Chased by the ghost of BS Johnson?

AS I POST this, tomorrow
marks the 50th anniversary of the tragic suicide at the age of 40 of the novelist, poet and filmmaker BS Johnson, perhaps best known today for his darkly humorous novel Christie Malry’s own double entry, published a few months before his death.

In this long and no doubt self-indulgent post, which I hope one or two people may fight their way through, I describe how he has kept cropping up in my own life, leading to a curiosity about his work that only in the last few weeks have I satisfied by reading any of it.

For a short but intense period of a few months in the mid-1980s Watford Central Library became something of a home from home for me. I had reached the age of 18 and messed up my schooling leading to an enforced gap year while I tried to get life and education back on track. It felt as though I had squandered my opportunities. So added to an already difficult home situation was a sense of being in disgrace. The library was a refuge.

While trying to sort myself out, I had discovered that other people, the kind that passed their exams and went to university, read proper books, novels and the like. Until then my own reading had consisted mainly of the following: books about rugby; books about pop music; true crime books (influenced by my grandmother) and humorous compilations that were often spin-offs from TV and radio programmes, often received by one family member or another as Christmas presents.

I was trying to get away from these and read some real literature, of which there was much to be found in Watford Central Library. So when I discovered a volume in there entitled Aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs? I didn’t even take it down from the shelf, let alone note the name of the author. Its seemingly whimsical title smacked of light-hearted Radio 4 programmes. I could imagine someone like Robert Robinson asking the question in a jovial way of someone like Nigel Rees. It sounded like the sort of thing I might once have devoured but now wanted to escape.

It took a couple of years to realise my mistake. Having had some success at my educational rehabilitation, I found myself spending a lot of time in the University of Leicester Library, occasionally reading books for my course, more often enjoying the other treasures to be found there. These included bound volumes of back copies of the New Statesman in which I found the columns of Auberon Waugh written during his brief sojourn at the Staggers between 1973 and 1975.

In one untypically poignant column, Waugh described how three times that year he had had to recall articles he had submitted to different publications because the person they were written about had suddenly died. The third of these, BS Johnson, he described as ‘by far the saddest’. It turned out that Waugh had been writing about Johnson’s collection Aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs?, which he described as a ‘serious tract’ containing an ‘impassioned plea for the experimental novelist’.

So the author of Aren’t you rather young…?’ was not a lesser known panel game host but a SERIOUS PERSON. Apparently Johnson argued that film and television could tell stories better than print so novels should ‘concentrate on thought processes.’ In the light of the conclusion I had jumped to, it seemed almost spooky that Waugh owned to having included a review of the book in a list of ‘Christmas “funnies”’ encouraging Johnson to ‘recognise his genius as primarily humorous’, hence why he needed to recall the article on learning of his subject’s suicide.

Waugh tended to disparage any literature that took itself too seriously. Yet amid his negative remarks about experimental literature, he described Johnson’s novel Christie Malry’s own double entry as a masterpiece and suggested that he had been a witting or unwitting influence on Martin Amis’s first novel, which had been published that year. So, curiosity piqued, I added BS Johnson to my ever-growing mental list of authors to read.

Yet it could wait. Looking him up in reference books I discovered a bit more. Coming from an upper-working/lower-middle class background in West London, Johnson had done a variety of jobs before studying English Literature at King’s College London and becoming a writer. In line with his belief that the narrative function of the novel had been eclipsed, he experimented with its form, including its physical characteristics. His second Albert Angelo set out parts of the text in columns with holes cut out in the pages readers to see what happens later in the story.

The Unfortunates was published in 27 loose sections that could be read in any order. In House Mother Normal several elderly residents of a sheltered home, with differing levels of lucidity, related an evening’s events each from a different perspective. The protagonist of Christie Malry’s own double entry applied the principles of double-entry bookkeeping to his own life, finding ever more extreme ways of exacting recompense for perceived wrongs done to him, culminating in poisoning the London water supply.

For me the problem was that reading such stuff seemed too much like hard work. If I was going to turn my attention to books that required work, then I should go for ones that actually were – those required for my studies. Other reading should be for pleasure and BS Johnson’s oeuvre didn't sound like it would be that.

