October 22-25 1973

Chapter: Fat Man on a Beach

VOICE: This is a film about a fat man on a beach.

VOICE: Did you hear what I said? This is a film about a fat man on a beach.

VOICE: Do you really want to sit there and watch it?

VOICE: Well don't say I didn't warn you.

The voice is unmistakeably Johnson's. The mock-belligerent attention-grabber: "Oi! You!" The statement of fact is "true," yet undercut with self-doubt: "Do you really want to--?"

Johnson's last complete creative work was a thirty minute film for Harlech TV. Title: Fat Man on a Beach. Director: Michael Bakewell. In Bakewell's words, "The film managed to be, against all the odds, a complete summing up of Bryan's character and ideas. Given the events that followed, it's Bryan's buoyancy and cheerfulness that come across. It was an extraordinarily happy time."

Bakewell had sent "a two line idea" to Aled Vaughan, Harlech's controller of programs. The commission that followed was "pure Bryan." The writer who opened his novel Trawl:

I ... always with I ... one starts from and ends with I

was invited to dump himself down in a place of his choice, to play himself, to be writer, narrator, star. Vaughan had shrewdly perceived that Johnson would be inspired by the commission's arbitrary disciplines: "Take a film crew to a beach in North Wales. Make a film of a single day. (In real time it was to be shot in twenty hours spread over three days.) Bring nothing with you, take nothing away." Bakewell says there was some cheating, but not much: "The few things we did bring, essential supplies, were mostly worked into the film: a bunch of bananas, a few fireworks, some shells bought in a shop . . ."

The film's style was well caught by Elkan Allen in The Sunday Times:

A poet of forty wanders about the beach, changes his clothes when he feels like it, reads his poetry, reminisces engagingly, and reflects on life ... Looking rather like Max Bygraves gone to seed, he keeps up a patter full of original jokes, interspersed with powerful verse about life and death.

Returning to the "El Dorado" of his first novel Travelling People, Johnson chose Porth Ceiriad Bay, near Abersoch, in Lleyn.

Harlech commissioned the film in late August and by October 22 Johnson and Bakewell were driving to North Wales to check out the locale. Leaving London at four in the morning, Johnson's mood was "exuberant" as the two old friends talked about the script all the way down in the car. They took a look at the Bay and worked out how they would get film crew and equipment into the inaccessible place.

Following the route taken by the characters in Travelling People, the two visited the country club where most of the novel is set. As in the novel, they drove to Bettws-y-Coed and stopped at the turn leading to the Club:

He took me as far as Bettws-y-Coed, and he said: "I am going down there" and I looked down there and it was a marvelously sunlit glacier valley.

(from Travelling People)

When the novel's protagonist visits the Club later, it lives up to his expectations. He writes to a friend in London:

Sorry to disappoint you, mate, but this place turns out not to be the cesspool you hoped it would be: in fact it's all and more the brochure promised--the Garden of Gorgeous 'ydrangeas is lovely, there is marvellous scenery all round, and the Loggia is romantic ... [ibid]

Bakewell says Lleyn had "romantic associations" for Johnson, and these are underlined by many poems quoted through the film:

Young fellow from Lleyn, who's the girl of your heart, You who wander so late in the evening apart.

The lyric mood is undermined by a number of elements, first the narrator's tragi-comic bulk. The film's most conspicuous feature, the fatness of Fat Man, has been rather overlooked by critics and viewers. This is partly due to its sheer obviousness, and is also the result of the film's camera technique. Johnson's big body is often lost in the landscape, dwarfed by sand, sea, cliffs, sky. Nevertheless the narrator's person is insistently there throughout the film, as this typical shot shows:

As late as September 24, a few days before shooting began, Harlech TV's correspondence referred to the working title, "The Lleyn Peninsular film." Johnson's last minute title "made" the film, it dictated its downright mood and tone. Whatever role Chance played in the film's writing and production, the title was deliberately chosen and deeply felt, the culmination of a lifetime's living with his own large body.

Three close friends and fellow writers give their impressions of the man and their sense of how he saw himself:

Peter Buckman recalls: "Bryan claimed it wasn't eating or drinking that made him fat, it was `all in the genes.' We had a long discussion about the different types, big bones and little bones, long-headed and fat-headed. Bryan's excuse was that that was the way he was born, his size didn't matter because it was right for him."

As Barry Cole saw it, "Bryan's big worry was his weight. Naturally huge, he cossetted his grossness with a gourmet's self-indulgence. To his friends, Bryan's weight was normal, but to him it was a burden, usually borne with the stoicism he publicly maintained. But he was huge. By the end he must have been eighteen stone. He was a great trencherman, great beer drinker, wine drinker, spirit drinker, social drinker. He loved going to pubs, but drinking with Bryan could be difficult. There was me at ten and a half stone and Bryan at eighteen, and in a pub you buy each other drinks ... He was not particularly tall, but he bulked large. He was broad, huge arms and thighs. Orson Welles had the same bulk, similar features, and the same intensity too."

