People, to the ‘specificity’ (115) that arises from the supposedly random readings demanded by the literal objective structure of the book-in-the-box. Perhaps White’s most intriguing readings are those of Albert Angelo, which he regards as ‘a literary collage: a selection of patterns,’ (111) one that is always tentative, not only articulating but memorialising Johnson’s aesthetic integration of the fact of the book, its temporality as a complex ‘physical’ and often ‘cumbersome’ process (112), and its quest for innovations and effects that defeat expectations. White outlines the nuances of Johnson’s relations with his reader that are carefully established in this text, the novelist teasingly playing with the readerly hypotheses which work with ‘the technical operation of the book itself’ (102). White provides fresh readings of Johnson and manages to evoke possibilities that have not previously been closely examined.

Lanchester, John (2001) ‘Foreword’ to Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, London: Picador. A model of brevity like the novel it introduces (and managing not to dislodge the pagination of the original edition), in less than six pages Lanchester’s foreword places the author, quotes judiciously from the ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs, taking care to note the difference in character between pronouncements



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If it was possible to leave a number of empty pages here for further contributions to the field to be included it would be a suitably Johnsonian gesture but the keenness of our contributors is unlikely to allow us that luxury. In any case, we are confident this volume is far from the last word.



and practice, and ends with two very apt sentences: ‘Readers, and viewers, are now well aware that grief and comedy and jokes about form can thrive in the same work. With good writers it can take some time for us to become their contemporaries’ (5–6).

Aarseth, Espen 58–59 abjection 133–4, 137, 139, 142 Adorno, Theodor 8, 9, 39–40, 41, 44–5, 46, 47, 48, 49, 81 Minima Moralia 88 aesthetics 5–7, 11, 30, 35–36, 37n.3, 39, 45, 47–8, 96, 114, 132–3, 138–9, 176–7, 180–5, 192, 200, 211, 215–16, 233, 235 of imperialism 12 reservations 108–9 Albert Angelo 4, 7–8, 12, 13n.2, 27–37, 38–50, 87, 106, 116n.1, 127, 177–87, 191, 202–13, 218, 227–8, 235 architecture in 42–3, 177–87, 204–6, 208 Christopher Marlowe in 80, 109, 186 and contraception 111–13 in criticism 226–8, 235 death of protagonist 110, 152 ‘Development’ 30 disaffection and resentment 40–2, 44–5, 47, 143, 152, 211–2 ‘Disintegration’ 28, 31–3, 38–9, 44–5, 114, 141, 152, 164, 178, 183, 187, 205–6, 212, 226, 227–8, 234 factual bases of 16, 40, 49 football in 143 holes in pages 35–6, 121, 161–2, 186–7, 227 human condition, the 41, 46–7, 49 original opening 96, 100, 103, 108–11, 113, 232 postcolonial experience in 202–3, 205, 207–8, 211–13 ‘Prologue’ 110–11, 202 publication 17–18 radio interview about 121–4 and the reader 27–37 republication 22

schoolchildren in 30, 41, 46–7, 87, 110, 152, 179, 181, 185, 104–5, 207–13 typographic design 28–30, 33–7 violence 89, 181, 209, 212 writing of 17 All Bull 21 Althusser, Louis 133 American criticism 224, 226, 227 Amis, Martin 6 amnesia 167 Angry Brigade, the 90 architecture 10–11, 31, 37, 38, 42–5, 88, 127, 175–88, 198, 205–6, 208 fascist 181–2 Georgian 175–6, 177, 179–80, 204 gothic 43–5, 175–6, 177, 179–80, 204 as legacy of imperialism 208 neo-classical 181–2 neo-gothic 42 modernist 127, 181–2, 198 Victorian 179, 204 Arendt, Hannah 8 The Human Condition 40 Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? 5 ‘Introduction’ to 5, 10, 33, 54, 81, 86, 128, 132–42, 224, 235 hybrid form 132–42 an obstacle to interpreting the novels 232, 234 quoted 12, 30, 33–4, 54, 58, 60, 63, 81, 84, 132–5, 137–42 publication 20 on radio 126 rejection of 19 writing of 19 Arts Council, the 19 Attridge, Derek 7, 28 Bakewell, Michael 19, 20, 21, 71, 77, 120, 214 237



