Well Done God! Read online

  Turner the painter turned a Welsh corner

  which revealed a view of the Vale of Clwyd

  so fine that he stopped and yelled . . .

  Buffalo-humped, bent, next to no muscle

  substance on any limb, her face pale where

  it is not grey-yellowed at the temples,

  sunken where it is not puffy under

  the eyes; her step hammertoed, hesitant:

  even a trivial fall may snap off

  the frail neck of a femur; no eyebrows,

  hair sparse except on upper lip and chin;

  her skin with unsuntanned sunspots, her pulse

  slow and temperature low, the genital

  tract become bloodless, unmoist, atrophic;

  her eardrums are in retraction, a sluice

  of cataracts lapses before her eyes;

  she is querulous, forgetful, unclean,

  distressing to others; and to herself.

  . . . Well done God!

  ‘Little Old Lady’

  from Poems Two

  by B. S. Johnson

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface by Jonathan Coe

  Foreword by Julia Jordan

  Prologue by Philip Tew

  Editors’ Note

  Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?

  Six Plays

  You’re Human Like the Rest of Them

  One Sodding Thing After Another

  What is the Right Thing and Am I Doing It?

  Not Counting the Savages

  Compressor

  Down Red Lane

  Short Prose

  The Travails of Travelling People

  Bloody Blues

  A Fishing Competition

  Writing and Publishing: or, Wickedness Reveal’d

  Censorship by Printers

  Holes, Syllabics . . .

  London: the Moron-Made City . . .

  [On football]

  A Hard Glance at the Poetry Business

  [On Beckett]

  Introduction to The Evacuees

  The Professional Viewpoint

  Soho Square [On British Cinema]

  The Gregynog Press and the Gregynog Fellowship

  Opinion

  Soho Square [On the Angry Brigade]

  The Author’s Plight – the Need for a Union

  The Happiest Days?

  About the editors

  Acknowledgements

  The editors owe a great debt of thanks to Virginia and Steve Johnson, who have represented B. S. Johnson’s desire for the integrity of his work to be always respected with passion and honesty, and have balanced this sensitively with a desire to restore these texts to a wider readership. Thanks too go to Paul Baggaley and Kris Doyle at Picador for their enthusiasm and imagination in bringing this project to fruition, Diana Tyler of MBA Literary Agents, and Tony Peake of Peake Associates. We are also grateful to Alan Brownjohn for his help. The staff in the British Library Manuscripts Reading Room dealt with us with forbearance and efficiency, and particular gratitude goes to the British Library’s Jamie Andrews, Rachel Foss and Helen Melody. Finally, we would all like to thank our editorial assistant Christopher Webb for his exemplary work, particularly his faithful transcriptions of an immense amount of archival material.

  Preface by Jonathan Coe

  February 5, 2013, marks the eightieth anniversary of the birth of Bryan Stanley Johnson. The present anthology is being published, in part, to celebrate this fact. We have arranged it in three sections. First we have a facsimile reproduction of Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, the collection of shorter prose pieces Johnson himself compiled shortly before his death in 1973. This is followed by a selection of plays, written either for the stage or for television, three of which have never been published before. Finally, out of the mountain of Johnson’s journalism published between 1963 and 1973, we have cherrypicked the pieces which seemed to us the most worthwhile: whether they find him delivering an especially feisty piece of polemic aimed at the publishers, film producers, writers or writers’ organisations he found lacking, or whether they just offer some flashes of insight into the theoretical thinking, autobiography or historical interests of this perennially fascinating man.

  With the appearance or reappearance in print of these pieces, a good chunk of the Johnson canon is now readily accessible – much more so than in his lifetime. All being well, it seems that a comprehensive DVD release of his film work will not be far behind, either. But there remain some significant gaps. Travelling People, his exuberant, picaresque first novel, remains out of print: in the ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young . . . he gives his reasons for this self-imposed prohibition, one which his estate continues to respect. His final completed novel, See The Old Lady Decently, the first volume of a projected trilogy, also remains a problematic item for any interested publisher, and his two volumes of poetry (Johnson considered himself first and foremost a poet) are likewise currently out of circulation.

  In the meantime, we hope that Well Done God! will do something to plug the remaining gaps, and that readers will emerge from it with a more rounded and more nearly complete sense of Johnson the writer than has been previously possible. Before the editorial process started in earnest in 2012, I had not seen most of these pieces since my work on Johnson’s biography a decade earlier. In the closing paragraph of that book I had signed off, over-optimistically – or perhaps just bad-temperedly – with the sentence ‘Those are the last words I intend to write about B. S. Johnson’. I had probably hoped that completing the book would give me closure on my interest in a writer which many people, I suspect, considered to border on the obsessional. But my interest, or obsession, has not gone away in the intervening ten years. I still find myself returning again and again to Johnson’s writings for inspiration and (just as useful) provocation.

