B. S. Johnson (1933–1973)

This is a hard novel to assess, for two unrelated reasons.

First, it may be the best of the 1970s style postmodern narratives in which the author continuously reminds the reader that it’s only a narrative, not anything real. If it is the best, it’s because of Johnson’s light touch. The first hint of metanarrative is on the first page. The book begins with a one-sentence paragraph:

“Christie Malry was a simple person.”

There then follows a paragraph describing a stupid decision he show more makes. The third paragraph is again one sentence:

“I did tell you Christie was a simple person.”

The little nag here doesn’t lead to more of the same; instead the novel is punctuated by first-person asides, novelist to reader, in which Johnson tells us he doesn’t need to continue on such-and-such a point, or doesn’t think we want him to, or can’t be bothered. I did not laugh out lout after the first four pages, but these passages are handled very carefully and they are never tedious, as in so many other first-generation postmodern novels. The author’s interruptions are never longer than this:

“I am told one has to put incidents like that in; for the suspense, you know” (p. 107)

In the opening pages Johnson also plays with ridiculously rare words: “exeleutherostomise” (“to speak out freely, especially in an inappropriate moment”), “trituration,” “cryptorchid” (“failure of one or both testes to descend into the scrotum”), “eirenicon” (p. 42).
Toward the end of the book there’s a brief chapter in which Johnson sits down with his main character, Christie, and they talk over the book’s progress. Johnson keeps varying the formula of self-awareness:

“‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said the goodhearted Shrike [Christie’s girlfriend], ‘but how can we be said to be perfectly happy a few lines back, and now be complaining about the monotony of the diet?’
‘Easily,’ smiled Christie.” (p. 139)

“And he had contrived a way of throwing these switches by remote control, so to speak, in an unusual way which I am not going to bother to invent on this occasion.” (p. 101)

The reason all this makes the book hard to review is that it strikes many readers as perfect. At the moment (April 2013) the nearly 500 reviews on Goodreads average 4.5 stars, and there are many five-star reviews on LibraryThing and Amazon. But it’s an odd kind of perfection that appears so closed, so neat, so finished. The humor is pitch-perfect but safe. The many little jokes, together with the brief chapters, the many half-title pages, and the white spaces between some sentences, depressurize an already low-pressure narrative, keeping it perfectly deflated beginning to end.

The second reason this book is hard to assess is that its theme is terrorism. Christie figures that society owes him, so he keeps double-entry books on what he is owed and gives himself credit when he causes mayhem or kills people. There is also an unusual act of cruelty in the book: Johnson gives Christie cancer, and kills him off, apparently with no ill-will from Christie.

I can’t think of a reason why terrorism or cancer should not be treated in a flippant, insouciant manner, but here that carelessness is very hard to understand. It isn’t as if Johnson thinks that serious things need to be deflated: it’s as if he feels they are already deflated: they don’t have much purchase on his imagination one way or the other. This is where it becomes impossible to forget that he committed suicide the same year this book appeared. The book has a particular lack of affect that seems more disconnected than cynical, more neutral than critical. An online reviewer who calls this a “spiteful slip of a novel” may be half right, but I don’t sense the spite, only a memory of what spite once felt like. In that respect this book is entirely different from other novels of disaffected, lower middle class people in the UK in the 1970s, such as Alisdair Gray’s “1982, Janine.”

PS. Among the five hundred or more online reviews I found this one on Goodreads, by someone with the username knig, posted January 17, 2012. It is one of those geeky reviews that takes the author to task for something technical, but this one is a kind of miniature masterpiece in its own right. There are five photocopied sheets of double-entry bookkeeping in the book, showing Christie’s balance sheet from his point of view. (He gets credits for killing people and being a troublemaker, and debits for insults received.) Knig contributes a real accountant’s review of double entry bookkeeping. It’s interesting that his (or her) review is drier than Johnson’s book, and has more affect; for me that shows this book’s lightness and lack of affect. I quote from Knig’s review:

"…what I’ve retained from Accountancy 101 makes me cringe at this blatant misuse of credit and debit. (Done deliberately I believe, as Johnson worked in accounts for six years. He must have had SOME inkling.) Debit does not mean take away from, reduce, diminish or anything remotely like that. It simply means a sum is entered on the left hand side of the equation. Nothing more. Similarly credit. It’s not an increase, just a right hand sum. Not to mention, if your boss shouts and you decide to debit, you can’t credit by shouting back. That’s not double entry, because its the same variable in two different events in the space time continuum. It would have to work a little like this:

"Boss shouts
"Dr Assets (you now have a shout, which you didn’t before you were shouted at).
"Cr Liabilities. Name it anything, like “I’m gonna get you sucka.” (You owe the boss a shout back.)

"Now, when you’re ready to shout back (or kill 300 people or whatever):

"Cr Assets (you’ve just shouted back and depleted your stored shout).
"Dr Liabilities (or the sucka account). (You no longer owe a shout. Accounts are square.)" show less

Not actual memoirs, needless to say, but a collection of short prose pieces Johnson put together during his fellowship at the University of Wales centre at Gregynog in 1970, eventually published not long before his death in 1973. It's most interesting for its Introduction, a kind of artistic manifesto (or maybe he would have preferred "manifest"?) in which Johnson sets out his ideas of what the post-Joycean novel can still do, and goes through his own novels to assess how far he has lived up show more to that. It's where we find his famous diatribes against "fiction" and "stories", neither of which have any place in literature as far as he's concerned. Literature "teaches one something true about life: and how can you convey truth in a vehicle of fiction?" — "Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies."

