B.S. Johnson was born in 1933 at Hammersmith and, except for his evacuation during the war, lived mainly in London until he took his own life in 1973. He did his Honours English degree at King's College, London University, starting at the late age of twenty-three. He was the author of seven novels: Travelling People (1963), Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966), The Unfortunates (1969), House Mother Normal (1971 ), Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) and See the Old Lady Decently (1975). He also published two volumes of poetry, and two collections of short fiction, Statements Against Corpses (1964) and Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973). He was a prolific writer, director, and producer of films and television; his 1967 film, You're Human Like the Rest of Them won prizes at two film festivals. He was poetry editor of the Transatlantic Review for ten years, and wrote several theatre scripts, including One Sodding Thing After Another for the Royal Court.

Johnson's novels are carefully crafted and formally experimental without being flashy. He was influenced by Beckett, as can be seen from his film, radio, and television work as well as from his fiction. And he was a powerful spokesman for the right of British writers, indeed the need for them, to try whatever formal innovations they thought would prove interesting. He himself published a novel (The Unfortunates) which consisted of unbound gatherings of pages in a box, allowing the reader to choose the order in which to read them. But, somehow typically, he hedged the bet by designating two gatherings as the beginning and the ending, setting a limit to his experiment, and a limit to how much control he would relinquish. And the subject of The Unfortunates, a deeply moving book, is the death of a friend, which has been an occasion for writing almost since humans began writing. He was willing to try new things, but was also devoted to the novel as high art, to being "a novelist of quality".

Johnson: All my novels started from a moment – usually a very pleasant moment – when I said: "Ah! There is a novel! I can make a novel out of that!" The process of writing is a confirmation of that moment of recognition, and so far there's never been a moment unconfirmed. Whether I make it come true or it was true in the first place, I don't know.

Since I started writing in 1959 I've had to earn part of my living in other ways so there's always been a backlog of novels, sometimes two or three, waiting to be written. I've just finished a book, and now I'm working on a trilogy.

Not precisely. With Travelling People, my first novel, it must have happened in 1959 when I was working in a sort of drinking club in North Wales. When I returned to England in September of that year I'd had the idea for the book though it was another two and a half years before I finished it. During that time I had ideas for two more novels which became House Mother Normal and Christie Malry. In between, three autobiographical novels, Albert Angelo, Trawl and The Unfortunates forced their way in, demanded to be written out of sheer personal need, psychotherapy if you like, though I call it exorcism. I wrote those three books to get them out of my head. I wanted to unburden my mind: "It's not in my mind: it's over there, in a book." Those books were written to relieve that kind of pressure.

Basically yes, but I hope they're witty, moving and poignant nonetheless. The Unfortunates is an extreme example. In Trawl I explored my sense of isolation my failure to make lasting relationships. I wanted to define this isolation and thereby understand and ease it, in the classic way.

It's a preoccupation. It takes up more time than I'd wish, more than I can cope with. I know by experience that writing does the exorcism job very well. I was looking at Trawl the other day and there were things in it I don't remember having written, don't remember having happened.

Obliterate is the wrong word. I want to change its form so 1 can refer to it voluntarily. If I want to recall how I felt at the time I wrote Trawl I can read Trawl, but I don't have to carry it with me, I don't want that stuff popping up in my mind when I've got better things to think about.

To distance it, not obliterate it.

I carry little notebooks around, about three inches by five. I buy them in Paris actually, for sentimental reasons. I make notes about things I think pertain . . . things I want to write about, things I think are useful for these novels I have in mind. . . .
I bung these notebooks into a drawer and from time to time, when I'm incapable of anything else, I do a filing job. I prefer to write, but as you know, everyone has times when they can't write and that's when I do the filing., I tear the pages out of the notebooks and stick them into folders marked with the names (or until they have names, the numbers) of the novels I'm going to write. Some notes are indecipherable because I was drunk at the time, or writing on a train or whatever. I always think I'm going to transcribe the notes into a book within a few days, but it's usually years.