  To me, looking at the contents of this new anthology as a whole, two major themes stand out: Johnson’s dogmatic insistence (articulated most famously in his ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?) on the incompatibility between truth and fiction; and his horror at the vulnerability of the human body and, in particular, its inevitable propensity to decay. In my biography I took repeated issue with both of these positions, but now, while I still consider his mantra that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ to be an unhelpful over-simplification, a decade’s further submission to the ageing process has been enough to convince me that, on the second front at least, Johnson definitely had a point. You’re Human Like The Rest of Them, which for a long time I never really ‘got’, today strikes me as a most courageous act of squaring-up to the unpalatable truth; and Johnson’s hitherto-unpublished continuation of Büchner’s Woyzeck, One Sodding Thing After Another, far from seeming derivatively Brechtian, as I once thought, now feels like a lively and probing excursion into his recurring preoccupations. As for Compressor . . . well, best to let readers themselves make up their minds about that one. At the very least, in its combination of playful obscurity with the most massive existential themes, it shows Johnson’s art, towards the end of his life, moving onto a new and intriguing level.

  In its diversity of content, we tried to bring this anthology close to Johnson’s original conception of Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?. His hope for that book, at first, had been to persuade a publisher to include a wide variety of occasional journalism, ranging from book reviews to football reports. In the end, however, he had to settle for a very much slimmed-down volume, concentrating mainly on what it would be convenient to call ‘short stories’, even though he of course disliked that term very much. And in the event he slimmed down the selection even further h
imself: having a ready-made assembly of nine early pieces to hand in Statement Against Corpses (1964), the volume he had co-authored with his friend Zulfikar Ghose, he nonetheless turned his back on all but two of them. Unless newness itself was the criterion, it’s hard to see why he would have admitted as slight (and damp) a squib as ‘Instructions for the Use of Women’, for instance, when from the earlier book he could have chosen ‘Sheela na Gig’, a truly compelling piece of autobiography with a supernatural twist. But there you have it: the selection was his own; and Johnson’s choices were never less than clear and emphatic.

  In any case, Aren’t You Rather Young . . . contains at least two of his finest pieces of work in any medium. ‘Mean Point of Impact’ brilliantly juxtaposes the building of a cathedral in medieval France with its destruction by aerial bombardment in the Second World War. ‘Everyone Knows Somebody Who’s Dead’ proceeds from a similarly contrapuntal device: extracts from a banal handbook for aspiring writers are interleaved, contemptuously, with an account of the events leading up to the death by suicide of an old student friend. The despised tropes of popular fiction are mercilessly contrasted with what Johnson felt to be their formal and moral opposite: a reminiscing authorial voice which stretches after truth with the same anguished urgency we also find in his great, novel-length threnody The Unfortunates.

  For a writer to ‘tell a story’, to do anything other than leave things ‘untied, untidily’, was to be unfaithful, Johnson believed, to the chaotic realities of life. ‘Everyone Knows Somebody Who’s Dead’ shows him putting this credo into practice. The ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young . . . meanwhile, shows him trying to convince us by argument. It was an argument he rehearsed again and again. Trawling through Johnson’s archive, we lost count of the number of similar articles we came across, dating from the early 1960s onwards: articles in which he repeated, in almost the same words, that Joyce was the Einstein of the novel; that novel-writing was a relay race and most British writers had dropped the baton; that Beckett was the only person worth listening to; that writing neo-Dickensian novels was as silly as trying to write Elizabethan blank verse drama.

  Putting together a readable collection of his journalism involved setting aside many of these pieces: with some regret, for all of them provided incidental, glancing pleasures. There was a good deal of sometimes animated editorial discussion about what to put in and what to leave out. But the three of us remained united by our admiration for Johnson and our determination to achieve a selection which represented him (we hope he would have approved this word) honestly. For their work and their company over the last few months, I’d like to express my gratitude to my fellow-editors. On which subject, this is a probably a good moment for me to step down, and allow them to have their say.

  Foreword by Julia Jordan

  I hate these women who only want bits of me. I offer her the enormous totality of me, and she says, yes, I’ll have the conversation bit, and the company bit, but not the bed bit, nor even the handsonmybigtits bit. I hate the partial livers. I’m an allornothinger. (Albert Angelo)

  B. S. Johnson, like the protagonist of his 1964 novel Albert Angelo, was an ‘allornothinger’. The writing collected in this volume seeks to represent ‘the enormous totality’ of the prolific Johnson; if, in the recent past, his novels have been the only widely disseminated part of his oeuvre, here the editors offer an encounter with a broader variety of Johnson’s eclectic range of forms. We say ‘yes’ to all his ‘bits’. This anthology seeks to recover some of these long inaccessible pieces of work and to deliver them to his – recently reinvigorated – readership. While we could not include all of his unpublished and out-of-print work, the editors hope that his spirit of capaciousness has been recreated here: included are the major plays, for television and stage; the short prose collected in Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?; journalism; essays; literary criticism; autobiography; single-issue polemics. These pieces throw new light onto the novels and poetry for which Johnson is best known, and show him ‘in progress’, in the process of working out the concerns to which he would return throughout his career.