Index

Index

Bannard, Michael 15, 16, 95–6, 109–10, 113–15 Barnes, Julian 76 Barthes, Roland 9, 51, 57, 86, 230 A Lover’s Discourse 86 BBC 9, 18, 19, 21, 117–31, 234 BBC Written Archive at Caversham 9, 119, 129, 130n., 234 influenced by publishers 121, 127 institutional values 118–19, 123–4, 129 Johnson’s radio appearances 121–4, 126–9 Radio Drama Department 117, 120, 125 Radio Four 127 Radio London 20, 129 Third Programme 117–18, 120–1, 124, 126, 128–9 Television 127, 128 World Service 125, 127, 129 Beckett, Samuel xvii, 18, 36, 37, 48, 81, 235 Watt 232 Beresford, Bruce 124 Bergonzi, Bernard 5, 77, 126 The Situation of the Novel 5 BFI 124 Bhabha, Homi K. 11, 12, 202, 205, 214, 218, 234 The Location of Culture 202 birth 62, 97–8, 104, 107–8 Johnson’s 17, 65, 69, 72, 78 links to death 106–8, 110 preventing subsequent pregnancies 69 see also contraception Blitz, the 49–50, 175, 184, 186 damage 186 remaining in 1960s 181 Bloodaxe (publishers) 6, 22 Bordieu, Pierre 127, 233 Bradbury, Malcolm 6 Braithwaite, E.R. To Sir With Love 207 Brecht, Berthold 224 bricolage 138 Bridson, D.G. 118, 123 Briggs, Asa 118

British Council, the 19, 20 British criticism 226, 227 British Railways 120 Brooke-Rose, Christine 36, 233 Brooks, Peter 51, 55 B. S. Johnson versus God 19 Burns, Alan 36, 68, 232 Burns, Tom 118 cancer 54, 71–3, 84–5, 90, 118, 153, 156 Emily Johnson (mother) 20, 71, 128, 156 Tony Tillinghast xvi, 4, 17, 63, 84, 153 chaos 28, 54–5, 63, 68, 70, 72, 76, 135–7, 139, 141, 153, 156, 179, 211–13, 224, 227, 234 Chaucer, Geoffrey Miller’s Tale 97 children 70, 114, 143–57 childlike behaviour 206 Joan’s, Trawl 101 personality development 144–7, 148–50 Johnson’s: Steve and Kate 17, 19, 21 wartime evacuation of 143–57 see also Albert Angelo, schoolchildren in childhood 4, 98–9 memories xvi, 4, 82–3, 101–2 mother’s 71 wartime evacuation 14 Chobham 14, 97, 147 Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry 4, 10, 15, 29, 31, 34, 66, 89–91, 155, 161, 235–6 cancer in 73, 84, 156 in criticism 224–5, 229 film of 22 final reckoning 172 gaps in text 167–9 political action 81, 86–7, 90 publication of 20–2 radio broadcast of 129 republication of 6, 22 terror 80, 89–91, 229 writing of 19–20 Cigman, Gloria 144, 154



