I ON BEHALF OF US: B. S. Johnson
1933-1973 by Philip Pacey
(Stand 15/2 1974, 19-26.)

They don't have to tell me about this human condition: I'm in it. They don't have to tell me what life's about, because I know already, and it's about hardness. Hardness and being on my own, quite on my own. You understaud that much right from the beginning, from the first time the pavement comes up and hits you, from the first time you look round for someone you excpected to be there and they aren't. Oh, I know you can get close to people, but that's not the same. In the end you're just on your own.
But that's not the point. The point is that you have to go on living in it, life, and not only just put up with it, either, but let it see that it doesn't matter to you. That you're going to go on living however many times things come up and knock you flat, however many people aren't there when you exrpected them to be.
So they don't have to tell me about it: I'm in it, right in it. You just have to go on.
(`Street Children')

B. S. Johnson died in November, 1973. In Stand, Vol. 13, no. 2, 1972 (pp. 61-64), in an article written some two years earlier, I discussed his first four novels and first collection of poems; subsequently he published two novels and a second book of poems. His texts to photographs by Julia Trevelyan Oman, Street Children, contain, in miniature, much of the best of him: his humour his ingenuity, his empathy. He leaves unpublished See the Old Lady Decently, completed just before his death: the first novel of what was to have been a trilogy called Matrix.
While his plays have yet to be collected, Bryan Johnson's rnost recent publication was a collection of the short prose pieces which he wished to keep in print, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs? This is prefaced by an essay in which he looks back on his work as novelist and discusses his theory of the novel, placing himself in the tradition of, acknowledging his debt to, Sterne, Joyce most of all, and Beckett, in contrast to the `neo-Dickensian' mode. This essay is closely based on a talk he gave on a number of occasions for me and others too; in it, he quotes some notes I wrote for students preliminary to one of his visits, in support of his argument that `telling stories is telling lies'.
This was the key with which, in my earlier essay, I tried to unlock his first novels; not that a key was necessary for by their nature the books are already open to anyone who takes them up, and in them the author opens himself. If, for Bryan Johnson, telling stories was telling lies, it remained for him to tell his own truth, as skilfully and unflinchingly as he could. In the first novel which, `part truth part fiction', he was to become dissatisfied with, he appears, thinly disguised, as the protagonist; in the second, Albert Angelo, the title is the name of the principal character until, near the end, the deception disintegrates and the truth breaks out:

and from then on, and in Trawl and The Unfortunates, Bryan wrote in the first person: an `I' which I for one could accept, to an extent at least, and in a particular sense I will enlarge on (of writer on behalf of novice), as `on behalf of us'. During his tenure of the Gregynog Fellowship of the University of Wales, Bryan wrote House Mother Normal, which was followed this year by Christie Malry's Own Double Entry. These represent departures from the previous novels in that they do not tell of the author's life; but that they do not represent a departure from his theory of the novel, from his insistence on truth, is made clear in both books; by, for example, the closing paragraphs of House Mother Normal. In this book, set in an old peoples' home, eight inmates are allotted twenty-one pages each, and each line on each page represents the same moment in each of the other accounts. The same applies to the House Mother's account with which the novel closes, except that she is given an extra page in which she explains that

and the book concludes with a delightful find (from the Montgomeryshire collections) which, however, makes light of, throws away, almost, what has been achieved. For, in what may be his technically most accomplished work, the whole accumulates in the reader's mind to give an impression of simultaneity, not unlike the twin columns of the classroom scene in Albert Angelo, or the snatches of thought and speech of Street Children, but attempting much more in what is an astonishing imaginative feat. It is marred only by the bizarre antics of the House Mother, supposedly distracting the old folk from their (human) indignities by her (subhuman) indignity.
The limitations of the slogan `telling stories is telling lies', beyond which it is itself a lie, are obvious. I had been happy to apply it to Bryan's own novels, but increasingly he seemed imprisoned in his own theory, breaking out only to lock himself away again almost apologetically. For with this theory (which is true of story-telling of a very crude, corrupted kind) Bryan shackled his own imagination (with `mind-forg'd Manacles'), and cut himself off from the possibilities of symbol and myth. Could not human truth be embodied, and universalized, in story which it makes its symbol? Especially in Christie, a story whose `hero' draws up a balance sheet with society, finally tipping a lorry load of cyanide into London's water-supply to square the books, Bryan may have been working towards something like this: but his truth, his preconception of what it is to be human (from which his theory sprang) worked against myth's discovery of truth; permitted no more than parable, mere illustration. Fond of saying that all has been said, by severing himself even from the unique richness of his own life Bryan was left, in Christie, with nothing new to say.
Moreover, he not only shackled his own imagination, but sought to constrain that of the reader as well:

But why `impose'? Surely the reader does not `impose' his imagination on words by which it is stimulated, from which it takes flight? Does a flame `impose' on the spark from which it flares? Do we `impose' ourselves on the life whose unfolding we are? Bryan's distrust of imagination becomes clear: it is to him mere fancy, the lure of fiction, of escape.