So he dropped down my list, but from time to time kept calling. Some years later I discovered that a film had been released of Christie Malry’s own double entry with a soundtrack by one of my favourite artistes, Luke Haines, former leader of The Auteurs. I bought the CD and could maybe have watched the film. But in a busy life my wife and I try to make watching movies a joint activity and this requires compromise. Strangely, the moment for saying ‘Let’s spend our Saturday evening together watching a film about a man who murders thousands of people by poisoning the water supply, based on a novel by an author who committed suicide a few months after publishing it’ never arrived.

Then I noticed that the novelist Jonathan Coe had written a biography of Johnson, Like a fiery elephant (he being a notoriously big and volatile man) and I read the usually glowing reviews with a certain smug self-satisfaction that I had at least heard of this ‘forgotten’ writer and knew something about him. But it would have felt odd to read a biography of a literary figure whose work I hadn’t ever opened so I let that go by. At the time I was combining work with serving as a councillor and studying for a research degree. Reading books I didn’t need to was a pleasure that had to be deferred.

A couple of years later I downloaded (legally of course) an album by indie-rock band the Pernice Brothers and was surprised to see it included a song called BS Johnson, which in two-and-a-half minutes summed up pretty well the author’s life and oeuvre:

Write a book of leaves shuffled by the wind
Two unbound lives, orderless and grim…

…You were dead by forty-two
There'd be no rigid form for you

For the reasons mentioned above, for many years, and indeed decades, reading BS Johnson seemed to be something to be done sometime in the future.

Recently, though, I have begun to feel that future has arrived. I’m in my late 50s. When my father, a fellow bibliophile, died three years ago I worked out that if I live to be the same age as him and manage to read on average a book a week, that would mean 1,000 more books, which will be a fraction of those I would like to read. I’m already falling well behind target.

So now is the time to start reading the books I’ve always said I’d read and the sad anniversary of Johnson’s death brought him to mind. So in the last few weeks I have read:

• The unfortunates (the ‘book of leaves shuffled by the wind’)

• Christie Malry’s own double entry

• Aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs? (at least the ‘impassioned’ introduction and the short story from which the volume gets its title and one or two of the other pieces inlcuded)

• Like a fiery elephant: the story of BS Johnson by Jonathan Coe

What have I made of it? I’m no Eng. Lit. critic so I don’t attempt any detailed exegesis, merely the observations of a casual reader, but here goes.

Like so many things in life, it was not as hard as I feared. No long, opaque, incomprehensible passages. Johnson wanted to see authors ‘writing like it mattered, as though they meant it, and as though they meant it to matter’ and his own work certainly demonstrates that.

In The unfortunates the protagonist visits a midlands city (clearly Nottingham) to report on a football match and while doing so remembers the illness and death of a friend who had lived there. By any standards it is a powerful piece of writing, the events of the journey interspersed with a portrayal of the effects of cancer on the sufferer and their family and friends. Johnson was also a keen student of architecture and this shows in his descriptive writing, whether of Southwell Minster or the lions in Nottingham’s Old Market Square, all together with a funny account of the main character composing a match report of a rather dull football match.

The book’s presentation in loose leaf sections contained in a box may seem like a gimmick, but was justified by Johnson as demonstrating the randomness of memory. Which may be logical enough, but leaves the reader (or at least this one) fretting after borrowing the book from the library as to whether all the sections are there at the start, whether they are all still there or if one has gone astray, does the introduction by Jonathan Coe count as one of the sections or is that extra and if I’ve lost one how much will it cost to buy the library a replacement copy? And in the end, couldn’t he have just published it as one book with an instruction that all but the first and last bits can be read in any order the reader chooses?

Although more novella than novel (23,000 words) Christie Malry’s own double entry has been hailed as a masterpiece and deserves this status. It’s a very funny book, its humour very dark, and with a vivid portrayal of London in the 1970s. The story is of an accountancy worker applying the principles of double-entry bookkeeping to his own life, a series of slights against him by individuals or society requiring ever more extreme ways of exacting payback, culminating in the aforementioned mass poisoning. The use of graphic features, in this case mocked-up ‘moral’ double entry ledgers to illustrate the plot was another innovation even if I can’t suppress a scowl at the largest debit owed being £311,398 for ‘Socialism not given a chance’. How long have socialists been saying that no real-life government, however much it proclaims its socialism, is ‘truly socialist’ and why has it proved impossible for nominally socialist governments to give socialism a chance? But I digress.

