Well Done God! Selected prose and drama of B.S. Johnson, Edited by Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan, Picador, 471pp, £25 (hardback)
Since 1999, Picador have taken the lead in making B. S. Johnson’s work available to a new public, republishing five of his seven novels. Well Done God! continues that project. (The title is from a poem by Johnson, included as an epigraph.) Probably no-one will make this book their first encounter with Johnson, but admirers of his novels will find it worth reading for the interest of the material it includes and for the variety of voices in which the author speaks. At £25 for a handsomely produced hardback, it is priced low enough to tempt individual buyers as well as University libraries.
The first one-hundred and forty pages offer a facsimile reproduction of the last book Johnson saw published, the 1973 collection Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs? Its ‘Introduction’ was anthologised in Malcolm Bradbury’s The Novel Today, and its judgements are often quoted in critical discussion of Johnson: ‘Joyce is the Einstein of the novel’, he writes, and if writers will not see this, their work will be ‘anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant and perverse’. The nine short pieces that follow have long been out of print, and for readers wanting to extend their sense of the author’s combative engagement with the forms of literary prose, this will be the most rewarding part of the volume. I return to it shortly.
The book continues with six play-scripts, three published here for the first time. Five were commissioned, and two eventually produced, by organisa- tions including the BBC, Associated TV, the RSC and the Royal Court. They read engagingly, but the radio and TV scripts feel like period pieces and the theatre texts seem unlikely to return to the stage today. The vol- ume ends with a selection of eighteen newspaper and periodical articles.
Most are on literary topics: reviews of plays and novels by Beckett, com- mentaries on Johnson’s own work, reflections on the audience for poetry, polemics about the meagre wages of authorship. Other writing includes reminiscences of schooldays and wartime evacuation and accounts of the 1972 trial of the Angry Brigade (a London-based anarchist collective) and of a trout-fishing competition in Connemara. There are two pieces about football: Johnson, a lifelong Chelsea fan, wrote football reports for The Ob- server between 1963 and 1965. Jonathan Coe’s rightly praised biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, ends with a Checklist of Johnson’s writings, and one can confirm from this that Well Done God! offers a representative sample of the journalistic genres he wrote in and the audiences he addressed.
Coe is one of the editors here, and his collaboration with two academics, Julia Jordan and Philip Tew, illustrates the double nature of the interest now taken in Johnson. While scholarly criticism seeks to establish his place in post-war writing, he has become an emblematic figure for readers, and writ- ers, frustrated by the formal conservatism of English literary novels today. The phrase ‘cult figure’ unsurprisingly crops up on the dust jacket (with its companion phrase ‘experimental fiction’), even though it is beginning to look as if Johnson’s reputation may outlive that of some of his mainstream contemporaries: John Wain’s Hurry On Down, for example, reprinted sev- eral times during the 1950s and 1960s, has been out of print for years. Nonetheless, it is as an avant-garde counter-novelist that Johnson continues to address us. The interest of his prose works seems likely to remain inex- tricably tied to their quarrel with dominant conventions. The holes cut in the pages of Albert Angelo (1964) and the twenty-seven separate booklets that make up The Unfortunates (1969) show Johnson persuading his pub- lishers to produce books that proclaimed their difference from the norm in directly material terms. He disliked the term ‘experimental’ being applied to his work, but the restless search for appropriate form comes through, in much of his literary prose, as a vividly unsettling element. For this readerly experience, ‘experiment’, with its connotations of a testing-out, an unstable process with an uncertain outcome, is an apt term.