238

city, the 4, 6, 38–50, 107–8, 175–88, 205–6, 209 Clark, Charles 78 class warfare 87–9, 198, 216 see also middle-class see also working-class Coe, Jonathan 29, 49, 51, 107–8, 143, 194, 198, 229, 230–2, 234 on Johnson’s poetry 180, 231 Like a Fiery Elephant xvi, 3, 7, 9, 11, 73, 143–4, 192, 194–5, 229, 231 awards for 3, 23, 143 Johnson and mythology 108, 115 notes for CMODE 90 notes for STOLD 8, 68–70 on Johnson’s contract 99–100 on Johnson’s finances 127 on Johnson’s script writing 120 original opening of AA 95–6, 108–10 psychiatric verdict 149 publication of 22 Collins, Christopher 29 colonisation see postcolonial conflict 39, 45, 47, 142, 145, 191–2, 194, 202–3, 206–8, 212, 227–8 Johnson and the BBC, between 117–32 Malvinas/The Falkland Islands 193 Conran, Tony 191 Constable (publishers) 17, 121, 127 contraception 105–15 Daily Mail, The 19 death xvii, 33, 52, 61, 62, 63, 86, 90–1, 110, 115, 148, 153–4, 156, 167, 183, 196–7, 200 Adonis cult and Albert’s 110 Christopher Marlowe’s in tavern brawl 109, 116n.1 links to birth 106–8, 110 drive, Freud 153–4, 156 fear of 29, 109 Johnson’s xvi, xvii, 5, 6, 8, 16, 78, 89, 107, 129, 142, 189, 195–6, 226 loss and bereavement 72, 80, 86, 153, 189, 196

mother’s xvi, 65, 72, 75, 156 Tony Tillinghast’s 55, 61, 62 Yorick’s, Tristram Shandy 82 D’Eath, Paul 58, 227 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 10, 85, 139, 140–1 Denmark 97 Derrida, Jacques 57, 164 Douglas, Jane Yellowlees 58, 60 Down Red Lane 21 drives aggressive 145–6 death 153, 156 unconscious 146, 218–9 Dunkling, Leslie 154 Earl of Snowdon 115 education 11, 87–8, 118, 127, 154–5, 209–10, 212, 218–9 privileged view and status of Oxbridge 118, 127 of university 176 ego 146–7, 149–50, 155–6, 163 primitive 146–7 superego 146, 149 Eliot, T.S. 181, 182 The Waste Land 108 Elliott, Janice 75–7 Empire, the British 8, 11, 71, 72, 202–19 Imperialism 12, 190, 191–2, 199–200, 202–19 Imperial symbolism 182 resistance to Imperialism 194 Entry 124 Esslin, Martin 117, 125 evacuation, wartime 14, 18, 82–3, 102, 126–7, 143–57, 176, 230 The Evacuees 10, 18, 126, 127, 143–4, 147–8, 154, 155, 157, 230 experimentation xviii, 3, 12n1, 35–6, 51, 58, 61, 76, 117, 124, 126, 128, 132, 139, 161–74, 185, 218, 223, 225, 230 BBC opposition to 117–19, 121–23, 127, 129 modernist experimentalism 39, 48 with literary form 4–6, 8, 29, 32–3, 61, 87, 121–3, 153, 161–74, 180, 205, 213, 226–7, 231



Index 239

Index

family 146, 151 Hughes family 199 Johnson family history 8, 38, 68, 70–1 Farrar, David 54 fascist/fascism 90, 181–3 anti-fascist groups and Cable Street Riots 181–2 architecture 182–3 British Union of Fascists 181 Fat Man on a Beach 21, 63, 67, 78, 107, 232 Felski, Rita 34, 37 Ferrebe, Alice 7 Figes, Ewa 7, 227 football (soccer) xviii, 12, 13n2, 54, 143 Chelsea Football Club 13n2, 143 Match in Nottingham 80, 153 World Cup 18 form, literary see under experimentation Foucault, Michel 10, 136 Fowles, John 12, 227 France 15, 17, 18, 21 Frankl, Paul Gothic Architecture 43, 184–5 Freire, Paulo 12, 204, 208–9, 216, 218–9 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 12, 204 Freud, Anna 146–7, 148, 150, 155 Freud, Sigmund 115, 149–50, 153–4, 156 friend/friendships 62–3, 74–5, 114, 144, 224–5, 227, 232 Crampin, Stuart 16 Holden, Tony 16 Knight, Richard 16 school-friend Trev Leggett 15 Starkey, Muriel, girlfriend 16 see also Bannard, Michael see also Ghose, Zulfikar see also Tony Tillinghast Genet, Jean 15 gentrification 176–7 geography 184–5 geology 184–5 German editions of Johnson 231, 235