Zulfikar Ghose writes: "When driving through France with Bryan, I noticed something about him that I had not remarked earlier. For some reason (e.g. going into different shops) we would part, and looking for him, I invariably found him in the patisserie devouring considerable quantities of cakes. Even in London, he had been a compulsive eater between meals. When we left pubs at closing time, he would make for a fish and chips shop or, when in Soho, the place in Great Windmill Street that sold salt beef sandwiches. But I had never seen him eat so many sweets before. And when I received news of his death, one of the images that came to my mind was seeing him in one of those patisseries, gluttonously thrusting a large quantity of cream, sugar and pastry into his mouth, almost as though his body were driving him to make up some obscure chemical deficiency, and I have often wondered whether, instead of some mental state, it was not some physical state, obscure but subtly malignant, the body constantly making its insatiable demand, that drove him to his terrible end."

The touch of cruelty in Ghose's description may be due to its being written in the aftermath of his friend's death, and the mix of grief and anger that greeted it. Johnson did not just guzzle his food, he enjoyed it, and shared his pleasure with his friends. Ghose had countless happy meals with Johnson, Peter Buckman also: "Bryan was always celebrating, always producing a bottle of wine. We would go out together and get very merry." Michael Bakewell and Diana Tyler were Johnson's trusted friends as well as his literary agents. When they speak of him, the word they use most often is "celebration." Another friend remembers "the physical bulk that did not prevent a lightness of touch, a nimbleness on his feet, as sprightly as Brendan Behan dancing an Irish jig, his body towering over his twinkling feet."

In his brilliant screenplay Not Counting the Savages, Johnson shows how well he understood the temptations and miseries of gluttony. The protagonist of this ferocious study of family hates is an "ugly, lumpish" fifty-year-old Husband. He opens the play "getting down to his food piggishly." He finishes his main course and follows it with a whole Camembert before a word is spoken. The play then explores the Husband's crapulence with pitiless ingenuity: feeding your face reverses the life-giving function of food. Sustenance becomes its opposite, a means of self-destruction. When he published the play in the Spring 1973 issue of Transatlantic Review, Johnson chose this drawing as its illustration:

[illustration not available]

And this is the cover of the notebook in which Johnson wrote the script of Fat Man on a Beach:

[illustration not available]

Johnson chose his stationery with unusual care:

I carry little notebooks, about three inches by five. I buy them in Paris actually ...

It was no accident that Fat Man came to be inscribed in this particular pad. Johnson closely identified with his namesake, the more so since making the TV film On Reflection: Sam Johnson in 1971. Apart from the attraction of Dr. Johnson's personality and inimitable writing style, those Johnsonian jowls made B.S.'s own appearance more acceptable.

If Dr. Johnson ranked as exemplar and general inspiration, the other model for Fat Man was Jarry's Pere Ubu, as this pair of portraits suggests:

The two shared more than body weight.

FLUNKEY: Sir, there's a bloke out there who wants a word with you. He's pulled the bell out with his ringing, and he's broken three chairs trying to sit down. (from Pere Ubu)

That could as well be Johnson as Ubu at the door.

He demonstrated that the beginning of wisdom lies where true stoicism meets profound epicureanism. Said of Jarry, this applies equally to Johnson. If Jarry was a twentieth-century Rabelais, Johnson's identification was with Sam Johnson and Sterne.

Fat Man is as ego-centred as Ubu, but as ever "the opposite is also true." All films are to some extent collaborations, but Fat Man was the product of a peculiarly intimate interweaving of talents. First was that between Johnson and Michael Bakewell, his long-time co-worker and friend. The previous year, the two had worked together on Hafod a Hendret, a TV film also for Harlech. Its success had ensured the freewheeling commission for Fat Man. This time, Bakewell says, "I did far more directing, because Bryan was fully occupied with writing and acting."

The collaboration extended to the whole of Fat Man's film crew. They dined together every night, and the film's ideas evolved around the table. Bakewell says, "The drinks bill was gigantic, expenses generally were monumental. At one stage we had to conceal them under 'Hire of boat.'"

Whatever others contributed, Johnson was the writer on the set. Bakewell says, "When everyone else had tumbled into bed, Bryan would take a huge bottle of wine up into his room, lock himself in, and steadily evolve the script. Next morning he was always last to arrive, but then he would use his notes from the night before to improvise that day's shooting ... For myself, I found working with Bryan quite easy in a sense. I understood his mind, I knew his passions and had heard his stories. It was just a matter of finding ways to embody them."

