Some Notes on the Poems of B.S. Johnson
Jonathan Coe
Sunk Island Review (1995)
If B.S. Johnson’s novels are all but forgotten in this country now (as opposed
to Germany, say, where every single one is still in print), where does that
leave his poetry? Trigram’s paperback edition of Poems Two has not
been available for years. The original Poems
is now a rare collectors’ item. Every so often these days Johnson’s name will
surface as part of an ongoing debate about the experimental tradition - or lack
of it - in British fiction; mention will be made of his bizarre, fundamentalist
belief in literal truth as the bedrock of all good writing, his conviction that
‘telling stories is telling lies’. But what we never hear is any discussion of
Johnson’s idiosyncratic concept of ‘truth’ as it applies to his poetic
practice. What follows is no more, at this stage, than an attempt to raise this
subject.
Poetry written by novelists is frequently treated as a mere adjunct, and read
not on its own account but for the light it supposedly sheds on their fiction.
We scour novelists’ poems on the look-out for clues, searching for more direct,
more confessional statements of themes we have already identified in the main
body of work. In B.S. Johnson’s case, this approach won’t wash, simply because
his poetry could not possibly contain anything more direct or confessional than
what we already find in the novels themselves. In terms of content, there’s no
substantive difference between his prose and his poetry: they are both, if we
are to believe Johnson’s own statements on the matter, part of the same attempt
to record personal experience in as raw, honest and accurate a form as
possible. The themes of his poems, then, are the same ones we associate with
his most intensely autobiographical novels, Trawl and Unfortunates:
betrayal (particularly sexual infidelity) and the randomness of misfortune
(particularly as it affects the body in the form of disease). Here, for
instance, is Johnson going ironically against the grain of his dislike for
invention, and extolling the virtues of fictional women over real ones:
Kim, composite of all my loves,
less real than most, more real than all;
of my making, all the good and
some of the bad, Yet of yourself;
sole, unique, strong, alone,
whole, independent one: yet mine
in that you cannot be unfaithful.
‘For a Girl in a Book’, Poems
And here he is returning to the theme of disease which will haunt his writing
from Unfortunates onwards:
Urinating in a urinal
I try at first directly
to jet down a fruitfly
then see random sprinkling
is the proper method –
you cannot beat the random element
as in cancer, as my mother knew
‘Where is the Sprinkler Stop Valve?’, Poems Two
Two questions are raised by these examples, one about content, and one about
form. The first leads us into the area of biography, and can only be answered
sketchily here: namely why, in giving expression to aspects of his own personal
‘truth’, did Johnson return so obsessively to the theme of betrayal? Trawling
through the scanty biographical evidence which is in the public domain (most of
it consisting of the novels and poems themselves) we find repeated references
to two experiences which seem to have stamped themselves indelibly onto
Johnson’s creative personality: being separated from his parents during the
war, and being ‘betrayed’ (or at least ditched) by a girlfriend some time in
the late 1950s. Of evacuation, he wrote:
When I was six, the problem was to find
a place for the evacuated boy,
out of London danger; they stayed behind,
said Grit. son! and bought me another toy.
Doing the best thing for me, to their mind:
war or parents: which did more to destroy?
from ‘Clay’, Poems
And in the same volume, we find the extraordinary ‘Sonnet’, dedicated to
Zulfikar Ghose, which after twelve lines’ fulsome celebration of friendship (a
friendship, we are told, that ‘excludes all falseness’), concludes with the
chilling couplet:
but when tonight you spoke my dead love’s name
a hatred for you spat like a welding flame.
This element of absolutism in Johnson’s personality has been remarked upon by
many of the people who knew him. ‘He had a tendency to take things to extremes,
to take truth-telling too literally,’ wrote Eva Figes: ‘Bryan was a purist,
almost a puritan.’ Zulfikar Ghose wrote a long essay about Johnson for The
Review of Contemporary Fiction
(Vol V, No 2) in which he went even further, maintaining that, ‘Bryan carried
an enormous quantity of sadness within him. Life had betrayed him, and he was
constantly on the guard against fresh betrayals, suspicious of anyone who could
not love him wholly ... Bryan’s demand for unquestioning devotion was a measure
of his love. And this, too, was perhaps a consequence of his experience with
the woman who had jilted him: he had loved her with such total commitment that
her betrayal was a treacherous act against his will, and, therefore, whoever
loved him after her must never perform the slightest act that appeared to be at
variance with his will.
This emotional absolutism seems to have spilt over into Johnson’s literary
politics, too. His famously combative introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young
to be Writing Your Memoirs?, which impressed me enormously when I was
younger, in fact presents a series of contradictions beneath its
brook-no-argument tone: one of them being that Johnson has seemingly no
hesitation in consigning the entire history of the Western novel to the dustbin
on the basis that ‘telling stories is telling lies’, yet retains his admiration
for Sterne and Joyce (‘the Einstein of the novel’), both of whom told stories
rather than dealing in fact. Ghose, again, has an interesting take on the
subject:
the polemical, belligerent tone of that piece, the posture of deliberately
provoking offence and the suggestion that the writer is in exclusive possession
of the truth and the reader contemptibly stupid if he does not accept that
truth echo the way he used to argue. The voice rising, getting more irritated
and excited. There was something of the bully in him.