What Bryan failed to understand was that it is precisely his unspringing of our imagination which enables us, first to partake of his books, his experience; to share his reality; to `admit others' ideas'; but then not to take that reality, those ideas, as our own, but to grow through and from them in our truth. Without imagination, it is we who would be imposed on, dangerously, by the bounds of the narrow, cerebral philosophy which the author imposes on himself, in a search for truth which is reined in before it begins.
The philosophy can be found wherever one looks in Bryan's various works; it is the philosophy of existentialism, and of existential unconfidence. We are born to die: `Your dying is your only certainty', as he wrote in his play You're Human Like the Rest of Them. We are born, and die, alone, and in an infinity of meaningless chaos. ` . . . I believe (as far as I can believe anything) that there may be (how can I know?) chaos underlying it all . . . ' Bryan wrote in the introduction to Aren't You . . .? And as he once wrote to me that he had come to understand what Leonard Woolf meant `when he said that, deep down, basically, nothing matters', so Bryan made Christie say (on his deathbed):

Christie dies of cancer, as did B. S. Johnson's real friend, Tony, whose dying is the subject of The Unfortunates; as, too, did his mother, whose dying, shortly before Christie was written, influenced its writing (`it cannot have been otherwise than affected by my feelings at the time', Bryan told me). Cancer, striking so often, so close to him, symbolized for Bryan arbitrary chaos, its beautiful forms (under the microscope: on the cover of The Unfortunates) concealing its destructiveness, as form conceals formlessness. Bryan tried to get round this, by refusing to tie up the loose ends of the title `story' of Aren't You . . .?; by giving a choice of alternative endings to the Flann O'Brien-inspired `Broad Thoughts from a Home' in the same volume; by, physically, destroying the form of The Unfortunates so far as he could. Not a book, it is a box of loose sheets to be read in random order, so re-presenting the randomness with which his memories of his friend came to him during a day when he revisited the city where he had known him; so re-presenting, making a paradigm of, the randomness, the chaos.
The theory was born of the philosophy: the philosophy, of a lack of confidence in the world and a fear, of his own imagination, which would lead him into a world he conceived as chaos, which he wanted to go on conceiving as chaos to excuse and rationalize his shrinking from it. Writing to him not long before he was to die, having previously mentioned to him a little of my disappointment in Christie, I tried to show how, in his own double-entry book-keeping, Bryan himself had failed (as, in his reply to my earlier letter, he admitted that Christie had failed), to

That is not wholly true, for in his scrupulous self-examination Bryan did include many of the good things which seem in conflict with his larger view. But that view held, though he enjoyed, relished even, the fellowship of family and friends, food pleasure in things seen, humour, writing, and printing. The humour runs through his work: richly spread in the first three novels and again (with a biting edge) in Christie; in Street Children (`kids could watch, / we could make them pay to watch us race, / sixpence a head, / any kid with two heads ninepence . . . '); and, in my memory, combining with his eye for the visible world in our finding, at Gregynog, the fungus Stinkhorn (phallus impudicus), laughing at its names, its form, its smell! Significantly, from Gregynog, where he felt most secure-and happy-in the womb of Wales (see his poem sequence `Hafod a Hendref') came his most positive, joyous visions of the natural world: the englynion in Poems Two: the young fern

—a paradigm, of more than .broom: did Bryan realise its intuition? His care for the appearance of his books has caused printers to curse, while the pleasure I was privileged to share with him for a few days at Gregynog, setting up in type and imperfectly printing a poem each, was recorded by him (in The Private Library, Vol. 6 no. 1, Spring 1973). But above all these, I sought to stress the craft he had mastered; as he put it