Ghose, Zulfikar 16, 17, 18, 21, 54, 181, 183, 226, 232 Statement against Corpses 5 Gielgud, Val 117–18 Gollancz (publishers) 18, 127 The Goon Show 120 Gordon, Giles 21, 127, 227 Graves, Robert 104, 106 Gregory Award 119 Gwenallt ( Jones, Davis James) 11, 189, 191, 192, 194–7, 200 ‘Y’Meirwon’ (‘The Dead’) 196–7 Habermas, Jürgen 11, 138, 217–8 ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ 11, 20, 189, 190, 192, 197, 198, 200 Hart, Lorenz 66 Hassan, Andrew 230 Hayles, N. Katherine 59 Harrogate Festival 127 Heath government 90 Heppenstall, Rayner 122 High Wycombe 14, 97, 147 history xvi, xvii, 12, 70, 82, 140–4, 176, 185, 190, 198, 208, 212, 214–15, 217, 230 architectural 11 family 8, 38, 68, 70, 74, 77 literary 132, 137, 142 personal 69, 74, 127, 134 post–war 175 subjectless 133 Hitchings, Henry 69–70 Hitler, Adolf 182 Hoggart, Richard 154 Holmes, Richard 61 House Mother Normal 4, 10–11, 73, 82, 118, 161 ‘abnormality’ 155 in criticism 225, 228–30 female characters in 229–30 human cost 87 metastable space 139–41 republication 21–2 textual space in 28–9, 167 Welsh sequences 189, 198–200 writing and publication of 19, 143 HRH Princess Margaret 115 Hughes, Glyn Tegai 192, 199



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Index 241

identity 9, 44, 101–3, 153, 155, 187, 204–7, 213, 215 of experience 44 middle-class 177 non-identity 82–3, 86–9, 91 sexual 9, 96–7, 101–3 working-class 151–2 writerly 101 Industrial Relations Act 90 influence colonial 68, 214–5 of Johnson on the Toronto Research Group 161–74 on Johnson Bannard, Michael 15, 95–6 mother 128 Wales and Welsh culture 11, 189–201 Middle-class on post-war London 176–7 Ingarden, Roman 8, 52–3 Konkretisation 55–6 Ireland 106 irony 152, 209, 212, 215, 228 Isaacs, Susan 148 The Cambridge Evacuation Survey 146, 148–9, 150–1 Iser, Wolfgang 8, 30, 32–3, 34, 36, 55 Jameson, Fredric 176 Joyce, James xvii, 36, 48, 81, 235 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 83 journalism 16, 127 see also under The Unfortunates Johnson, Emily (née Lambird) (mother) 14, 20, 69–70, 195, 213, 215, 230 death of 20, 65, 71–2, 75, 77 separation from 147–51 Johnson family holidays 19, 21 Johnson, Kate (daughter) 19 Johnson, Stanley (father) 14, 21, 143 Johnson, Steven (son) 17