Telling old tales and experiences he had carried with him for half a lifetime gave Johnson an ease and spontaneity before the camera that made Bakewell think "this is the way Bryan might well have developed, talking direct to the TV audience. He did it in his TV film on Dr. Johnson. Now the technique came into its own."

Johnson's engaging directness helped him get away with stories like the one about

the girl being taken to the pictures by a man and he said: "We are going to see a film about whales." And she said: "I am not terribly keen on Taffies as you know." He said: "No, not that kind of Wales. The film is called Moby Dick." And she said, "I don't like sex films either."

Silly poems too:

Mary had a little lamb, She put it in a bucket And every time the lamb got out, The bulldog tried to put it back again.

Followed by Johnson's characteristic "Ho, ho, ho, ho." This was all part of his high-spirited attempt to dismantle the conventions of the serious TV documentary. When the film was shown on the first anniversary of Johnson's death, The Sunday Times compared it to Peter Ustinov's The Mighty Continent, three and a half years in the making. Fat Man, shot in less than a week, "will be remembered long after the other is forgotten."

If this had been all there was, Fat Man would have been no more than Goonery, or a souped-up Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film. Johnson's underlying seriousness is shown by his daring juxtaposition of these jollifications with poetry of a high order, among them Porth Ceiriad Bay, written years before on his first visit to Lleyn:

Descended to the shore,
odd how we left the young girl with us to herself,
and went straight to examine the stratified cliffs,
forgot her entirely in our interest.

You marvelled at the shapes the clockwork sea had worn the stone,
talking keenly,
until the pace of this random sculpture recalled your age to you,
and then its anodynes.

And so you turned,
pretending youth,
courting the girl as if you were a boy again,
leaving the wry cliffs to their erosion and me to my observant solitude.

[1964]

Those "stratified cliffs" are maybe a too obvious reminder of times past, but they underline the film's various levels of action and meaning. In Travelling People's prose version of the scene described in the poem, the protagonist looks out to the sea that laps the Bay and calls it "the snotgreen gannetsbath (syzygy of Ulysses in mind)." Earlier in the film, Johnson says he is "besotted with Beckett and Joyce." So the girl observed on the beach surely recalls Gertie MacDowell "on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore" in Joyce's Ulysses.

The film's basic "wanderer" theme also derives from Joyce. The day spent mooching around a beach is grounded in Bloom's day in and around Dublin. Starting with reminders of Travelling People, the "wanderer" appears in the film in many forms. Johnson's chance meeting with a friendly dog suggests Odysseus greeting his old friend. There are signs of Sinbad, Childe Harold also, Robinson Crusoe is there, complete with footprint in the sand. Fat Man is engaged on an "uncertain quest in search for peace" with a bunch of bananas in place of the Holy Grail. All through, Joshua Rifkin plays Scott Joplin, with a hint of stride piano, at an appropriate jog trot.

Porth Ceiriad Bay's last line leaves the narrator to his "observant solitude" and Johnson clings to that, as he wanders across the beach, whatever his excursions and distractions. He is amused and interested but undeterred by screaming seagulls, exploding light bulbs, a child's umbrella stuck in the sand, bunches of bananas, a broken altar candle, a dead sheep, footprints in the sand, changing weather, changing clothes, two blue toy inflatable rubber whales, frying sausages, shop-bought shells, exploding fireworks, breaking waves, skullcap, brass tack, an outsize paperclip, a Labrador dog, the remains of two sandals, a Schweik doll, a mirror found in the sand.

The succession of random events and lucky finds is not as haphazard as it seems. Johnson's constant changes of clothes, jump-cutting from brown sweater to green, pink-striped shirt to white, are not only designed to give away the tricks of the film maker's trade, they are fine sideswipes at those costume epics whose wardrobe budgets would have paid for Fat Man five times over. The sequence of constant shifts comments on time passing, role playing, the futility of everyday living.

For Johnson "art by accident" was a serious matter. Like Eisenstein leaving a door open on the set "for the unexpected to come in," or Flaherty letting the unaimed cameras run in Man from Aran, Johnson revelled in the paradox of "deliberate uncertainty." The whole film was a "found object," but the accident was just sufficiently contrived. Johnson and Bakewell set things up so things would happen.

Being able to trust their instincts and one another, produced in the two film makers an exhilaration that was shared by the camera crew. The collaboration already mentioned fed its own arbitrary element into the chance process. Cameraman Mike Reynolds had the idea of "treating the camera as if it were a dog." Johnson instantly knelt down, "patted it":

Come along. This way ... Not so fast. Down boy. Down. That's a good boy. Sit. Camera "sits."

Spontaneity and Chance work together to disarm the writer. His unconscious acceptance of "anything that comes along" can lead him into dangerous waters. Fat Man's plethora of death images--the more striking for their juxtaposition with moments of exuberance and celebration--are sadly prophetic.