the inventivity which makes him most especially a writer's writer. But `forcing'? Into patterns of preconceived meaning? No more than a `technical joy'? I argued that creativity is the human search for meaning, impelled by a sense that meaning must be, by meaning itself calling to be revealed. `Whether or not . . . all is chaos, certainly all is change . . . ' (Aren't You . . .?) Certainly. And to create is to change what already is; to show again under other forms. Given no-thing, we can create nothing. Given no meaning, can we create meaning? `Order and chaos are opposites . . . ' (Aren't You . . .?), but if order=form, then the most remarkable aspect of the chaos that surrounds us is the multiplicity of forms which it conjures out of itself, not least through us. The formlessness is the possibility of infinite form. In our creativity-not the imposing of preconceived form on, but the discovery of form within—we experience, and participate in, a force not bounded by `self' which it caused to be, and in relation to which self finds its significance. Some years ago Bryan upbraided me for seeming to dispense with the White Goddess of inspiration—`And yet at the same time you are agreeing with Graves (although calling it by a different name) in saying that it becomes "art almost by accident"-the name of the "accident" is the White Goddess for Graves (and me)' . . Yet he shrank imagination into the shell of self's certainty-and kept the `goddess' at bay.
If he admitted the `good things', he devalued them because, at the root of the matter, 'he devalued, constrained, creativity which endows things with good-ness. He was like the John(son) of his piece `Mean Point of Impact' (in Aren't You . . .?), a medieval cathedral builder who is questioned, and answers, thus:

John has too much faith not to build; too little to be certain that faith is not illusion. Bryan Johnson was too creative not to create, but because he could not believe in creativity's power to cleanse our doors of perception and reveal truths beyond the reach of reason, he did not allow it free rein to explore and discover, but put it to work in the endlessly inventive, in the end repetitive, representation of a view of life it had had little part in bringing about, a preconception previously conceived by others before him. It was his belief that there was nothing new to be discovered, nothing more to be said:

So without intending so, he cooked the books, ensuring that in the end they added up to that state of mind, and its conclusion, he brought to their `balancing'. This is evident in the poem `Little Old Lady' (Poems Two), a clear case of double-entry book-keeping in which, as throughout his work, the emphasis is on the body, the body's rotting: here, at the expense of another's vision, Turner's, whose exclamation `Well done God!' in the Vale of Clwyd, is discredited, and unfairly. In his lifetime Bryan failed to integrate dying with life that, opposites, he makes to oppose each other; mutually enabling, he makes enemies. So Haakon, in You're Human . . ., becomes a hero, of life against death:

and his heroism is mocked, for its futility. Here is the duality, of Life and Death, Order and Chaos, Good and Bad, Truth and Fiction, which makes double-entry book-keeping possible; of Self and Other which is the failure of this author's imagination to encompass the kinship of all in One.
Bryan Johnson's fragile hold on life is apparent, in retrospect, from his work; from `The Short Fear', for example. Theodore Roszak, in Where the Wasteland Ends (Faber, 1973) writes of `the panicky flight from meaninglessness: keeping busy, conquering, achieving . . on the brink of the void. As in Beckett's Godot: the only purpose left is to pass the time . . . '. Of his printing at Gregynog, Bryan wrote

Perhaps I have said enough to suggest that Bryan's creativity might have been, in his own estimation, little more than a passing of time, a willingness to be distracted from nothingness by the thing-ness of his life's textures, of paper, printed book, architecture, house, home, the people around him, close to him; by the concreteness of his paradigms of that nothingness; on all of which, on whom, he depended in their material existing, to justify and give tangible substance to his living: a dependence which may have been his Achille's heel who was not slow to recognize impermanence.

No more, when there is no confidence in the power of imagination, in love, to embrace the world and enter with the whole being, body and spirit, through the bodily existence of all that is other, that more that was to Blake `Heaven in a Wild Flower'. It may be that such a failure of confidence, common to each of us, more or less, is traceable to our first, or early, experiences of the world, experienced at the first in our mother; even to that `first time you look around for someone you expected to be there and they aren't'. Trawl is a record of such experiences, betrayals, as Bryan called them; it is a trawling of betrayals from his memory, `to trace the causes of my isolation', of unconfidence, while he was physically isolated from the trappings and companions of his life on a trawler fishing the Barents Sea. The earliest `betrayal' he recalls is separation from his mother as a result of his being evacuated in wartime; subsequently he felt himself betrayed by girl after girl, until, the history of betrayals exorcised, and a naturalness (a spontaneous impulse to give) achieved, he returned

His unconfidence was not complete: he could love, give of himself in love, in friendship, in his books of which Trawl is the bravest, most nearly directed to meaning, to healing (and how brave of the girl who gave him that home, in the full knowledge that one so vulnerable regarded it as a last chance). Matrix, the trilogy, one volume only of which was completed, was to have been about Bryan's mother; but also about England, Empire, as maternal; and about the Earth Mother herself. Whether any of this throws light on, would have thrown light on, the likely source of his unconfidence (for one feels that his, later experiences of cancer, however distressing, merely confirmed a view of things already formed, for which cancer provided a potent symbol); whether it casts light on his work, even on his dying, his choice not to survive perhaps his lowest ebb; yet, as he wrote of Tony in The Unfortunates:

In a letter to me Bryan quoted Samuel Beckett as saying to him, that to commit suicide or start on a new book seemed much the same thing. But if only he could be even now working on the second volume of the trilogy; if only he could have believed in the power of creativity to break free of, not only received forms, but also the tomb of `it has all been said', to new life, new meaning.
In differing with, growing away from, Bryan Johnson, I retained my admiration of his gift, my affection for him. Indeed, there is a real sense in which he was an agency in that change which was my growth, and which brought me to the point of daring to write critically of his work. In his introduction to Aren't You . . .? Bryan wrote:

And this is exactly the way his writing has worked for me: stimulating, challenging, exciting, and tutoring me into writing myself (and out of my experience); into, in some way, becoming myself. This, though a personal response, may be the best tribute with which I can honour him. Fiction could not have had this effect; only the shared reality of another person manifestly transforming experience into art, and so defining himself that, as in real companionship, the reader is obliged to define his self in relation to this other. `I on behalf of us'—but only so far! Another writer, more confident in imagining, might have led us into a world beyond. Bryan Johnson leads us, not so far, but, uniquely, into the writer's study, into his mind his hand holding the pen; whereas most art presents to the layman a fait accompli, Bryan's work is more a master class, a chance to watch a craftsman at work, when, though the achievement may be no less, it at least appears humanly possible. This is true of his work from the first lines of the first novel. I have briefly indicated, and have written previously, how in Albert Angelo a crisis in the writing is not concealed; on the contrary, the reader is drawn into the crisis, and, so, into the writsr's development from that point. The joyousness and ingenuity of his craft is such that one can hardly read him and not be inspired to write.
My concern here has been with the writing, which is not separate from the man; my particular concern has been with the writing as embodiment of aspects of the man which just a few weeks ago seemed important, looking to his future; which seem important, in coming to terms with that future's annihilation. As a result there is much that I have not done justice to; but let this be said. The writing is not separate from the man, whose generosity, the capacity to give of himself (despite himself) is there from the beginning, is discovered in Trawl and informs the compassion of The Unfortunates, the empathy of House Mother Normal where, through imagination allowed this temporary freedom, he becomes, body and mind, one after the other, eight old people. The compassion, the absence of which in Christie (intended by its absence to direct attention to the compassion itself, as he explained to me) was to have returned in Matrix. Within the bounds of life as he saw it, he was committed to oppose prejudice, to fight injustice, to alleviate suffering:

As in writing at all, so too in the way he wrote, in his generosity and (Dickensian) commitment, Bryan Johnson denied the pointlessness he sought to convince himself of: for the implication is that change (which can create form from `chaos') can improve, and so contains within its perpetual motion a force, a direction, that is contrary to chaos. Despite the contradiction, because of the contradiction, which his work fails to resolve, between a philosophy that palls, and a human condition which it reflects but which, authentically re-presented, contains that which might transcend it, readers will come to Bryan's writings to share his humanity. For, within the all-too-human limits which I have tried to chart, he was brave to

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This list does not attempt to be comprehensive, but includes B. S. Johnson's most important published works and all those cited in the preceding article. The year given is that of publication.

1963 Travelling People. Constable.

1964 Albert Angelo. Constable.
Poems. Constable.
Statement Against Corpses (stories, with Zulfikar Ghose). Constable.
Street Children (texts to photographs by Julia Trevelyan Oman). Hodder and Stoughton.

1966 Trawl. Secker and Warburg.

1968 The Evacuees, edited with an introduction by B. S. Johnson (accounts of the experiences of children evacuated during the last war). Gollancz.

1969 The Unfortunates. Panther, in association with Secker.

1970 `You're Human Like the Rest of Them' (play/ film script). In Penguin New English Dramatists 14: 221-231 (first published in Transatlantic Review, 1964).

1971 House Mother Normal. Trigram; Collins.
Three prose pieces in Penguin Modern Stories 7: 115-134.

1972 'Hafod a Hendref' (poem sequence). Planet 10, Feb.-Mar. 1972: 47-54.
Poems Two Trigram.

1973 Christie Malry's Own Double Entry. Collins.
Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (prose pieces with an introduction). Hutchinson.
All Bull: the National Servicemen, edited with an introduction by B. S. Johnson. Allison and Busby
Not Counting the Savages' (playscript). In Transatlantic Review 45, Spring 1973: 55-75.
`The Gregynog Press and the Gregynog Fellowship'. In The Private Library 6 (1), Spring 1973: 4-15.
See the Old Lady Decently. Written in 1973 as the first novel in a trilogy to have been called Matrix; not yet published.