Some of the remaining items in the collection are rather overwhelmed by their titles: calling a travel piece about Bournemouth "What Did You Say the Name of the Place Was?" leaves us little doubt about how much Johnson is going toile the town, for instance. "Mean Point of Impact" turns out to be a reworking of Golding's The spire under aerial bombardment, whilst "Broad Thoughts from a Home" is a clever but rather too respectful Joyce parody. "These Count as Fictions" starts with a wonderful passage about finding curly hairs embedded in the (shared) soap and drifts into a lampoon of a story-writing manual. Probably the most entertaining piece, though, is "Never Heard it Called That Before", a gloriously surreal exploration of the possible origins of the London street-name "Balls Pond Road". Typically, given what's gone before, about half the pieces in the book are such that any reasonable reader (now that Johnson is safely dead and in no position to get stroppy about it) would have to call them "fiction" and "stories"...!

Johnson was obsessive, amongst many other things, about layout and typography, so it can be no accident that the book is set in Univers with a ragged right margin, and all the titles are in American-style "title-case", where most British publishers at the time would have used sentence case. The sans-serif look is presumably meant as a nod to Bauhaus design ideas, which were very important to Johnson — he quotes Mies van der Rohe in his Introduction, and he had the same three sentences about form and materials pinned up over his writing desk.

An eccentric, funny, but very principled book. Not many people will agree with Johnson's logic, but you have to respect him for it. show less

This is Johnson's famous "book in a box", which comes as twenty-seven separate fascicules, to be read, apart from the ones marked "First" and "Last", in a random order. I don't know what he can do to stop us reading the ones marked "First" and "Last" in a random order as well, if we want to, though. The shortest of the fascicules is only half a page, the longest have twelve pages. Only a few are easily bindable multiples of four, however, so there must have been quite some technical show more headaches involved in making it. The 1999 re-issue includes a further fascicule with the title page and Jonathan Coe's Introduction, which is probably worth having. It's worth having a close look at the box, by the way, as the book's epigraphs from (Samuel) Johnson and Boswell are concealed in unsuspected spots around it.

A football reporter, operating on autopilot, gets off the train in yet another Saturday provincial town to report on a match (which could be anywhere, the teams are simply called "United" and "City"), and it's only as he's leaving the station that he registers that this is actually Nottingham, where he's often come to visit his student friend and literary mentor Tony, who died of cancer not long ago. As we follow the random sequence of the fascicules, the narrator's experiences of his afternoon in Nottingham and the football match are mixed together with memories of Tony, the times they have spent together, and his final illness and death.

The unusual format is probably about one-third interesting experiment and two-thirds publicity stunt, as this is obviously a book that would work perfectly well in conventional form, but it is interesting to catch yourself wondering how he knew you were going to read this particular bit before that bit, or whether there was some subtle trick of suggestion involved in making you choose a particular sequence. Our mind can't help imposing structure on random assemblies, it seems.

As we would expect, there's some clever, witty, touching and very self-critical writing involved, behind the gimmicks. The narrator is digging into his conscience to try to work out how much of his reaction to the death of his friend is purely selfish thoughts about his own loss, and what he could or should have done differently. And there's also a disturbing element of envy — how easy it would be to be dead too. Not now, but...

On the other hand, it's also fascinating to see how Johnson ties in the narrator's seriously literary aspirations (there's no real attempt to pretend that the narrator is anyone other than novelist and part-time sports correspondent B S Johnson) with the more mechanical but still quite demanding work of the football reporter. There's a lovely section in which he takes us through the writing of the match report from kick-off to telephone dictation, including all his false starts, rejected adjectives, tempting puns used and even more tempting ones not used, doubts about apostrophes, and so on. You could probably use it as training material on a journalism course: maybe people do.

Fun! show less

In what would be his last book to be published in his lifetime, Johnson deliberately goes back to the early days of English fiction, with jokey chapter summaries — "Chapter XX: Not the Longest Chapter in this Novel" turns out to be only three lines long — and both the narrator and the characters repeatedly remind us that we are in a work of fiction. When asked by his supervisor why he had arranged his mother's funeral so soon after her death, Christie replies "There wasn't any more time. show more This is a very short novel." At times, the characters stop off to argue with the author — 'you shouldn't be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it' — and at other times the narrator insists to us that there is no independent reality they exist in. If it were only a few hundred pages longer and set in Yorkshire, it would be Tristram Shandy.

But the central structural device of the book goes even further back than that: office-worker Christie Malry reviews his success or failure in life by means of a balance-sheet, just as Robinson Crusoe did. But he takes it a few notches further: where Crusoe used the balance-sheet to demonstrate to himself, against all reason and common-sense, that he was relatively fortunate and should be content with what Fate had delivered, Christie's balance-sheet consistently shows that his account with "Them" is in debit. He tries to resolve this by contriving acts of revenge — against his employers, the state, the world, the universe — that gradually escalate from minor acts of office sabotage (an order for "5 cartons of carbon paper" modified to read "5 tons...") to large-scale acts of terrorism. The latter probably aren't quite as funny now as they were in 1973, when bomb-scares were still something of an amusing novelty for most of us, but it's pretty clear that this isn't a novel that's meant to be read realistically.

As usual, there's a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle wit, a good deal of entertaining sex, and some learned references (lots of citations from Brecht and from Luca Pacioli, the "father of book-keeping", but also an epigraph from Széll Zsuzsa, a literary critic so impressively obscure that he still only has Wikipedia pages in Hungarian and Esperanto!). Great fun! show less