They do occur unexpectedly. I get them down in recognizable form as fast as possible and then get on with whatever I was doing before I was interrupted. They're what Joyce called Epiphanies, sudden moments when one realizes there's something worth writing down. Something clicks in my mind and I know I must do it. It's a common experience. I'm pretending I'm not unique.
Very rarely do I note down the words that actually go into the novel. Often it will be a phrase that only has meaning for me, a personal shorthand to recall what I saw or heard. What goes down in fulI is a rhythm, if a particular rhythm takes me. There are all sorts of rhythms stuttering away in my head, which I like to keep with me. Rhythm is the most important thing to me.

I don't go as far as you on that, they're equally important. The balance in English literature swings from one to the other. Dylan Thomas went towards music and after him it went flat and concentrated on meaning. Just as Bach combines sound of fantastic beauty with technical mastery, I attempt a combination of form and content in which neither dominates and both are in harmony. It's arguable whether I've ever achieved it but that's my aim.

Essentially they are pictures.

All of those, though I don't dream much. I may see something, or something comes into my mind that has passed the filter of memory, and thrust its way to the surface, for reasons I've never understood. That's what Trawl is about. Trawl is an extended metaphor for the way the mind works. The trawl goes down into the sea and you don't know what's happening as it drags across the sea bed, or why it comes up, until it comes up.
Trawl has a physical shape that can be drawn on paper: Trawl begins with a prologue, followed by exposition, then development, reaching the highest point in the novel: then it explodes, disintegrates, falls down into coda. The design is a line that climbs a steep incline, then falls at a sudden point then collapses. This was drawn on paper by a Hungarian critic (the book was translated into Hungarian) called Georgy Novak. The shape of the book's construction is the shape of a trawl: it drops quickly down, travels along the sea-bed and is slowly hauled to the surface.

It's the shape of the first half of the book, the reminiscences.

I don't think about it at all. I feel: it is there. I don't know how significant it is. The book has an inner consistency which I don't remember putting there consciously. I don't know how the book happened. I just know it's right. The subconscious of the mind all the myriad impressions one's ever had, is like a vast sea and this little net dives down and pulls things up at random.

Empirically, by whether I use it or not. There's some wastage. At the end of each novel there's always a pile of material, bits of paper not used, which goes back in the files, available for future novels. I don't throw anything away. The house is overflowing with bits of paper.

Yes, but they don't dictate the overall structure, which is after all a very simple thing: beginning, middle and end. I start by sorting the bits of paper, seeing which bits go with other bits, exactly "dot-to-dot", it's a good image. Accidents, like the order in which the bits got thrown into the folder, often dictate juxtapositions which weren't there by design. I then sort the papers into a series of other folders which represent the sections of the novel, according to a previously thought-out structure. Some sections are quite long, others half a page, others a couple of lines as in chapter twenty of Christie Malry.
The second stage I call starting to write the novel proper. It can take two or three or six months or a year, but it's relatively the easiest part of the book. The exact timing is partly decided by economics. Even as personal a book as The Unfortunates had to be written on time, as the second book of a two-book contract with Secker. The key stage is finding the form. That happens between the first idea (the "Ah!") and the filling-into-sections I've just described. Between those two points I work out the form suitable to the material I have in my mind plus the stuff I've got down on those bits of paper. It was at that stage I settled on the book-in-a-box random form for The Unfortunates.

I rarely sit down and work it out, it goes on in my mind. But having "done" English literature at university, having read the work of many modern writers tackling similar problems, I have a compendium of possible forms and I select one, by a process of mental trial and error. The bits of paper with notes on do not influence the choice of form. Each bit is like a brick in a whole house: the house is built of bricks but they don't dictate its architectural form.

Outside writing I'm a very political animal. My novels have generally been written from a political stance but the politics have been very much in the background. The books have mostly been concerned with other things, like the nature of writing itself, its relation to me not to other people or society.

Definitely. I've wondered about it and been concerned about it, though Christie Malry had a definite political viewpoint. I disagree with socialist realism: "You must write things that people can understand and you must write things that help towards socialism." That I reject utterly, not because I'm not a socialist but because I am. In England I don't think books can change anything. Here if you want to change things you've got to throw bombs or work through Parliament. Three years ago I went to Hungary and many Hungarian writers said, "We envy you your ability to write whatever you like." But when they wrote something their government didn't like they got thrown into jail. In England no one takes a blind bit of notice. Writers are no threat to established British society.