It's a bit sad though to say that the best thing I’ve read on my BS Johnson adventure has not been one of his own books but Jonathan Coe’s biography. I see from the cover it was shortlisted for the 2005 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction and in my view it should have won, an argument I might be better qualified to make if only I had read any of the other shortlisted books.

While Johnson might turn in his grave (if he hadn’t been cremated) at being biographised by a conventional narrative storyteller novelist, what really makes Like a fiery elephant such a success is that it nods to Johnson by putting his writings at the centre of the narrative (each section starts with a passage of Johnson’s writing) with an ongoing thread of authorial intrusion so that it’s not just a biography but a book about writing a biography. It is very much a warts-and-all portrait that gives a clear sense of this brilliant, tortured, misguided and ultimately tragic figure. I would go so far as to say that this is Coe’s best book, if only I had managed to read the others (they are on my list).

To me the tragedy of BS Johnson is the way he stubbornly channelled his remarkable talent up an obvious dead end (‘telling stories is telling lies’). Among the observations from Coe’s interviewees is that Johnson managed to emerge from a humanities degree having learned not how to think, as is supposed to be the point, but rather having adopted one particular thought about the nature of writing that he would never let go of. Another comments that while he wanted to be the greatest novelist of his era, he was intimidated by the Oxbridge varsity novel tradition and so tried to redefine the rules so as to compete on a non-narrative, ultra-realist field where he could be the champion.

As well as the two novels described above, I also read Aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs? or at least parts of this collection of his shorter writings. The eponymous short story, with its gunfight-but-not-quite narrative is rather funny. The ‘impassioned’ introduction less so, but worth reading because it prompted me to think about why Johnson was wrong, why narrative novels still sell and his own belief about the future of fiction was a cul-de-sac. Jonathan Coe comments that Johnson did not see himself as a niche writer but could not understand why his approach was not seen as mainstream. Indeed his regular firing of literary agents and fights with publishers demonstrated an unshakeably conviction that his books should be bestsellers and it was only their ineptitude and laziness that prevented this.

On this point Auberon Waugh’s comment seems most perceptive:

He argued convincingly enough that the narrative function of the novel has been overtaken by cinema and television; that the novel should therefore concentrate on thought processes; nothing could be more relevant than the thought processes of a novelist in sitting down to write a novel; how puzzling it is that few people want to read the product of such correct reasoning.

Jonathan Coe’s point in rebuttal of the notion that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ is that fiction involves a compact between author and reader – both parties know what is going on so no lies involved.

For my own part, back in the day when I was supposing Johnson to be a humorous lightweight, I was pondering whether to study History or Eng Lit. at university, opting in the end for the former, lest the latter spoil my enjoyment of reading fiction.

I learned that writing history too involves making choices about how to present a particular event or theme, selections as to what material to include and what to omit. Indeed in the year of Johnson’s death the American historian Hayden White wrote his seminal book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe about how historians organise their narration events into a coherent story. One doesn’t have to be a total relativist to be aware that even when relating true events one may be telling a story.

Reading two of Johnson’s books more than 50 years after they were published, I didn’t find them that innovative or experimental. The use, for example, of authorial intervention to make clear this was a work of fiction not real life, were used by Johnson’s contemporaries David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury even as they wrote conventional, narrative, varsity (albeit non-Oxbridge) novels. Yet they did this in a playful, postmodern way rather than with Johnson’s gritty deference to Beckett and Joyce.

One wishes he had thought better of his desperate choice, made 50 years ago now to this day. To have achieved the acceptance he craved he would have surely had to shift his thinking and emerged from a dead channel into the mainstream. I was struck by reading that Johnson rejected the cultural changes of the 1960s, flower power and hippiedom not being for him. It put me in mind of another Johnson, Paul, the former New Statesman editor, who while still a socialist wrote of ‘The menace of Beatlism’ before going over to full-blooded Thatcherism. Might BSJ have followed that route too?

We can’t know about that nor how he might have developed as a novelist had he lived. My own BS Johnson odyssey is at an end. There are so many books to read, I’ve done my bit in turning from more pressing things to read a novelist whose works are now mostly out of print and who killed himself 50 years ago. So I’m not doing Trawl or House mother normal. Yet it has been a rewarding experience, enough to make me write this excessively long blog post. It shares with Johnson’s work one thing: that rather fewer people will read it than the effort put in feels like it warrants. I hope you are the person who reached the end and decided to read one of BS Johnson’s books as a result.