Johnson, Virginia (née Kimpton) (wife) 17, 18, 20, 21 Kanaganakayam, C. 228 Kelman, James A Disaffection 40 Klein, Melanie 145–6, 150, 155 knowledge 62, 71, 136, 145 architectural 42 gaps in 61 personal 134 sexual 98–9 Kristeva, Julia 10, 133 Lanchester, John 22, 235–6 Landow, George 57–8 language 61, 78, 103, 118–19, 121–2, 125–6, 134–6, 138–9, 141, 187, 189–91, 193–200, 202–4, 207–10, 212, 215, 217, 233 see also Welsh language Lee, Molly 126 Lefebvre, Henri 179, 182, 183, 187 The Production of Space 179 Levitt, Morton 6, 225–6, 227 Lewis, Saunders 191 Lewis, Wyndham 182 Little Tew 21 Llewellyn, Richard Green, Green My Valley Now 75 Lodge, David 6, 128 London 10–11, 45, 49,147, 151, 175–87, 205–7 Arsenal Stadium 182 Barnes 14, 17 Bloomsbury 182 Cable Street 40, 180, 181, 212 Chapel Market 114 Chelsea 177 Chelsea Football Club 13 Claremont Square 114 Deptford 116, 186 Docklands 177 Hammersmith 14, 15 Hampstead 177 Holloway Road 211 Islington 177 King’s College London 15, 16, 118 King’s Cross 180, 182, 185



Hungary 19, 20, 21 Hustler 172 hypertext 8, 52, 56–60, 229

Index

London—continued Marylebone 177 North 202, 211 Oxford Street 112 Pimlico 177 Russell Square 182 St. Pancras (station) 42, 180, 182, 184–5 Soho 17, 19 South Bank 175 Stepney 180, 182 West 206 Westminster 177 Londoner/s 38–40, 45, 48, 49 London County Council 184 MacBeth, George 119–20, 121 Mackrell, Judith 55, 226–7 Mallarmé, Stéphane 164 Marlowe, Christopher 80, 109, 116n, 186 marriage 115 to Virginia 17 Marvell, Andrew 166 Matrix Trilogy, the 65, 68–70, 156 Maxwell, Bennett 124, 125 McCaffery, Steve 161–2, 169, 172–3 Panopticon 161 McEwan, Ian First Love, Last Rites 75 McHale, Brian 6, 178 McKeon, Michael 33 memoir: see Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? memory 61, 65–6, 83, 99, 101, 167, 197 reader’s 73 experimental textual representation 166–7 and The Unfortunates 153 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 11, 203, 204, 210, 233 Sense and Non-Sense 203 middle-class, the 11, 118, 144, 175–7 novel 58, 227 upper middle class, the 176 values 88–9 vocabulary of the BBC 119

Millet, Kate Sexual Politics 163 modernist architecture 182–3, 198 high 176 narrative/novel 4–5, 8, 39–40, 45, 48, 105, 144, 168–9, 192 poets 181, 192–3 style in Johnson’s poetry 190, 192 subjectivity 39–40, 43–5, 47–8 Moi, Toril Textual Politics 163 Morgan, D. Densil 195 Moseley, Oswald 181 mother goddess see muse Murdock, Graham 117 muse ( Johnson’s) 9, 15, 73, 104, 106–8, 110–11, 112–16, 225 national service 83 Neumann, Erich The Great Mother 73 New Delhi 182 New Directions (publisher) 6, 22 Newstead Abbey xvi Nichol, bp 161–2, 169, 172–3 1950s 15, 109, 117, 120, 180 1960s 6, 16–19, 36, 106, 118, 119–20, 181, 184–5, 190–2, 194, 196–7, 230, 233 1970s xii, 3, 19–21, 67, 90, 118, 175, 223 1980s 6, 22, 223 1990s 7, 22 Not Counting the Savages 20 Nottingham 18, 20, 80 Nüremberg 182 Nye, Robert 76–7 O’Brien, Flann 235 The Observer 13, 17, 61 obsessions xvii, 9, 16, 48–9, 66, 68, 96, 98, 113, 115, 146–9 Omnibus 7, 22 One Sodding Thing After Another 18 O’Regan, Cyril 47 Orwell, George 182 Pacey, Philip 223–4 Parrinder, Patrick 6, 8, 48, 225