Johnson relishes these morbid scenes:

At the foot of the cliff he finds a dead sheep. Zoom in to close shot of its bloodied head.

He recalls a road accident seen nearby years ago, remembered with utter clarity:

There had been a crash between two cars and a motor cycle ... the rider of the motor cycle had been thrown across the road and had hit a wire fence ... and the wires had gone through him like a cheese cutter through cheese ...

Less gruesome but equally telling is the aimless violence: he throws stones at piles of stones, "stamps on a bunch of bananas," smashes a light bulb, explodes fireworks in a cave to scare the screaming gulls. These are the actions of a disturbed child. They bear out Michael Bakewell's prescient words: "Bryan could pass from incredible jollity to total belligerence to incredible pain within five minutes. We shared a room while making the earlier film Hendret, and Bryan was always moaning and shouting in his sleep. He was obviously deeply disturbed in his dreams. One got the impression of a terrible restless spirit going on inside."

In this context, visual jokes worthy of Buster Keaton or Beckett seem somehow grim, as when Johnson responds to the old philisophical questions:

I'll have to go away and think about it. He paces back and forward ... As he paces he wears a deep trench in the sand--and falls into it.

Digging his own grave, but it is done with a chuckle. He explores his private dreads, but with lugubrious glee. Suicidal maybe, po-faced never. Each image has its other side. Building a column of stones then pelting it with stones is futile, but it is also a way of coping with the tedium of "a day by the sea," and it brings back those seaside holidays spent with Mum and Dad "before the war." Exploding fireworks are violent, but they make a lovely bang. (That the rockets produce their spermatozoic fizzle inside a womblike cave only makes the equation more interesting.)

Johnson's "high spirits in hard times" were partly due to the delight he always felt at being back in Wales. After the trip that produced Travelling People, Johnson returned for the next three summers to work in Lleyn. In 1970 he had a wonderful six months as Gregynog Writing Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

In Fat Man, a "Welsh Voice" calls out: "What can an Englishman know about Wales?" Johnson replies with his fine translation from "the great Welsh poet David ap Gwilim." The first stanza of Seagull:

Gull all grace on the flood tide
Mailed hand of sea salt.
Moonlight white, reflected snow.
Perfect lily of the wave's valley.
Fish fattened, cork-like coaster, shining piece of paper.

But the poem that most clearly, even tenderly, conveys Johnson's connection with Wales, is the one he wrote for his Welsh film Hafod a Hendret (Winter home, Summer home):

Once at Gregynog, not long after arriving, we walked across a field maculate with snow and lambing blood and amongst the scattered animals came upon a lamb so newly born it had not yet laid eyes on its dam:

some instinct set it unsteadily towards us as though we must have caused the monstrous expulse it had suffered ... it parallels the raw helplessness

I feel in moving towards your so much benigner and more properly valued older civilisation:

a feeling I have hardly had since bribing glass in hand outside a pub I was a child waiting for parents.

Michael Bakewell describes how the two of them went about filming the sequence that went with the poem: "It wasn't easy to find a new born lamb actually staggering about. Bryan got to know an old shepherd by playing cribbage with him in a pub, night after night, and eventually he led us to the lamb..." Making the film was fun, but being in Wales brought back memories of Johnson's separation from his parents--for Johnson the seminal experience, even in the trivial context of waiting for them outside a pub. Johnson's overwhelming love for his mother had recently been intensified by his close attendance at her agonising death from cancer. To connect waiting for his mother with "moving towards" Wales was an indication of his love for what had become his mother country.

In Fat Man, the Welsh Mother Goddess appears to Johnson on "a mountain called Carn Fadrun on Lleyn." He tells how he found himself one morning "at dawn on top of that mountain, almost not of my own volition and stripping off all my clothes and making what I can only think of as religious gestures--worshipping some sort of female deity."

That surrender to impulse, that acceptance of the instinctive self, was in line with the spirit and content of Fat Man on a Beach. The man's integrity gives him dignity, as he alternately ambles about and skips around, playing games, confiding secrets, being himself to the bitter end.

The film's conclusion is prefigured by the couplet that ends "Young Fellow from Lleyn":

Dark, dark is my lover and dark-haired is she And white shines her body like foam on the sea.

Only months before, Johnson's friend, the novelist Ann Quin, had walked into the sea at Brighton, and drowned. Michael Bakewell describes the film's final scene as "a reenactment of Ann Quin's death." The script states simply:

BSJ walks determinedly towards the sea ... He goes on walking until he is lost beneath the waves.

Bakewell says "Bryan was determined that he would not suffer from the simulated suicide, so we made enormous preparations for bringing him back from death, pouring brandy down his throat, rubbing him down with hot towels. As Bryan would only do it once, we had to get it right first time, so we rehearsed it over and over again."

