Merely Human—the writings of B. S. Johnson by Philip Pacey
(Stand 13. No. 2. 1972, 61-64.)

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'.
B. S. Johnson believes that `telling stories is telling lies', that he can only write meaningfully about the world as refracted throügh the prism of his own existence; his aim is to build novels of truths, caught in the net of his own experience; and his third novel, Trawl, provides this metaphor for itself and for all his writings. It tells of the author's voyage on a trawler in the Barents Sea, and is divided between sharp descriptions of the fishing and the gutting, on the one hand; and on the other, the long periods spent, helpless with sea- sickness, lying on his bunk and fulfilling the purpose of his self-im.posed isolation from the world he has known `to shoot the narrow trawl of my mind into the vasty sea of my past'— recalling and exorcising for himself, and sharing something of his own humanity with any af humankind who might care to listen, perhaps to learn. There is no arrogance in this, for the author's down-to-earth honesty with himself excludes conceit; nor is his preoccupation with himself in any way egotistical. It is, rather, a humble refusal to generalize beyond himself, to say that what is true for him is necessarily true for others—`in general, genera1ization is to lie, to tell lies'. But what he does have to say remains of interest—as surely, any individual response to life must be af interest, if ably expressed, and B. S. Johnson has that ability in abundance.

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. . .
Yet, though the use of such devices brings his writings closer to actuality, the effect is not that of mere imitation or `trompe l'oeil', wlvch would make of his honesty a dishonesty; rather, in Albert Angelo, the constant switch from one style to another (from an argument set out as formal debate, to a poem, to a dialogue arranged as a play-script) jolts the reader into an awareness of the author's agency in, at least, selecting and re-assembling the parts. B. S. Johnson's writings are like buildings in which there has been no attempt to hide the construction—his techniques are as naked as the iron arches of King's Cross or a bridge by Maillart, and he is at pains to keep them so, to draw attention to them, as Brecht, in the theatre; even, in The Unfortunates, to physically involve the reader in the format of the book. In his first novel, Travelling People, he declared that `it would be desirable to have interludes between my chapters in which I could stand back, so to speak, from my novel, and talk about it with my reader, or with those parts of myself which might hald differing opinions, if necessary; and in which technical questions could be considered, and quotations from other writers included, where relevant, without any question af destroying the reader's suspension of disbelief, since such suspension was not to be attempted'. Indeed, his own approach to writing is frequently defined in the novels, in passages from which I have quoted freely; this is especially true of Albert Angelo. B. S. Johnson is a poet with an interest in geology, and in architecture, which emerges, not only in his novels, but in several of his poems:

. . . outwardly the fabric was sound,
founded upon outcropped

slate in which pyrites glinted
against rusty oxide:
inside, however, looking up,
the few joists were patterned

against the summer like broken
teeth in an unwashed comb,
and the doorless and windeyeless
weeping walls stared glibly. . .

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.
This, then, is the essence of Johnson's work, the uncompromising integrity which has been the subject of this study, and continues to be the chief object of my personal admiratian. Yet it has been truly said that `simply to lay bare the moral bones (of B. S. Johnson's novels) is to lose the succulent flesh with which he covers them. His scene is both comically and decoratively rendered; his language is incisive; his thought is paradoxical and often disquieting'. The novels have become increasingly grave, the unglorious, intense tragedy af The Unfortunates giving to Travelling People the appearance of levity, while Trawl is a study in self-analysis; yet the self that is at their centre, whether as subject or, as in the case of The Unfortunates, filtering knowledge of another through the mesh of its own consciousness, remains rotund and Rabelaisian,

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.

NOVELS

Travelling People. Constable, 1963; Corgi, 1964.
Albert Angelo. Constable, 1964; Panther, 1967.
Trawl. Secker and Warburg, 1966; Panther, 1968.
The Unfortunates. Panther Books in association with Secker and Warburg, 1969.
House mother normal. Collins, 1971.

POE'TRY

Poems. Constable, 1964.
Poems 2. Trigram Press (forthcoming).

SHORT STORIES

Statement against Corpses (with Zulfikar Ghose). Constable, 1964.
(Three stories in) Penguin Modern Stories 7. Penguin Books, 1971:

SCRIPT

You're human like the rest of them, in New English Dramatists 14. Penguin. 1970.