242

‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ 48–50, 225 Partington, Gill 60 patriarchal, the 229 Penguin Modern Stories 7 5 phallocentric 163, 165–6, 173–4 phenomenology/phenomenological 52, 60, 133, 163, 175, 210 Picador (publishers) 3, 7, 22, 231 Pike, Burton 187 Plaid Cymru 191 Planet 11, 20, 192, 194–5 Plato 47 pleasure principle 149–50, 153–4 poetry 16, 119, 189–90, 197–8, 223–4, 231 collaboration with Ned Thomas 194–7 Johnson’s theories of 29, 180 Poems 17, 29, 107–8 Poems 2 20 translations of Gwenallt 194–7, 200 see also ‘Hafod a Hendref ’ Poetry Wales 189, 191 Pope Paul VI 104 postcolonial 7, 11–12, 191, 200, 202–19 postcolonial poetry 214 postmodern 6, 223, 226, 233–4 comic strips, of the Toronto Research Group 172 narrative 58, 95, 161, 167–9, 227 poststructuralism 6, 57, 229, 233 Poulet, Georges 57 Pound, Ezra 181, 182 Priessnitz, Horst P. 117 prolepsis 186 psychopathic, the 155 puritanism 48–50, 225 Quantick, David xviii Quin, Ann 227 Raban, Jonathan 185 Radio: see BBC Rajan, Tilottama 132–3 Rational Geomancy see under Toronto Research Group reader, the 27, 29, 31, 35–6, 51, 53–4, 56–62, 71–2, 81–2, 169, 171, 214, 218

implied reader 30 reading act of 51–2, 56–7, 162–3, 165–6 Albert Angelo 27–37 creative reading 28 interactive reading 52, 58–9 in general 10, 27, 31, 33–5, 48, 59, 67, 74, 121–2, 231 Johnson xviii, 9, 33–5, 65–6, 73, 86, 108, 133, 141, 180, 186, 209, 218, 235 Rational Geomancy (TRG) 165, 171–4 the play of 32, 34 The Unfortunates 51–64 twenty-first century reading 56 realism xvii, 6–7, 12, 31–2, 44–5, 61, 81, 113, 120, 126–7, 141, 167, 177, 179, 185–7, 195, 202, 227 conventional forms of 5–6, 39–40, 44–5, 60, 81, 83, 113, 126–7, 180–1, 186, 227–9, 234–5 critical 10, 138–9, 233–4 mimesis 7, 32, 126–7, 226–7, 235 reality 7, 11–12, 38–42, 45, 49, 55, 61, 81–2, 103, 132, 134, 149, 205–7, 209–11, 215–17, 233 reality principle 147, 149–51, 153–5, 167 Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 Richards, I.A. 33–4 Ricks, Christopher 5, 121–2 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 68, 139, 228 Rowlands, John The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry 195–6 Ryf, Robert 6, 224 Sade, Marquis de 169 Saporta, Marc Composition No.1 51 Sarraute, Nathalie 68, 141–2 Sartre, Jean-Paul 138 La Nausee 83 school 6, 18, 40, 83, 144, 148–50, 154, 179, 215 Albert Angelo 111–12, 181–2, 184–5, 202–13 Johnson’s experience as a child 14–15, 97, 99, 144, 147–8



Index 243

Index

school—continued Johnson’s experience as a teacher 14, 18 Secker and Warburg (publishers) 18, 21 Second World War 14, 184 self-conscious see self-reflexive self-reflexivity 6, 29–30, 36, 95, 134–5, 138, 161, 167, 169, 183, 185, 226 self-conscious act of reading 62 self-conscious form 28, 33, 45, 75, 103, 178 self-referential 161, 185, 244 senility 4, 167, 199–200 See the Old Lady Decently 4–5, 8, 11–2, 65–79, 202, 213–19 availability of 66–7 blurb for 67, 78 cancer in 71–3 in criticism 224, 226, 228, 230 family history in 68–70, 74–5 fragmented structure 65–6, 71, 73–4, 213 genre of 74–5 matrix trilogy 65, 68–70 postcolonialism in 213–9 publication of 21, 78 reviews of 75–7 writing of 20 sex/sexuality 73, 155, 169 condom/contraceptive sheath 9, 96, 99–100, 107–8, 112–13 drives 147, 156 ‘green pro’ the 99, 101 homosexuality 95–6, 98, 109–10, 113, 115, 116n1 Johnson’s sexual past/sex life 4, 9, 83, 95–103, 104–16, 232 Johnson’s sexual identity 9, 95–103, 104–16, 232 perversion 118, 155 sexual politics 224 sexual symbolism 9, 73, 95–103, 104–16, 169 sexualization of textual practice 163–4 Shakespeare, William 102 Hamlet 204 Macbeth 101