  The sheer bulk of Johnson’s output demands the principle of selection. A man with serious affection for objects – a collector even of paperclips – Johnson is driven, like his Customs Officer in ‘Instructions for the Use of Women’, by the ‘desire to see objects declared’. So, walking down Bournemouth’s arcades, one Johnsonian narrator scrutinizes the ‘locked, mahogany and brass’ advertising cases, looking through their ‘angled glass’ to read ‘hand-lettered posterpaint showcards for hairdressing and tinting, dancing, restaurants, the Bournemouth Casino (members only), two discotheques, theatre and cinema’, itemizing ‘pictures advertising the Foot Clinic and the Public Baths Department’. The exhaustive nature of Johnson’s depiction is both generous and inclusive, and yet unavoidably selective. To collect is, by necessity, to select, and to omit.

  Selection, in turn, necessitates interpretation: the aim has been to include the pieces of Johnson’s writing that are significant in relation to his major themes. Indeed, the reader can trace Johnson’s lifelong preoccupations: the slippery distinction between truth and representation; the proper role of the author; fictionality and storytelling; the accuracy of memory and the importance of memorialisation; the vagaries of chance, contingency, and randomness. In the establishing of these themes we see repetition itself emerge as a characteristically Johnsonian rhetorical device: for Johnson, certainty is achieved through accumulation, through the testing and extension of his ideas. Johnson’s repetitions display him in the act of gaining certainty through these accretions – a certainty which inevitably reveals itself to be precarious even in its vigour and appetite – and many of the works here are the results of the creative alchemizing of these fundamental literary precepts. The editors’ explicit goal was to give a sense of the trajectory of his literary development, and to this end a sense of the chronological order of the pieces has been maintained where possible in order to uncover changes of style and tonal shifts.

  At times it seems that Johnson is at open war with the very notion of fiction. ‘Telling stories is telling lies’, he declares, declining to perform such cheap party-tricks: as he writes in Albert Angelo, ‘fuck all this lying’. Consequently, Johnson’s subsequent refusal to delineate between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ informs the organization of this anthology, which distinguishes only between the dramatic works and the shorter prose, allowing the autobiographical to sit alongside the imaginative. For Johnson, these genres cannot remain hermetically discrete; it is in their interaction that the line between ‘telling stories’ and truth-telling is effaced. ‘There’s a lot of me in this house’, as the protagonist of What is the Right Thing and Am I Doing It? admits: ‘Literally, when you think of it. I’ve spent thirty years here, and most of the skin I shed in that time must be in the dust, in the crevices, in the air’. The reader of this anthology, and of Johnson’s work in general, will feel the corporeal presence of the man in his writing; his autobiographical dust is in the air throughout this anthology. This intimacy is there, too, in Johnson’s feel for the material stuff of life – for food, for sex, for objects – for consuming and being consumed. Indeed, an almost uncomfortable proximity to the physical pervades these text; the confines of the body and its demands press down on his characters and on his readers. Naked women in the play One Sodding Thing After Another, the ‘Nudies’, are evoked by the image of ‘skinless sausages’, as Woyzeck is starved by military doctors in the name of science. A stage direction in One Sodding Thing . . . reads, tellingly: ‘then he returns to his preoccupation with food: hold this as long as it will bear.’ Similarly, both Down Red Lane and Not Counting the Savages are plays that portray corpulence and compulsive eating as correlatives of the generous capaciousness evoked elsewhere. Johnson asks us to ‘bear’ gluttony frequently, as indicative of a visceral self-loathing and as a marker of compassion. As the diner of Down Red Lane a
dmits: ‘I do know I have suffered from my appetite, my grossness, my peculiarity.’

  Johnson does not flinch in the face of the gross, or the peculiar. Yet at the heart of his governing authorial injunction – to tell the truth – lies a perceptible trace of uncertainty, a concession of unease: while attesting a belief that truth can be represented, Johnson betrays his fear that it may be a mirage. Truth is an opaque thing, and Johnson’s anxious attempts to fix it to the page are palpable in the works collected here. His is a poetics of frustration: his prose fluctuates between cohesion (certainty) and fragmentation (the failure of representation to do its work). The demand for truth and contempt for artifice inform Johnson’s desire to abolish the distance between author and reader. Indeed, to read Johnson is to find oneself in active struggle for control over the text, negotiating with a confrontational author, who seems at times to be let down, disappointed by our readerly shortcomings. As he says in ‘Holes, Syllables . . .’

  But my character is something like Shandy’s father, who had—‘...such a skirmishing, cutting kind of a slashing way with him, in his disputations, thrusting and ripping, and giving every one a stroke to remember him by in his turn – that if there were twenty people in company – in less than half an hour he was sure to have every one of them against him.’

  In his various direct addresses, his cajolements or confrontational indictments, his flirtatious asides – these elegiac calls into the void – Johnson articulates a kind of mourning for the reader’s presence. The pleasures of the text, for him, are a resolutely consensual matter, and must be negotiated via constant dialogue: ‘you can provide your own surmises or even your own ending, as you are inclined’. ‘For that matter’, he continues, ‘I have conveniently left enough obscure or even unknown for you to suggest your own beginning; and your own middle, as well, if you reject mine. But I know you love a story with gunplay in it’.