I think those short films we made for ACTT had an effect, however tiny, on the fight against the Industrial Relations Act. We helped a bit in mobilizing the trade union movement.

It's my fellow man's tragedy as well as mine, because he's not been brought up to receive whatever I have to give in the form in which I'm best able to give it. They don't regard books as a way of changing the world. I'm talking about our contemporaries, not the generation of, say, Welsh miners who educated themselves in libraries, reading Marx and Lenin, nor of the Left Book Club in the thirties. There's nothing like the Left Book Club today. So I don't write for political reasons. Maybe I'm a writer because I'm no good at anything else. I may be no good at writing either, but I couldn't do anything else. I have a simple need to express myself, not a need to have what I write read by others.

That's the exact image. I just know it's something I have to get rid of.

Not for long: Travelling People gave me an identity in 1962 but not in 1972.

I type at the very last stage. I work from those bits of paper in longhand on to loose-leaf lined quarto sheets. Sometimes for shorter pieces I work in manuscript books in pencil. One draft balloons into a second and is worked over again and again and again. It gets interspersed with poems that occur while I'm working on a novel. A novel gets so complicated, with chunks of prose changing position, that I have to work on loose-leaf. When I've done all I can in manuscript it's ready for typing.

I like the graphic quality of pencil, I like the way it looks.

I haven't the room for that here. I sometimes use scissors if Virginia's typed the stuff for me, but I usually type for myself. I learnt typing at fourteen. I failed the eleven-plus and went to commercial school where they taught me shorthand, typing and book-keeping. Useful. While I'm typing I can't revise, I can't think. The manuscript gets into such an involved state because I have to do all the creative work before I start typing. Typing a novel becomes more depressing and painful every time. With Christie Malry, though it was short, I was bored stiff, not by reading it because I wasn't reading it, but by the mechanical act of typing.

My wife. I never show anything to anyone while I'm working on it, not even to Virginia. I may ask her about the odd word, but it would be a very minor thing. My marriage doesn't work that way, Virginia's never set herself up as a literary critic. This started with Albert Angelo: I showed her the manuscript and she didn't know what to make of it. I was very disappointed. It was the first time I'd shown her my work, and that she didn't see how good it was (in the way I thought it was good) was a great disappointment.

Confirmation that I'd done the right thing.

That's common in writers. But my showing the manuscript matters less and less now. It was important that Christie Malry was finished on time, for economic reasons, there was a feeling of relief about that. Virginia didn't read much of that book, it wasn't the right time for her to read it, though I wanted her to like it, I wanted very much for her to find it funny.

From an economic angle obviously one's publisher's editor is very important. If he likes it and praises it, apart from agreeing to publish it, that's a bonus. My first editor, at Constable, was very good. He took Travelling People. He spotted some weaknesses, though this was a year after I'd written it and I could see them for myself. He was good for me, but he was sacked not long after the book was published. As to critics, I have to ignore the bad things people say about me, otherwise I wouldn't write any more. Some people are simply trying to stop writers writing. This is a common thing with people who have no creative ability at all. It's an old cliché but that doesn't make it less true. The thing they'd like above all else would be to stop everyone writing because they can't do it. For myself I can't allow either adverse criticism or praise to change the way I write.

There isn't. There was with Travelling People and, to a lesser extent, Albert Angelo. I used to rely on this man, Tony Tillinghurst. He looked at the first two novels and improved them by his suggestions, he acted as a rein on my self-indulgence. He died of cancer and it's all recounted in The Unfortunates. Since then I've never trusted anyone enough, no one at all.

I find I get on all right without. The nearest thing was my editor at Collins, Philip Ziegler, who talked a lot of sense. With Christie Malry he made a few minor suggestions and one major one. In the book a group of young revolutionaries discuss how to make war on society: "We could attack the clubs!" one says. Another replies, "Yes. The Atheneum!" Then in dialogue they named every club in England from the list in Whitaker's Almanac. Philip Ziegler said it was boring, he thought it didn't work. Now I have some sympathy with anyone who says that that was a piece of self-indulgence. But I like lists and I think I have the right to be self-indulgent sometimes. But I chopped up the list and made a few other jokes, about Pratt's Club, The Reform Club (which is a joke), and Bucks. . . .