Much Ado About Nothing 16 Sheela-na-gig 106 Sillitoe, Alan 18 Sinclair, Iain 41 Radon Daughters 48 Sinfield, Alan 126, 129 Smith, Anthony 17, 34, 36 Snow, C. P. (Lord) 6, 128 Snyder, Ilana 56–7 Sontag, Susan 37 space dilatory 51–2, 62 mental 187 metastable, Deleuze 139 ordering the spatial 54, 182, 185 social and ideological 179, 207 textual 51–2, 53, 56–8, 62, 77, 79, 113, 161–74, 187 utopian 58, 163, 169–70 virtual 57–8 Speer, Albert 182 Splendore, Paolo 228 Stockwell, Peter 37 Springsted, Eric O. 47–8 Statement Against Corpses 9, 17, 106–7 Stephens, Meic 191, 196 Sterne, Laurence xvii, 82, 235 Tristram Shandy 82 Stevenson, Randall 6 Straus, Peter 7 Street Children 17, 224 subjectivity 33, 39–45, 47–8, 52, 63, 66, 88–9, 98, 133–42, 149, 178–9, 203, 205, 209, 226 intersubjectivity 138–9, 205, 211, 234 suicide 115, 141, 231–2 of Johnson 21, 132, 142, 149, 189, 195, 223, 232 Summerson, John Georgian Landscape 175–6 supplement, the 164, 166 Tati, Jacques 18 television, see BBC Tew, Philip xviii, 3, 7, 11–12, 37n, 50n, 233–4 B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading 38, 40, 53, 66, 73, 96, 133–4, 138–9, 152, 191



244

on Johnson and the BBC 118–19, 234 PhD 22 Thielemans, Johan 227–8 Thomas, Ned 11, 194–5 The Welsh Extremist 194 3 AM Magazine xviii Thwaite, Anthony 7, 119 Tickell, Paul xviii, 22 Tillinghast, Tony xvi-xvii, 4, 17, 55, 61–3, 72, 80, 86, 153 Times, The 61 Times Literary Supplement, The 69–70 Toronto Research Group, the 10, 161–74 Rational Geomancy 10, 161–2, 164, 166, 172 Tours International Film Festival 18, 124 Tracy, David 46 Travelling People xvii, 4, 82 BBC verdicts on 121, 126 in criticism 226–9, 235 factual basis of 16 publication of 17 television adaptation 128–9 writing of 16 Trawl 4, 9, 14, 16–17, 95–103 class 98, 102, 151 in criticism 224, 230 epitaph 85 evacuation 82–3, 147–8, 151–3 identity in 151–3 on radio 125 repetition 83–4, 86 sexual memories in 66, 99–101, 103, 106, 112–4 symbolism in 9, 96–9 therapeutic experience 82–6, 110 writing and publication of 17 Tredell, Nicholas 54, 55, 57, 228–30 Tyler, Diana 20, 118, 232 UK network for modern fiction studies 23 Unfair! 73 The Unfortunates 4, 7–8, 13n, 51–64 academia xvi-xvii, 3–4 cancer 54, 153, 156 contraception 114–15