The pieces at the start of this volume, those that make up Aren’t You Rather Young…, exemplify this restlessness. All but two of them were written dur- ing the half-dozen years before the collection’s original publication in the year Johnson took his own life. Their composition is contemporaneous, then, with that of three novels that came out in the second half of his brief writing career (The Unfortunates, Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry and House Mother Normal), and of the posthumously published See the Old Lady Decently. This was a prolific period by almost any writer’s standards. Yet these short texts all bespeak, and several reflect on, the mistrust of fiction that we find expressed in the ‘Introduction’. Here Johnson makes clear that he rejected the narrative-driven ‘neo-Dickensian’ novel not just because it was formally anachronistic but because he thought it impossible to ‘convey truth in a vehicle of fiction’. ‘Life’ (he declares) ‘does not tell stories … Telling stories really is telling lies.’
This disregards some obvious aesthetic and philosophical complexities. The ‘Introduction’ is a sequence of polemical provocations, rather than a fully reasoned argument. In any case, both Christie Malry and House Mother Normal depend on a good deal of novelistic ‘lying’. But the texts collected in Aren’t You Rather Young … comply more nearly with the aus- tere, not to say puritanical, view that invention equals falsification. John- son has good grounds for his ‘avoidance of the term short story’ for these pieces, between six and twenty pages long. None of them relies on narra- tive suspense, and they invoke fictional conventions only metafictionally, as if to display the rules being broken.
Two pieces might be classified as quasi-documentary writings: a diligent but not particularly exciting evocation of Bournemouth, and a lapidary, memorable text entitled ‘Mean Point of Impact’. This counterpoints the building of the cathedral of St Anselm, in an unnamed Norman town, with its destruction by artillery bombardment in the Second World War. John- son presents an aural collage of medieval and twentieth-century voices: the cleric John, the builder-architects Elias and Nicolas, anonymous masons and artisans, the battery commander speaking over the radio, and the insub- ordinate cockney gun-crew (‘ … on the bleeding spire, he says, who wants to hit the bleeding spire …’) who will all the same carry out their orders.
The narrator is taciturn, invisible, and the dialogue is subsumed within a factual account that acquires the anonymous authority of a chronicle, even though the cathedral may well be imaginary: I have not been able to iden- tify it with any actual building. ‘Mean Point of Impact’ draws its force from the contrast between creative and destructive action, reminding us of John- son’s sympathy with the anti-militarist spirit of those times, but there is no question of making explicit the implicit moral, which can speak for itself.
In most of the other pieces the narrator is more voluble, as the argument about fiction-making is taken into the texture of the (non-)stories them- selves. Where these don’t quite come off, one is rather too aware of the influence of other meta-fictionists: of Flann O’Brien in one case, and of Beckett in several. Beckett was an equivocal influence on Johnson, encour- aging an inward-looking solipsistic gaze, whereas Joyce productively stim- ulated his desire to represent the world around him better and more truly.
That outward look does find original expression in the first and last pieces. In both, apparently autobiographical situations are presented in ironic jux- taposition with the narrator’s comments on the kind of story they might conventionally engender. The first revolves, or does not revolve, around an enigmatic incident seen on an angling trip: a man steps out of a car and accosts or confronts two other men, one of them holding a gun. Despite its narrative potential (‘I know you love a story with gunplay in it’), the situa- tion is eventually dismissed with the throwaway line ‘But you can provide your own surmises or even your own ending, as you are inclined’. The final piece, ‘Everyone Knows Someone Who’s Dead’, is more sombre. As in The Unfortunates, Johnson’s memorial to his dead friend Tony Tillinghast, fiction’s adequacy is challenged by the invocation of death. The Unfortu- nates sought to embody, and hoped to trump, the arbitrariness of fate and the free-associating inconsequentiality of memory by dissolving the fixed form of the bound book. In ‘Everyone Knows Someone Who’s Dead’, the narrator has bought a copy of the XLCR Mechanical Plot-Finding For- mula, whose interpolated instructions seem particularly crass since he is recalling the suicide of two acquaintances. It’s a much slighter piece, in scale and achievement, than the novel, but here too the question of truth, fiction and writing, although it prompts wit and even facetiousness, is a serious matter, ethical as much as aesthetic.