Yes, the totality of the list.

There are many historical examples of this thing about lists. This is not something we have invented. There's that enormous long list in The Odyssey of all the ships that went there, all the places they came from, just a bloody list.

Yes. I like lists. It's a poetic thing. A list implies that you are including everything, it's an absolute, an attempt to impose pattern on the chaos, it's all sorts of things. One's following Beckett, he likes lists. There's a lot of it in Watt, and in Molloy where the guy on the beach changes the pebbles over, he goes through all the possibilities.

Yes, very funny. Sometimes Beckett plays a joke by making a deliberate mistake to catch you out.

In Albert Angelo the teacher calls the class register and I put in the whole thing, with every bloody kid's name. A straightforward novelist would have written: "He called the register."

For me the act of writing is a way of not becoming insane. Life is chaos, writing is a way of ordering the chaos.

Even Babel, your book of chaos, is fixed, it is not chaos in its own terms. The images you have juxtaposed in a particular sentence are there for ever. You don't reflect chaos, you use a metaphor for chaos, because you create a new order, in a fixed pattern.

I would tend to use it as a comic device. I've done it with characters' names. In a short story, "Instructions for the Use of Women", I wanted to tell what bloody happened to this girl but because of the laws of libel I couldn't name her. So each time she appears she has a different name.

I think it should be done, but not by me. Like many of your things, like Babel, I'm glad you wrote it because it saved me having to do so.

The trouble is that one has to have an economic as well as a literary relationship with an editor (what he thinks of your book means money) and the two things don't go well together. And however nice a guy the editor is he never seems to have the power to put his judgements into practice. Some money man, for irrelevant non-literary reasons, interferes with the money or the publication. Ideally, in a small firm, a sympathetic editor would also make the financial decisions.

As poetry editor of Transatlantic Review I know a number of poets and I talk or write to them about their work. I went down to Port Talbot recently to do a poetry reading with a poet called John Tripp. We talked a lot about writing and hardly at all about money. He wrote me later saying that unlike other English writers I cared enough about writing to help a fellow poet. That happened in Wales. In England writers rarely help each other; it's a great pity. I don't discuss the novel with other novelists because I have strong notions about what the novel should be doing. Most novelists disagree with me and I am not in the business of converting them to my point of view.

No. I did that in university, studying The English Novel and reading hundreds of them. I've done that bit and come to a position where I am right. If they can't see it then the strength of my case is such that they haven't properly understood.

Right. I was with Anthony Burgess and someone said, "Why don't you talk about the novel?" He said, "I don't want to talk to Bryan about the novel: he has views about it." He had his own ideas and he didn't want me upsetting his apple cart. I have never found anyone to debate with on the subject. When I sit down to write a bloody novel I've got to make certain assumptions about the function of the novel now and in relation to every novel that's ever been written. No one can write the same after Ulysses. Ulysses changed everything. But people do write as though Ulysses never happened, let alone Beckett. These people simply imitate the act of being a writer, a deliberately anachronistic act, like writing a five-act verse drama in Shakespearean English. So there is nothing for me to discuss, except with people like you who are vaguely on the same wavelength, though the results of our work are very different.
Muriel Spark when asked, "How do you write a novel?" replied: "I write down the title, and underneath that I write 'A Novel by Muriel Spark'. Then I put `Chapter One' and I start writing."

If that's so she, like Beckett, should refuse to be interviewed. Beckett says: "I don't know how I write. I have nothing to add to what I've written. If I had I'd have written it." He won't talk about his work. He's about the only writer in the world who won't, so far as I know.

James Hanley, like many others, says, "Once I get to Chapter Three, the characters take over." I couldn't write like that. I always know what a novel's going to be about, I know its structure well beforehand. If I ever dry up, if there's ever no longer three novels in my head, perhaps I'll sit down and write "So-and-so, a novel by B.S. Johnson " and off I'll go.

I don't think of my books competing with each other. I haven t got a "best book" or anything like it. I very rarely go back and read my own work. In moments of despair, and there are lots of those, I will pick up a book to see how I did something in the past, or to confirm that I have written some books worth writing.