October 26-November 13 1973

Chapter: Home. Means Her

Home. Means her. . . . . . . . . . . Good, for a start, that I think of

her, Ginnie, in connection with home, home not in the sense of my

home, I have no home: there are the flat I rent and my parents'

home: but neither of these is truly my home. I can form the

concept of my home, though, I can see the desirability of having a

home. Which means her, in that home, making that home: with me.

I'll rest there.

(from Trawl)

Back home, Johnson tried to get to grips with the work that had piled up while he was in Wales. There was plenty to do. Michael Bakewell says, "Bryan was doing too much! The Matrix Trilogy was a full-time occupation in itself. To do that, and Fat Man, and edit two books, and to do the other teleplays, and the Writers' Union stuff, and everything else, meant he was incredibly fully extended."

"Everything else" included six scripts for Thames TV's schools' programs, publicity interviews for the publication of Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?, decisions to be made about the Danish and Swedish translations of Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, correspondence with his US publisher Dick Seaver, work on a new book of Welsh/English poetry, selection and revision of his own poems for Penguin Modern Poets 25.

Bakewell wanted to start work on editing Fat Man, but two things prevented Johnson from meeting him to discuss this. First was the priority Johnson gave to The Matrix Trilogy. This ambitious project was begun soon after his mother's death in 1971. Johnson's Notes on the Trilogy record its "Three interlinked themes":

1) the death of my mother 2) the decay of the mother country 3) the renewal aspect of motherhood paralleling the cancer she died of with the decline of Britain over the last forty years.

See the Old Lady Decently, the first of the three novels, had been delivered to Hutchinsons on October 1, 1973. Charles Clark, managing director, and Johnson's editor, had some fundamental reservations about the book (though he published it unaltered in 1975). Johnson was preoccupied with Clark's critique. At the same time, he was mapping out the second novel, provisionally titled Buried Although. See the Old Lady ends with the author/protagonist's birth in 1933. Extant notes for the second novel take the story through to 1945.

The Trilogy was Johnson's most complex and challenging work to date. Given this, and its close connections with mourning his mother, he was determined to give it priority over his mass of other commitments, as this Note to himself makes clear:

[not available]

Further work on the Trilogy, on Fat Man, or anything else, was soon to be out of the question. Something happened to incapacitate Johnson entirely. It was to do with his wife Virginia.

Diana Tyler, Johnson's trusted friend and indefatigable literary agent, recalls: "When Bryan came back from Wales, obviously something had been simmering. The first I knew that anything was wrong was when he telephoned me at home at about eight o'clock on Sunday morning. I was in bed asleep. He was very distraught. He said, `You know Virginia is thinking of leaving me?' I said, `Don't be so ridiculous, what are you talking about?" I thought he was overreacting to a minor matrimonial problem. He came over to the house and spent the day with me. He was clearly upset, but by the end of the day he seemed OK. He was listing how much work he had on, he would talk things over with Virginia, they would go back to counselling."

Sunday with Diana must have done Johnson some good because on Monday he was able to attend to one of his lighter chores: commissioning contributions to You Always Remember the First Time, the book he was editing for Quartet. Michael Bakewell says that the collection "added considerable zest, dynamism and embarrassment to the year, with Bryan dashing off letters to the most improbable people, asking them about their first sexual experience." Contributors included Brian Aldiss, Larry Adler, Peter Buckman, Barry Cole, Giles Gordon, Ruth Fainlight, Michael Moorcock, Jeff Nuttall, Philip Oakes, Giles Playfair and Emma Tennant. Replies from those who could or would not contribute are often as revealing as those who appeared in the book.

Dame Sybil Thorndike's secretary wrote:

Dame Sybil could not possibly write what you ask. She is far too busy, and does not find the subject very interesting.

Malcom Muggeridge pleaded "pressure of work," Sean Connery regretted that he "did not have anything worth contributing to the book." Rayner Heppenstall recalled Johnson's previous anthology All Bull and suggested the new one be titled All Cock. Germaine Greer felt she must

resist the temptation to tell the story (which is droll and dull and ghastly) ... Besides, he and I are still friends and sometimes even lovers ... I wouldn't dream of retelling the story without the connivance of both him and his wife, who is one of my best friends.

Johnson's last commissioning letter reads:

is it 29th or 30th Oct 1973

I can't sleep anyway Dear Delicious Ingrid Pit:

I was delighted, as I said, that you were interested in doing the piece for You Always Remember the First Time; and so sorry that you had so much trouble reaching me. As I told you, I have been in the middle of an absurd but deadly serious marital disaster since I returned from filming in Wales last Saturday; and god knows what happened before that.

But that is not the point, anyway.

I'm especially pleased to hear that your piece will be hilarious . . . You don't know how much I'm looking forward to reading what you write ...

