Jonathan Coe
The Daily Telegraph, 2 October 1999
To A nation of literary amnesiacs, BS Johnson is already a forgotten writer. In
my experience, at least, blank stares are the most common response to any
mention of his name. It's less than 30 years since he died, but his books have
been out of print for most of that time, and the tides of literary fashion have
ebbed and flowed often enough to wipe his name from collective memory. And yet
when The Unfortunates appeared, in February 1969, its press release was bold
enough to claim that Johnson was "the most important young English novelist now
writing" .
The Unfortunates stands at the centre of Johnson's output: it was the
fourth of his seven novels. The first, Travelling People, was described by
Anthony Burgess as "original in the way that Tristram Shandy and Ulysses are
original," and by the time of his sixth, Christie Malry's Own Double Entry,
he was picking up endorsements from Samuel Beckett, a man not normally known
for his freedom with dust-jacket quotations.
Johnson was, at the time, one of Britain's best-known - if not best- selling -
writers, famous for his uncompromising, bluntly expressed views on the
conservatism of most modern fiction, and for the eye- catching devices which
tended to characterise his books, such as holes cut in the pages and in the
case of The Unfortunates unbound sections published together in a box.
And yet, following his death by suicide in 1973, at the age of 40, he slipped
quickly into near-oblivion. His books became the provenance of cultists and
obsessives: by the late Nineties, copies of The Unfortunates were
changing hands for well over 100 times the original cover price.
Unknown to the general public, fetishised by collectors: this is no fate for a
gifted, serious and accessible novelist. It's time to reclaim BS Johnson for
the mainstream.
Some of Johnson's admirers might balk at this, and argue that, in his own
lifetime, he was anything but a mainstream figure. He may have disdained the
label "experimental", but there's no denying that his literary politics put him
violently at odds with most of his contemporaries.
HE WAS born in Hammersmith in London in 1933, and after an education, that was
badly disrupted by wartime evacuation and left him feeling unfit for
university, Johnson filled out his late teens with a succession of book-keeping
jobs before arriving at King's College, London in the mid-Fifties as a mature
student. It was there, in the course of what was otherwise a routine induction
into the Western canon, that he encountered the works of Sterne, Joyce and
Beckett, who promptly became his idols and mentors.
From then on, his allegiances were fixed: the primary task of the novel, as he
saw it, was to interrogate itself, to draw attention to its own artifice, and
any writers who saw it merely as a vehicle for linear storytelling were kidding
themselves. He insisted that after Joyce, the straightforward Dickensian novel
had had its day. "No matter how good the writers are who now attempt it," he
wrote towards the end of his life, "it cannot be made to work for our time, and
the writing of it is anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant, and perverse."
In his collection of prose pieces, Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your
Memoirs?, Johnson drew up a list of those few writers who he felt were "writing
as though it mattered", and pointedly excluded most of his more celebrated and
formally unadventurous contemporaries. Johnson professed himself baffled by
public and critical taste. Why shouldn't his dazzling innovations, his
ingenious re-thinkings of the novel's possibilities, be winning him both
critical respect and a wide readership? "The mainstream", in other words, was
exactly where he wanted to be: but a mainstream defined according to his own
terms.
This was not his only instance of literary puritanism. Equally important, but
even more difficult to swallow for most readers, was his insistence that the
novelist should not be a writer of fiction at all. "Telling stories is telling
lies": this was Johnson's mantra, and he maintained that while his own close
attention to matters of style and form made him something more than an
autobiographer, there was no place for invention in the serious novel, no
excuse for "making things up". Novelists should confine themselves to one
subject only: the simple facts of their own lives.
Johnson's theory, in effect a breathtaking insistence that all literature should
reduce itself to the status of glorified memoir, eventually proved too much of
a straitjacket: by the time of his last, posthumously published novel, See the
Old Lady Decently, he was reaching further and further back into his family
history, and the result has an air of strain and imprecision, weariness even.
But The Unfortunates is something else. In this book, his two fundamental
commitments - to formal innovation and rigorous truth-telling - coalesced into
a strange, powerful and spellbinding work of literature.
