The novels of B.S. Johnson

Jonathan Coe

The end can't come quickly enough for me,' wrote B.S. Johnson in the closing pages of his second novel, Albert Angelo. In 1973, some nine years later, he committed suicide at his North London home. From the perspective of Britain's ever changing literary landscape, amidst the perpetual ebb and flow of fashions and reputations, it all seems a long time ago. Only one of his seven novels remains in print, and instead of being forgotten Johnson has been con- signed to what some might regard as an even worse fate: that of being endlegsly invoked as a reference point in a sporadic and none too fruitful argument about something called 'experimental' fiction. It is high time that his other novels were made available again, so that we can all be reminded of what he was really up to.

Johnson published two volumes of poet- ry, edited three anthologies, directed numerous short films and television pro- grammes and wrote at least six plays. All of these must be seen as important aspects of his creative personality, but his central achievement lies in the series of novels

which appeared between 1963 and 1975: Travelling People, Albert Angelo, Trawl, The Unfortunates, House Mother Normal, Christie Molly's Own Double Entry and See the Old Lady Decently. House Mother Normal is nominally still available as a Bloodaxe paperback, but getting hold of any of the others now requires hard work and substantial capital outlay. And if, in fact, some of Johnson's books are now over-valued by his admirers, this has every- thing to do with their current status quite independent of literary merit — as precious objects, which may not be entirely inappropriate in the case of a writer whose work made so much play with the notion of book as artefact. (Meanwhile, prospective Johnson-hunters should take heart: a friend of mine recently picked up a copy of Trawl — signed, no less — in Newcastle for 70p.)

The long-term unavailability of these books merely adds fuel to the sense that Johnson has in some way been excluded from the mainstream of British letters written out of its history, if you like. There is a strong B.S. Johnson cult in this coun- try, busy buying up his novels from second- hand bookshops and contributing occasional revaluations to literary maga- zines, and he is much admired in America and Europe, where more of his books are in print. But he has, to an extent, been ghettoised, and what this proves, according to some people, is that Johnson's technical innovations, his radical reappraisal of the novel's formal possibilities, continue to constitute a challenge which is simply too daunting for the essentially timid and con- servative British literary establishment.

As it happens, I don't think this is true. What strikes me most forcibly now, looking back over his work as a whole, is its consis- tent accessibility. In particular, there is nothing at all obscure about the famous `devices' which seem to have caused so much fuss at the time. Take the most well- remembered of all, the `novel-in-a-box', The Unfortunates, which consisted of 27 unbound sections to be read in whatever order the reader chose. Its rationale can be summarised in a sentence: the workings of the human mind are random; this is a novel about the workings of a human mind; therefore it will imitate this randomness as closely as possible. It is nonsense to pre- tend that this concept could have appeared `difficult' to the readership of a country which now puts Salman Rushdie on the bestseller list and awards top prizes to Nicholas Mosley.

Many of his other most talked-about (and supposedly problematic) techniques have since cropped up in books which have won enormous mainstream success. In Travelling People he told every chapter in a different style: epistolary novel, diary, film- script, etc. Does this ring a bell for readers of David Lodge's Changing Places? In See the Old Lady Decently Johnson abruptly breaks off from the narrative to sketch

scenes of his own domestic and family life while writing the novel: was it not just such a moment of authorial intimacy which everybody adored in Julian Barnes's A His- tory of the World in 10112 Chapters? When Peter Ackroyd reviewed See the Old Lady Decently in the pages of this very magazine back in 1975, he sneered at Johnson's `lamentably archaic "experimentation"' and said that

the problem with the whole book. .. is that it is actually an anachronism masquerading as something different and new

Yet the patently Johnsonesque introduc- tion of Ackroyd's own person into the pages of last year's Dickens biography use- fully became one of its main talking- and selling-points.

The poet and novelist Zulfikar Ghose, who knew Johnson well and wrote an immensely moving memoir of him for the Review of Contemporary Fiction a few years ago, casts a different light on the reasons behind his lifelong sense of exclusion. Recalling two separate occasions on which Johnson lashed out at some hapless critic or publisher at a dinner party, he said: Both these men whom Bryan abused belong to a particular class, socially much higher than Bryan's; they are of that group of gifted or fortunate people whose class, together with an Oxbridge education, assures them a privileged position in London's literary power struggle. Bryan despised them: per- haps because they were what he could not be, or because they acquired so easily what he, with his great talent, was denied.

In other words, the forces against which he had to battle went further and deeper than mere literary prejudice. Of course, he was also the victim of his own dogmas, the most tendentious of which was his belief that 'telling stories is telling lies', so that novelists should in effect confine themselves to providing accurate recreations of their own personal experience. This theory was not at all well thought out. Joyce, for instance, who was one of Johnson's great idols, never did any- thing of the sort, neither did Beckett, another mentor. Eva Figes argued the point with him a number of times and pro- vides all that we need by way of counter- argument:

By concentrating too much on form, on liter- al truth, I think Bryan lost touch with an essential, greater truth, that the only way to tell the truth is by lying, and that is the real starting point of meaningful fiction.

But there is no doubting the passion with which he clung to this central conviction, because it burns through the pages of his three most intensely autobiographical books, Albert Angelo, Trawl and The Unfor- tunates. Albert Angelo is, I think, the funni- est of his novels, as well as being a superb, and scrupulously realistic, account of what it was like to teach in a tough London school in the early 1960s. Trawl is more dif- ficult, relying for its effects on dense pat- terns of imagery and plunging the reader into the rhythms of a strange, lurching prose which makes the central metaphor (deep-sea fishing) seem uncomfortably vivid. And the more I read The Unfortu- nates, the more I feel that it represents the peak of Johnson's achievement — the closest he ever came to a perfect blend of personal honesty with formal innovation.

It describes a Saturday afternoon in Johnson's life when, arriving in Nottingham to report on a football match (he was a soccer reporter for the Observer), he realis- es that he remembers the city well for its association with a close friend who 'died an early death from cancer. The novel there- fore combines a sustained lament in the tradition of Lycidas with a vibrant celebra- tion of the sort of provincial intellectual life which tends to go unrecorded in British fiction. And I believe it is this very confla- tion of raw feeling with unrepentant intel- lectual vigour, neither of them masked by any kind of metropolitan smartness, which guaranteed The Unfortunates its muted reception — although naturally the alleged `gimmick' of its presentation provided crit- ics with a ready-made weapon of attack which spared them the trouble of engaging with the book on its own terms.

It is no use urging people to read it now, however, because just about the only ways of finding it are either to go to the British Library or to track down a dealer in first editions — who will let you have it, if you are lucky, for about £60. Meanwhile, your local branch of Waterstones will continue to burst at the seams with novels written at only a fraction of its level of intelligence and commitment. Slowly but surely, the work of one of our finest post-war novelists has been allowed to dribble out of print. Is anyone going to remedy this situation?