in criticism 54–5, 61, 162–3, 165, 173, 224–6, 228–9, 231, 235 death 52, 61, 63 Hungarian translation 21 hypertext 52, 56–60 interactivity 52, 58–60, 62 journalism 13n.2, 127, 153 memory in 61, 63, 80, 82, 83–8 publication 19, 51 printed text 57, 63 promotional film 18–9 random experience 36, 51–64 radio interview 126 writing of 16, 143 see also Tillinghast, Tony Universities Poetry 16, 119 University of Texas 226 University of Wales 190 University of Westminster 22, 23 urban experience/life 38, 41, 45, 107–8, 175–88, 202–13 renewal 11 terrorist/terrorism 4, 90–1, 168–9, 172 Vernon, Tom 20, 129 violence 21, 87–9, 109–10, 181, 207, 209, 212 comic 169 in language 125 Wales 4, 11, 19, 189–200 Carn Fadrun 73 Glyn Club 16 Gregynog 19, 20, 190, 192,197–9 Lleyn Peninsula 16 Wall, Stephen 61 Waugh, Patricia 6, 58, 155 Harvest of the Sixties 143 Webb, Harri 189, 191, 196, 197 Weil, Simone 8, 46–9 Letters to a Priest 46–7 Science, Necessity, and the Love of God 47 Welfare State 87–8, 155 Wells, Peggy 120 Welsh language 11, 189–91, 193–201 Welsh Language Society (Cymdeithasyr laith Gymraeg) 191



Index 245

Index

Welsh writing in English 189–200 West Country 106 Weston, Jessie L. 110 White, Glyn 3, 7, 165, 234–5 Reading the Graphic Surface 3 White, Jerry 184 Whose Dog Are You? 18, 19 Wilson, Harold 90 Wolf, Katherine M. 144–5, 146–7

working-class, the 152, 175–6, 206, 215 Johnson’s identity 5–6, 11–12, 48 male narrators 11–12 Worth, Paul 187 You Always Remember the First Time 21 You’re Human Like the Rest of Them xvii, 18, 19, 20, 124–5



246

Re-Reading B.S. Johnson

Rereading Conrad

Rereading Conrad

On Rereading

Johnson Junction

BS ISO 30301:2011

Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy

Randy Johnson (Baseball Superstars)

BS EN 12573-4:2000

BS 5839 - 2002 Fire Detection

Helicopter Theory - Johnson

Life Of Johnson

Loving Cee Cee Johnson

Life of Johnson

Johnson, Writing, and Memory

The Johnson Years

In Mind of Johnson: A Study of Johnson the Rambler

BS EN 60079-19:2011

Johnson Family Vacation - Retail Pressbook

Samuel Johnson: The Latin Poems

BS EN 60534-7:2010

Emergency Lighting BS 5266-1

The Devil and Ms Johnson

The Life of Samuel Johnson

Charlie Johnson in the Flames

Charlie Johnson in den Flammen

Mr. Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker

Religious Life of Samuel Johnson

The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant

Gender matters: rereading Michelle Z. Rosaldo

The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant

Re-Reading B.S. Johnson

Rereading Conrad

Rereading Conrad

On Rereading

Johnson Junction

BS ISO 30301:2011

Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy

Randy Johnson (Baseball Superstars)

BS EN 12573-4:2000

BS 5839 - 2002 Fire Detection

Helicopter Theory - Johnson

Life Of Johnson

Loving Cee Cee Johnson

Life of Johnson

Johnson, Writing, and Memory

The Johnson Years

In Mind of Johnson: A Study of Johnson the Rambler

BS EN 60079-19:2011

Johnson Family Vacation - Retail Pressbook

Samuel Johnson: The Latin Poems

BS EN 60534-7:2010

Emergency Lighting BS 5266-1

The Devil and Ms Johnson

The Life of Samuel Johnson

Charlie Johnson in the Flames

Charlie Johnson in den Flammen

Mr. Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker

Religious Life of Samuel Johnson

The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant

Gender matters: rereading Michelle Z. Rosaldo

The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant

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