Merely Human—the writings of B. S. Johnson by Philip Pacey Philip Pacey: born Yorkshire 1946. B.A. from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Presently Tutor-Librarian at the School of Art, St. Albans. Winner of first Pernod National Young Poets' prize. Poems published in magazines; in Poems 7l (Gwasg Gomer & Welsh Arts Council, edited by Jeremy Hooker) and The Happy Unicorns (anthology of young poets forthcoming from Sidgwick and Jackson). Collection of poems published as special issue of Dragon (University College of Wales, Aberystwyth), summer 1971. `Faced with the enormity of Iife. all I can do is to present a paradigm of truth to reality as I see it: and there's the diffculty: for Albert defecates for instance only once during the whole of this book: what sort of a paradigm of the truth is that? B. S. Johnson is well-enough known for his technical experiments—the blacked-out pages in Travelling People; the hole, cut through several pages of Albert Angelo, revealing a hint of what is to come; and the loose sections of The Unfortunates—the hooks on which the critics have hung their supercilious facilities, while the fundamental strength of his writing has been neglected. Which is a poet's strength, precision of language rooted in the soil of experience; his own poems provide a useful key for entering the novels, of which the second, Albert Angelo, is directly concerned with `being a poet in a world where only poets care anything real about poetry, through the objective correlative of an architect who has to earn his living as a teacher'; and the hero, architect manqué, supply teacher, and poet, `stands for me, poor fool'. In trying to `tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth about my truth to reality', B. S. Johnson has rejected the conventions of story-telling, and has been influenced by Joyce and Beckett in his struggle to reproduce the actualities of talking and thinking as edited, though unpolished, raw material. Thus the construction of Albert Angelo is that of a collage or patchwork quilt, the constituent parts—conversations, soliloquies of thought, lessons in class, children's essays, a note from a pupil's mother complaining that her child (who is menstruating) had been refused permission to go to the toilet, intruding memories, a poem—roughly stitched together, preserving.their identities, their textures, not melted down and steam-rollered into a smooth- flowing whole. Dialogue is often set out in the form af a play-script; thought, on the other hand, flows, but randomly; sometimes urgently, with only commas for punctuation, making pauses where mind questions, breathes, half-hearted obstacles soon nudged aside by thought's flow; and sentences may be cut short by new thoughts bubbling like a spring from what has gone before, or suddenly and seemingly from nothing. Hence the unusual format af his novel, The Unfortunates, which comes in an elegant box like a record-set, containing twenty-seven loose sections, of which the first and the last are marked as such, and the rest may be read in any order-an attempt to avoid `an arbitrary pattern which must falsify', and to `represent the random workings of the mind' by getting away from `the enforced consecutiveness of a book'; the thoughts and memories of a football reporter—the author—visiting a city where a close friend was at university, a friend who subsequently died, pointlessly, horribly, of cancer—`the whole of a man's rotting telescoped into two years'. The experiment is not wholly a success for, while many of the recollections are the product of a mind darting to and fro through time, randomly, others are sparked from specific buildings, scenes, remembered by the author as he makes his far-from-random progress from railway-station to restaurant, from restaurant to pub, from pub to football-ground. . . . . . outwardly the fabric was sound, against the summer like broken of a castle in Wales. Albert, on the other hand, is an architect (by vocation, if not in fact) with an interest in geology and in poetry, the latter revealed in his owning, and valuing, a copy of Robert Graves' The White Goddess and by a poem (one of the author's finest) supposedly written by Albert for a girl who haunts his memory. A thin disguise! But even this must be torn off, becomes offensive to the author's integrity. for he breaks out into `—fuck all this lying look what im really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture trying to say something about my writing im my hero . . im trying to say something about me through him albert an architect when whats the point in covering up covering over pretending pretending. . .' (my italics)— and it is significant that he should leave these admissions and dissatisfactions in the book, clearly labelled in a section headed Disintegration, rather than starting afresh and sterilizing this insight into the actuality and pain of writing, depriving the reader of the thrill of identifying, not with a fictional hero, but with the writer himself, engaged in the very act of writing, and at a turning-point—for in the subsequent novels there is no deception, no Henry Henry or Albert Albert in place of the author's own `I', no lies. Sir rolling home threeparts Canuted, Much of the pleasure, in rolling or suffering with him through his writings, lies in gaining knowledge of him—earned, not `like miner's pay', but by fitting the pieces together, like a jigsaw—for example, the poem conceived in a Yates's Wine Lodge, called, simply, In Yates's, to the reference in The Unfortunates: `They recommended Yates's happily, and I came back with a poem, with the idea for a poem, and a few lines of it, too, which I worked into a poem later, at hame, in London, and sent it to them.' Lies; also, in recognizing his friends as they come and go, even in making some sense of `the saga of his women'. Books as personal as these exact a personal response—for myself, I gained a kind of friend, imagmary confidante regarding girls, informed companion at football—as Pevsner, through the medium of his Penguin guides, in buildings. But `the poetry comes from the suffering . . ‘; of the novels, this is particularly true of .The Unfortunates, too raw for either sentimentality or grandeur, that is to say, too true to the brutal fact of death, but with a pathos often hard to bear: `It could not have escaped his attention that we took photographs, that were the last, for us, of him that we were taking photographs that would be the last . . . .' or `. . . They had bought a taperecorder themselves now, he had they said recorded conversations, tried to write things as well, poems, against this unwelcome shortfall'. But not just from the suffering; from the drinking, yes, and the loving and more broadly from the living, from that which reader and writer hold in common, share; from being merely human. Bibliography: NOVELS Travelling People. Constable, 1963; Corgi, 1964. POE'TRY Poems. Constable, 1964. SHORT STORIES Statement against Corpses (with Zulfikar Ghose). Constable, 1964. SCRIPT You're human like the rest of them, in New English Dramatists 14. Penguin. 1970. |