And thanks for the consolation about the universality of the marital condition, Sincerely,

Johnson spent much of the rest of the week with Diana Tyler at MBA Agency's offices in Tottenham Court Road, or on the phone to her at home: "Bryan was very unhappy. Whatever had been talked about in counselling had obviously upset him. I told him Virginia just wanted a break, which was perfectly normal. But Bryan took it that she wanted out. I said that was an overreaction, but Bryan remained extremely disturbed about the whole thing. He had a very narrow view of marriage: everybody had to be faithful. He would not acknowledge that there could be other loves in people's lives. He thought there may have been somebody else in Virginia's, but he could not accept that it could ever happen."

Johnson's puritanical view of marriage is duplicated in Zulfikar Ghose's experience of his concept of friendship:

Bryan's demand for unquestioning devotion was a measure of his love.

The extraordinary intensity of Johnson's need for undeviating loyalty was matched by his terror of abandonment. His first great betrayal (as he saw it) had happened in 1939 when he was six, and evacuated at the start of the war. This italicised cry from Trawl he reprinted as part of his contribution to The Evacuees:

Why am I parted from my mother and sent away to live with strangers?

He worries about the reason, the causes, the extent of his rejection:

The worst would be that my mother had had enough of me and was glad I was off her hands and did not wish to see me back again ...

(from Trawl)

Barry Cole believes "that that separation damaged Bryan irreparably. His references to it were constant and maintained the tone of dismal pessimism which invariably marked his depressions." Certainly, the idealisation of Mother and certain women able to play that role, and fear of betrayal by them, is a recurrent theme in Johnson's fiction.

Johnson's study of mother love in See the Old Lady Decently was based on his study of Erich Neumann's The Great Mother, which is quoted throughout the novel. This illustration is taken from the comprehensive collection of artworks that forms an appendix to the book.

The weekend of November 3 and 4, the Johnson family spent with the Buckmans at their cottage in the Oxfordshire village of Little Tew. This was a regular jaunt for them and was usually a happy time. With marital tension in the air, the prospects were not good, but Rosie Buckman recalls: "Bryan and Virginia were very civilised, there was no sniping between them, just maybe a shared sadness. The men went for long walks with lots of pub sessions. Virginia and I were left with the kids. Virginia just said things weren't going too well. She didn't want to talk about it. Anyway, with Steve and Katie, and our two, it was impossible to have a conversation with little kids rushing around."

Johnson's dismissal of the children was not like him, and a sure sign of something wrong. Normally, as Peter Buckman recalls: "Bryan was very good with children. He'd draw them into the conversation. It was never ,adults sitting here and discussing important matters,' with the kids scrabbling around on the floor being ignored." This is confirmed by countless references in Johnson's fiction. The narrative of See the Old Lady is interrupted from time to time, "as in life," by the advent of the author's daughter:

During the above my daughter came up into my room, practising her writing before going to bed. BOOTS and SNOW are the words she likes best ... Now she is drawing round her hand, one at a time, with my red pens, one after the other. Do you like this? She is fluttering the paper at my elbow, demanding attention. I give it her, telling her to put it where I can find an envelope for it in the morning. Suddenly she leaves the room, not saying Night Night, and the loss is noticeable. I call her, she does not return. The loss is

The Johnsons were driving back on Sunday afternoon. They had packed up all their things, and the children were running into the car. Johnson came downstairs and he stood at the bottom of the stairs. Rosie Buckman: "Bryan stood there with this face, his face was always very expressive, and he had this hangdog look, that's the only expression, everything slightly drooped, his eyes terribly sad. He gave this funny smile and said, 'Well, maybe we're going to laugh about this one day.' Apart from goodbye, that's the last thing I remember Bryan saying."

A few days later the Buckmans received through the mail a copy of Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? inscribed

For Peter and Rosemarie with much love and such thanks on this unhappiest of days.

Bryan. 4.11.73

As an indication of his mood swings, or at least his ability to present different faces to different friends, Johnson sent this matter of fact note to Barry Cole on November 3:

Dear Barry: Here's the letter I mentioned on the phone today. Hope it leads to something of mutual benefit--if it's any good I'd recommend Quartet as the first place to try it. Yrs B

Over the years, Johnson had sent hundreds of similar bits of advice to fellow writers. At a difficult time, it was typical of him to find time for this one.

That week, Johnson also sent f5 to his Union strike fund, to aid ACTT members locked out in the long-running Kodak Hemel Hempstead dispute. Like the note to Barry Cole, this seems a minor act of generosity. But, as personal chaos threatened, both actions were also tapping in to sources of strength in Johnson's life. His comradeship with other writers empowered him as well as them. His trade union activism was part of his allegiance to the working class:

The class war is being fought as viciously and destructively of the human spirit as it ever has been in England: I was born on my side, and I cannot and will not desert: I became an enlisted man consciously but not voluntarily at the age of about seven.

