B.S. Johnson railed intemperately at life, but in his fiction at least he found a lugubrious comedy in human failings. In 1973, aged 40, he killed himself by slashing his wrists in a bath while drunk. Today, in spite of his former high reputation as Britain’s ‘most subversive novelist’, Johnson is pretty well forgotten. On the evidence of the prose and plays collected in Well Done God!, however, it would be a mistake to consign him to the frivolous pastures of the literary bagatelle.
Samuel Beckett, for one, enjoyed the irreverent boisterousness of his writing, and the admiration was mutual. Included here are several articles for The Spectator in which Beckett is hailed as a theologian of doom, whose tramps, waifs and other crotchety moribunds display the compulsive talkativeness of the Irish bar-room virtuoso. (‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’).
Like Beckett before him, Johnson was conspicuous among so-called ‘modernists’ for his refusal to be glum. At the same time he had a grimly puritanical dislike of the imagination and believed that storytelling was a euphemism for lying. ‘How can you convey truth in a vehicle of fiction?’, he asks in one typically scolding essay. ‘The two terms, truth and fiction are opposites.’ Disturbed by this contradiction, Johnson set out to write a series of ‘truth-telling’ novels in which details from his life would provide a documentary authenticity. The best known of these, Albert Angelo, Trawl, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry and House Mother Normal, are republished by Picador with new (or newish) introductions by Toby Litt, Jon McGregor, John Lanchester and Andrew Motion.
In the name of literary ‘truth’, Johnson chose to put the most humdrum of autobiograpical details into these novels. Trawl, published in 1966, includes memories of his Edgeware Road sexual encounters and even the cremation of his Latin teacher in sub-urban Streatham. (The novel fetched up in the Angling section of Foyles.) Albert Angelo, Johnson’s second novel, concerns an aspirant architect who works as a supply teacher in a series of tough north-London schools. Johnson did much the same. But do we need to know about the frequency of his wet dreams and interest in ‘Frenchie packets’ (Durex)? The obsessive re-creation of his past results in mere solipsistic spouting.
The son of a domestic servant, Johnson was born in Hammersmith in 1933 and lived for most of his life in London. At school he was known as ‘Pork and Beans’ (according to his biographer Jonathan Coe) for his podgy, bullish physique. Keen to appear plebeian, he later enjoyed abrasive encounters with Oxbridge literary ‘toffs’ (as he called the Auden and Isherwood brigade). His essays and plays celebrate the ordinary decencies of Lyons Corner Houses, Green Shield Stamps and, in the Monty Python-like gastrodrama, Down Red Lane (starring Simon Callow in a 1974 stage production), the delights and dangers attendant on eating.
Another of his late period plays, Not Counting the Savages, broadcast by the BBC in 1972, revolves round a flasher who skulks in a suburban cemetery, and very disturbing it is too. Johnson’s increasingly alcohol-soaked essays dilate knowledgeably on such subjects as football, James Joyce and the plight of wartime child evacuees (of which the author was one). After the publication in 1973 of Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, his sixth and bleakest novel, Johnson began to drink more heavily. Dipsomaniac self-delusion led him to believe that he was the James Joyce de nos jours; liquor had got him well and truly licked.
His avant-garde devices by this stage included holes cut in the chapters (so the reader could see what was coming) and the use of a Tristran Shandy-esque black page to signify a character’s death by heart attack. Many found the typographical eccentricities tiresome. ‘Johnson’s seriousness is not in doubt; that, alas, is his trouble,’ the London Magazine editor Alan Ross once told me, adding: ‘Most of his so-called avant-garde devices were really awfully childish and silly, but I suppose he had a talent of a kind.’
In Johnson’s most wayward novel, The Unfortunates (1969), the narrator is sent to Nottingham to report on a football match for a Sunday newspaper, when he is overwhelmed by memories of a close friend who died there from cancer. Characteristically, Johnson believed his random recollections of that time conflicted with the physical restraints of a bound book. So he resolved the problem by writing The Unfortunates in 27 loose-bound sections and placing them in a box. The sections could be read in any order.
The book was potentially silly (it was one of the most frequently shoplifted books of the entire 1960s). But on the evidence of the writing contained in Well Done God! Johnson was firmly with Henry Fielding in ‘preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime’. The Hammersmith Rabelais is ripe for reappraisal.
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