Why publish a book in a box? The Unfortunates had its genesis one
Saturday afternoon when Johnson arrived in Nottingham for a routine football
reporting assignment. (To supplement his income from his novels, he was at this
time working as a soccer reporter for The Observer.)
A close friend, an academic called Tony Tillinghast, had lived and worked in
Nottingham before his death from cancer a few years earlier. As Johnson went
about the task of reporting his football match that Saturday afternoon,
memories of Tony were unfolding, but not in a structured, linear way, and they
were interrupted at random by the action on the pitch and his attempts to start
writing his match report. It was this randomness, this lack of structure in the
way we remember things and receive impressions, that Johnson wanted to record
with absolute fidelity.
But randomness, he realised, is "directly in conflict with the technological
fact of the bound book: for the bound book imposes an order, a fixed page
order, on the material". His solution, as always, was simple and radical: the
pages of The Unfortunates should not be bound at all.
There was a paradox here, because - in his life as well as his writing - Johnson
was an extremely orderly man. The Unfortunates was a compromise. It
would come in 27 unbound sections, with the first and last being marked as such
to give the material a proper sense of form and closure. The other sections
could be read in any order the reader chose.
Disintegration and frailty: these are the themes of The Unfortunates, and
its tone is one of restless, enquiring melancholy. Johnson's prose owes a great
deal to Beckett, the long, looping sentences punctuated only by commas, clause
piled upon clause, qualification after qualification, but always carrying the
reader through by means of an emotional momentum which derives, in Johnson's
case, from the intensity of his remembered grief. The facts of his friendship
with Tony do not seem to have been remarkable: animated discussions of books
conducted in Nottingham pubs while wives and girlfriends listened in or hurried
home to prepare the dinner (the grim sexual politics of the period are
faithfully preserved here). What is remarkable, however, is the energy with
which Johnson addresses himself to all this, and the rich flavour and texture
the novel acquires in its celebration of male friendship and provincial
intellectual life. He records the petty in-fighting and rivalrous camaraderie
between his fellow reporters. And he returns, again and again, to the subject
of his first great love, the woman he calls Wendy.
If Johnson's peers never quite gave his novels the recognition they deserved, it
was because they presented an emotional challenge, rather than a formal one.
Militantly working class, with no access to the Oxbridge network, Johnson was,
in many ways, an embarrassment to the literary establishment. The feeling in
his books was too raw, too upfront. They lacked the veneer of politeness and
diffidence which England has always admired in its writers.
But times change: and it may be that BS Johnson's moment has come at last. In
the wake of books by Blake Morrison, Nick Hornby, Frank McCourt and others, new
life has been breathed into a confessional genre, of which The Unfortunates
can now be seen as a great example, and emotional directness has become
something we expect, even demand, of our male authors. The Unfortunates also
seems an eerily contemporary text, anticipating the bleak but courageous
memoirs of disease (by Ruth Picardie and John Diamond, for example) that have
recently found such a sympathetic readership.
In its day, Johnson's unclassifiable book - novel, memoir, call it what you will
- was accorded at best a sort of grudging respect, tempered with a palpable,
barely disguised disdain for its pretensions to originality. Now, I hope, we
can see it as something more, much more, than just a quirky offshoot of Sixties
experimentalism. It is a unique and wonderful book: a classic of its own time,
and of ours.
This is an edited version of Jonathan Coe's introduction to 'The
Unfortunates' (Picador), which is published in a box on Friday, price £18.
Jonathan Coe's biography of BS Johnson is due out next October.
'The Unfortunates' is featured in The Modern Library, Colm Toibin and Carmen
Callil's recent list of the 200 best novels written in English since 1950.
Johnson's other experiments with form include Albert Angelo, in which holes are
cut out of pages so the reader can "see the future" . In Christy Malry's Own
Double Entry he appears at the hospital bedside of his main character
to announce he is killing him off. The residents of an old people's home
narrate House Mother Normal. Its chapters range from lucid prose to mainly
blank pages, depending on the character's level of senility, and only gradually
does the reader realise the obscene act they are all witnessing.
1999 © Telegraph Group Limited