(from Trawl)

These old loyalties were threads that bound him to life. The marriage bond was breaking, and resulting tensions made work impossible. Johnson turned to the lifelines still there for him, friendship and habit. The two brought him naturally to the "Quartet" pub on Friday evening, where as usual he met John Booth of Quartet, and Diana Tyler, his trusted friend in good times and in bad. Johnson had in his arms a great bunch of red roses, to take back to Virginia. He left his friends in cheerful mood: "It's all going to be lovely now, tonight we're going to make love, and everything's going to be fine."

On the morning of Saturday November 11, Johnson phoned Diana at home. He asked her to come over to the house in Dagmar Terrace, the home he and Virginia had bought together in 1970. Diana found Johnson alone. He had no idea where Virginia was, she had left the day before and taken the children. "Bryan told me what he had done. He said he had become violent. At the time, it did not sound much to me, but clearly it had been enough to frighten Virginia. He told me to stay, he wanted somebody there, he did not want to be on his own, so I spent the day with him."

Although she had been there many times before, Johnson took Diana through the house. It was part of a modest terrace, but well designed and made, nicely furnished, with a cheerful aspect from the late autumn sun pouring through the windows. "Bryan showed me all his work, in his tiny attic study, on his desk, in the drawers. I thought, he's in a strange mood, he wants me to see everything he's written." Then he got on the phone to Samuel Beckett:

who of all living is the man I believe most worth reading and listening to

(Memoirs)

"Bryan rang nobody else that day. He kept trying to get through to Beckett.

"For lunch we went to the pub and had a drink. Bryan said, `I think it would be nice to start again with somebody,' but he did not say who. He said he needed `order' but whatever had happened on Friday night had been `disorder.' I don't know, I could not work it out. He was quite dangerous that weekend, in a funny kind of way I sensed danger. Yet I did not think of getting help. I thought he was in control.

"In the early afternoon, Bryan said he was having dinner that night with an old friend he'd known in Paris: `Before that I'm going up to have a sleep, will you wake me at four o'clock?' He put an alarm clock in front of me. I thought, `Well, here I am, sitting here . . .' I read a book and woke him at four. Bryan came down and said `I have to be at Ladbroke Grove by six.' I said, `Well that's good, I will drop you off.' He said he would be staying the night. I was relieved to hear that because I did not want him to be on his own. As we left the house, he said, `Wait a moment,' and he went back and put all the lights on. In the car he said he wanted to leave the house as if there were people in it, as if Virginia and the kids were still there. He did not want to get back on Monday to a darkened house."

Six years earlier, when he and Virginia were living in a flat in Myddelton Square, and they had one child only, Johnson had written, in The Unfortunates:

Steven will be in bed, but I can still look at him sleeping, my son, the warmth of returning, to Ginnie, to our son, the flat will be lit as I come across the Square, always stands out, as we do not have curtains, being on the second floor, and warm, Ginnie perhaps sewing, how oldfashioned a picture it seems, warmth, I can enjoy this for now, must, it is all there is.

That Sunday night, Johnson rang Diana from Ladbroke Grove to say he was OK. "For weeks he had been ringing me whenever he went anywhere or saw anyone. He seemed to be ringing every half hour. I said to my husband Bill: `It's a good sign he's doing that.' Bill was the most understanding of people, but he did not quite know what was going on. Such things are not unusual in an agent's life, but this was extreme. Michael (Bakewell) was busy and unable to help, and anyway Bryan was asking for me not Michael, as if I had to be the one who was there."

Diana was watching over Johnson, but she did not think in terms of suicide. She trusted him, she trusted him to get through it. She knew where he was staying on Sunday night, and she had arranged to meet him at her office on Monday at four. She assumed they would have a drink after, as usual. He had to deliver a script to Thames TV beforehand, and he would not miss that deadline.

Unknown to Johnson, his wife had gone with the children to the Buckmans at Little Tew. She arrived on Saturday, towards the end of the day. She said there had been a bad scene between her and Bryan, he had been violent, he had "shown her a side she had never seen before." When the kids were playing together, she took Rosie to one side and said, "Look, I don't want to alarm you, but don't--don't open the door to anyone, and don't let the children out in the garden for the time being." She made sure all the doors were properly locked.

Peter Buckman: "We were frightened for the kids, and for ourselves, because of that vein of violence in Bryan that was always there, running just beneath the surface. I had seen it before, but never worried about it. That was the only time, because I was afraid he would come here with an axe."

A feature of Johnson's social life was the way his various groups of friends were kept separate, one lot being barely aware of the other's existence. So it happened that while Diana Tyler watched over Johnson during these difficult days, Barry Cole and another of Johnson's most loyal friends, the painter John Furse, were keeping an eye on him at night. The two shifts never overlapped, and neither knew what the other was doing.