Although less notorious than this introduction, the ‘Note on Metre’ which
concludes Poems
provides a distant foretaste of its hectoring tone. Here, Johnson is defending
his decision to write poetry in syllabics. ‘It is as legitimate to use
syllables as the element from which to form metrical units as it is to use
elements like stress or quantity,’ he writes, as if people had been queuing up
to ban the practice. Again, we see him engaged in a wholesale writing-off of
literary history: ‘Since most poetry reaches its audience in printed form, a
metre which is easily apprehended visually, as any syllabic one is, would seem
to be more appropriate than those metres which depend upon sound, like stress
or quantitative ones.’ (Hard luck, then, to Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth et
al, who simply never saw what it was all about. But don’t we, in any case,
‘hear’ poetry in our heads while reading it on the page?) And finally, there is
the insistence that Johnson’s methods are only wasted on those who are too
stupid to recognise them: ‘Syllabic metres can also be recognised by ear easily
enough, provided the audience is not expecting a stress metre or is prepared to
pay sufficient attention to a different metrical element.’
One sentence in Johnson’s ‘Note on Metre’ states the case more persuasively:
‘Syllabic metres enable a poet to use rhythms (particularly those of colloquial
speech) which are very difficult to accommodate without strain in stress
metres.’ This is really all that needs to be said in defence of the technique,
and indeed it indicates precisely where the strengths of Johnson’s poetry lie:
both Poems and, to a greater extent, Poems Two (much the more
relaxed and assured collection) exhibit at their best a supple command of
conversational idiom, combined with an alertness to irony and a preference for
tight, aphoristic forms. The language is rarely figurative; in fact in one
poem, Johnson explicitly rejects such an approach on the entirely
characteristic grounds that it is ‘dishonest’: The
sound of rain
is like only
the sound of rain
(rain seen against
the black threat
of copper beeches)
in truth can be
like nothing but
the sound of rain
'The Dishonesty of Metaphor', Poems Two
However, the limitations of this aesthetic are such that, in his poetry even
more than in his novels, Johnson can be accused of attempting to contain
experience rather than simply to render or communicate it. Often his motivation
is all too visible - to take some painful event from his life and box it into
verse, packaging it up into stanzas, sealing it with metre, so that its hurtful
mess no longer needs to be contemplated. Yes,
I shall write it all down, you old cow,
all: the first time, the last time, all the times
in between, and then all the times I should
have liked there to have been. I shall go on
writing it down even out of habit,
till there is nothing left to exorcise.
You may judge from that the emotional
debt I feel your lovely daughter owes me.
'Bad News for her Mother', Poems Two
Lines like these immediately call to mind the list of motives for writing which
Johnson provided in the introduction to Aren't You Rather Young ... They
included 'conceit, stubbornness, a desire to retaliate on those who have hurt
me' and 'especially to exorcise, to remove from myself, from my mind, the
burden [of] having to bear some pain, the hurt of some experience: in order
that it may be over there, in a book, and not here in my mind .'
It's important to emphasise the aphoristic nature of Johnson's poetry. Most of
his poems are extremely short, and some of them recall Ogden Nash, if anyone: I'm
fond of women
Naked
But I like my salad
Dressed
from 'Three Irrelevant Thoughts', Poems Two
The appeal of poetry for Johnson, then, would not seem to be that it offered an
opportunity to write about different sorts of experience (for he used it to
write about the same experiences which haunt his novels), or to write about
them using language and diction in a radically different way (for he distrusted
metaphor just as much in his verse as he did in his prose), but to take
particular shards of experience and pin them to the page with a sort of
aphoristic precision for which the novel provided little scope. 'There are
certain ... experiences or certain ideas which come to me as poems,' he once
said, 'and it is not an alternative to write them as a short story, or indeed
as a paragraph of prose - they require the form and the rhythms and the metre
of verse.' Note that emphasis on form, rhythm and metre: these, for Johnson,
are the important factors.
When Bernard Bergonzi interviewed B. S. Johnson for the BBC on November 3rd,
1967 (an interview in which Johnson announced proudly that the recently
published Trawl was 'as far as I know a hundred per cent truth as far
as I could do it'), he asked him to comment on 'the relation between writing
novels and writing poetry'. Johnson began his answer, as usual, by insisting
upon a terminological distinction:
- Um - I'd
rather make the distinction between writing novels and writing verse. It seems
to me that in, at this point in the Twentieth Century, as far as I'm concerned
again, th ... this is a terrible conflict between you see I... I'm really only
saying what I feel and not - um - not making a general statement that applies
to everyone. I feel I cannot write a long poem, that is a long piece of verse
at this particular period. On the other hand I think that Trawl is a
long poem in that it can ... it ... that it is Poetry, even though it's not in
verse it's in prose. And that two hundred years ago, well this is a silly - um
hypothetical statement but two hundred years ago Trawl would have been
written in verse as a long poem, but that there are so many historical,
sociological - um - temperamental reasons against writing a long poem today
that I wrote it as what people call 'a novel'. That does not stop it being
poetry - it is a long poem - it is not in verse, it is in prose.
The knowledge that Johnson set so little store by the distinction between novels
and poetry, then, makes us all the more keenly aware that his writing is all of
a piece: just as in Poems and Poems Two we find fragments of some of the most
painful incidents from his novels packaged defensively into verse, so Trawl
and Unfortunates, in particular, are best understood not as 'novels'
in the neo-Dickensian sense but as poems written in prose. What unites all of
his work, in whatever form, is its burning commitment to personal experience
and to truth: a commitment which may have restricted Johnson in scope, but
which nonetheless provoked him to ever more energetic feats of formal
innovation, and so proved, in that sense, to be profoundly liberating.