At about six o'clock on the evening of November 12, Johnson phoned Barry Cole, as he did several times a week. They were near neighbors, and they went for a drink at Dirty Dick's around the comer. As usual, they played electronic bar football. Johnson was a fanatic player who hated to be beaten. He played with ferocity that night, pulling the little plastic levers, up to kick forward, down to bring the ball back. One lever had lost its plastic cover, so a little piece of steel jutted out. At about 9:30 Barry noticed his friend's left hand was bleeding. He suggested they call it a day, but Johnson, who was losing, played on. He wrapped his hand in a dirty handkerchief which was soon dyed bright red, and continued the game until closing time.

Barry Cole continues: "I went home with Bryan and stayed the night, to make sure he didn't do anything. For weeks John Furse and I had taken it in turns to watch over him, because Bryan had told us he planned to kill himself. I realised `you can't stop someone taking his life' but I waited around while Bryan dressed his hand. I made coffee, and while we were drinking it I told him, `People love you Bryan, they admire your writing.' But his eyes were blank, as if he hadn't heard a word, and I left about 2 AM."

For the next hours Johnson was alone in the house. He does not seem to have tried to find out where Virginia and the children had gone. The Buckmans were an obvious refuge, but he did not phone them. The weight of inertia and exhaustion counteracted any desire to go in search of his family. He could not pursue Virginia, he could only wait for her. In despair, home was the only place for him. It was the end of his wandering, the completion of The Great Round.

The Great Round

(from The Great Mother)

On November 13, Michael Bakewell and Diana Tyler were having lunch at an Italian restaurant in Tottenham Court Road, when Diana was called to the phone. She recalls: "It was Ginny. I said, `Well, where are you?' I was slightly cross in a way. I did not know where she was. She said she was back from the country, not at home but close by, and somebody should go into the house. I said, `Oh, Bryan's fine. He said he'd be at the office at four.' She said, `Well I think we should get someone. . .'She had obviously seen something, she had been in part of the house, or someone had, I don't know. I went back and told Michael and everybody brought us brandies."

Virginia had previously phoned Barry Cole, and while she was talking to Diana, he arrived. Barry went into the house and found the body. He dashed over to MBA's offices and told Michael and Diana. They took him to the restaurant where they had been eating, and Michael said, "Get this man a large brandy." Barry drank it, then left alone for his own home.

Shortly before he died, Johnson broke in half a painting by John Furse which had hung in his study for several years. Among the notes he left behind was one which explained the damage to the painting as "an accident." There was no will. Only a note stuck to a half-empty bottle of brandy: "Barry, finish this." Barry drank the brandy, then smashed the bottle.

When the Buckmans heard the news, they took some china plates into the garden and smashed them.

Mike Moorcock's response was a volley of curses: "That fucking man! That fucking man! That fucking sodding bloody bloody bloody man!"

Zulfikar Ghose was in Austin, Texas. He wrote later: "When I received the cable BRYAN DIED SUICIDE I said Fuck you Bryan and went out to the garden and found things to do muttering Fuck you Bryan I could not look at his books again gave away his letters to the university could not phone Virginia did not see her on subsequent visits to London because I did not want to see him not there and remain pissed off with him for ten years always muttering Fuck you Bryan and then writing this going to the library to look at his letters again ten years later the sight of them the humour the passion the rage ten years later taking down his books from the shelf and then writing suddenly at last I am crying like a bleeding child Fuck you Bryan."

Michael Bakewell remembered the change that followed the making of Fat Man: "When the film was finished Bryan suddenly cut himself off ... everything kind of submerged after that. I felt a bit deserted, but so did everybody."

Samuel Beckett wrote to Michael Bakewell:

Dear Michael

Thanks for yours of 14.

I learnt the shocking grievous news at end of last week.

I have had a brief card from Virginia.

I missed T.C. in Paris.

It wd be good to see you again, here or anywhere.

Best always,

Sam

Johnson left another note. It lay on his desk, in his study. Barry saw it but did not touch it. Virginia read it. It was handwritten in neat pencil, on a card about four by two. It had been composed with characteristic deliberation:

This is my last word

Earlier that year, Johnson had written in See the Old Lady Decently:

I shall never buy a new pencil again.

And a few pages on:

The close of his life was infinitely sad ... that short period was enough to prove to him that his high hopes were futile.

Earlier still, in Trawl:

It is too far to see faces: he must tell by their coats: fawn, blue, red, another blue, the red just like the coat that Ginnie has--Ginnie? Can it be her? She could not know what time I was due in, nor even which ship I was on, for I would not tell her. But she could have found out, if she had tried hard enough, of her own accord she might have tried to break my isolation in the only way it could be broken. Ginnie! But is it she? My eyes narrow, strain to see through the early-morning light, the mist, the shadows on the quay, to the face of that figure in red.

© 1997 Review of Contemporary Fiction