Well Done God! Read online

  You would not be forgiven for thinking my life one long round of weddings, the like.

  The first (or Oscar) wedding reception was at a hotel on the front. Very pleasurable, being at the seaside with something proper to do, with a purpose, and with friends, like Bengs, in this case. But the epigram, and reading the telegrams, too, were almost distressing. And so was the bill. My duties as best (available) man it seems, included paying for the reception. Not out of my own money, the father of the bride footed. I cast the bill carefully and quickly, being at that time more an accounts clerk than a student. It seemed the least I could do following the pagan flatness of my speech. Mine was nothing approximate to the maître’s total, differing by some fourteen pounds if I remember as accurately as I cast. A considerable sum, even more considerable (as ever) then. The difference was in the favour of the maître, no surprise, or of those who employed him. His apologies were certainly profuse, though practised and just not concealing a challenge to my sharpness. The bride’s father was noticeably grateful to me. The maître must have hoped we were all too drunk by then. Perhaps more often than not that is the usual state at the end of these functions. I hardly remember the bride and groom during this wedding : only her on the church path after, him in the church as we awaited the delegation. Perhaps that is as it should have been.

  Abortive is shortly a good word in context.

  Three years for our respective degrees, ha, and we hardly saw each other. One occasion though I remember with some clearness : a Fireworks Day, one of three, by deduction. A dinner or supper with him and the curls, me and my moll, what a metonym. The streets, afterwards, of Pimlico—(“Have at thee, then, my merrie boyes and hey for old Ben Pimlicos nut browne”—as it occurs first written down in News from Hogsdon, 1598. But no doubt they would frown on such a scholium as having no place.). There were fireworks in the streets, we threw them, a bonfire on a bombsite, St. George’s something the road was called, in Pimlico, where one may be catered for but hardly satisfied.

  Then when we had both just finished we met in the coffee bar in Malet Street next to Dillons, on purpose. We were able to tell each other what we had done in between. The marriage was just become or becoming a divorce. My moll had cast me off in favour of a sterile epileptic of variable temperament. But yes ! Now I remember exactly, ha ! We had not just finished, but were finishing, finals. One of the days we met in the Rooms, I feel they called them, arranged to meet afterwards downstairs. And thence to the coffee bar. On our way, talking at a junction, waiting, just before Euston Road, to the south, I could look it up, gazetteers are to hand, but why should I ? Am I not allowed to be lazy too ? Or reckless ? But as we stood talking at this junction, she who was once my moll appeared in the long distance, walked the long way towards us, crossed the other wide diagonal, went the long way away. And all that while I tried to talk as though I were unaware of her, of all that she had meant to me, of all those things I have exorcised elsewhere. Ah.

  After the coffee we made an evening of it, did the thing most opposite to degree finals we could think of at such notice : front row of the royal circle at the Victoria Palace. The Crazy Gang were then tailing off, we could have sat anywhere, at any price, they would have had us. No doubt there were other funny things, we were raucous with relief, but now I remember only a game they played with a fat lady, throwing old pennies so they landed flatly on her bare mottled old chest, briefly, then dropped into her cleavage. There were things like that then. No doubt we also caught up then, though since I was without any direction, where was he ?

  Robin (now I have to name him) had taken up with a student, a girl in the year below him (before, during or after the divorce was unclear), a Swiss who was having an affair also with a much older man with money, and all that went with it, a car. The curls, he told me, had had an abortion, arranged with confounding liberality (for this was in what was thought of as the heyday of the backstreet abortionist) by his tutor, to whom he had gone for help in this matter. The marriage was virtually broken, after less than a year, and satisfaction at having foreseen their short incompatibility was not absent from my remarks at the death on this occasion. But I could not have acted otherwise, in marrying her, I am sure, emotionally, he insisted. But there had been hints, heard over the telephone not long before Finals, that they had parted. I was put off, easily, working all that afternoon by indecision as to ringing her and attempting to take sexual advantage of the state she might or might not have been in. I did not know about the heyday then, and after all I had been more or less best man.

  It occurs to me now because of this and other things that I could not and cannot call myself his friend. Was he capable of friendship ? I do not think so. Am I ? It was more a working relationship, he was like a colleague though we had no common enterprise or ambition beyond both being working-class boys bent on an education, the illusion that that was the key to—

  Extension is always achieved by the Insertion of one or more Abortive Efforts.

  There was another occasion. Bengs and I went to a Wandsworth hill road, in the curls’ time. Of more I have no recollection.

  Their Comprehensive Scheme should deal with this Common Problem. But it does not.

  It was another flat in which I remember him next, as it may be, in Old Brompton Road, the corner of Drayton Gardens, near the powerhouse of the literary trade union movement. Though I was then of course unaware of its militancy. And now I am quaintly aware of one of those loops in time where. . . . but you do not need me to explain that cliché of the twenties. What has happened is more important, of certain interest to me, and what has happened is that I have remembered that the girl I took to this Old Brompton Road flat Robin had was in fact the very same girl whose marriage I attended all those years later and whose father I disappointed ! This can be no coincidence : a real loop in time has happened. I think I did not want to marry her myself. I was at that time between girls I wanted to marry. But it is a curious loop, though I have not wanted for more curious. And while describing it the one thing I remember is that we four (the Swiss being there too) discussed a topical tragedy in the world of politics, Sharpeville. The reason I remember what he said is that he was shortly proved to be right : in that the Sharpeville massacre, far from being the spark which would ignite a conflagration to consume the old repressive system, was on the contrary more likely to be the flame which would harden into steel the iron resolve of the oppressors. I do not know that his imagery was as elegantly contrived as mine is, but he had written an unpublished article about the incident, for (I think) a serious weekly. But he was remarkably right ! I am myself never right for anyone else but me, and not too often do I achieve that small victory. How many times have you yourself been right for other people, then ? Ah.

  He was at this time teaching at some South London secondary school, his writing was towards another job. If ever you want to make a lot of money, he told me, open a sweetshop next to a school, the kids are in and out all day long. As we left I told the Swiss privately I thought that what he had read to us of his writing had . . . saleability ! As though I knew, it was mere politeness !

  The Solution Stage. . . .

  Perhaps it was this perceptive rightness which led him inevitably to a post on the Evening Standard at the City Desk.

  . . . involves the character in either (a) overcoming his problems . . .

  How full everyone’s life is ! Why, I hardly knew him and here I am well past two thousand words already !

  . . . or (b) succumbing to them.

  Later in this stage they visited me. I cannot avoid the thought that he was showing me that he had arrived in the world of affairs before I had. That is, he had a car and after eating curry out he bought a whole bottle of whisky to take back to the flat I had then. I think he even told me how much he was earning; it seemed at that time I was managing adequately on about a quarter of his salary. I think he wanted not only to show me he was doing well but that his way of doing well was better than mine. My way then
was simply to try to write as well as those exemplars from the past I had chosen to set up whilst at college. Neither did it escape my notice that he was ahead in the matter of a mistress, too, and a glamorous foreigner at that. All I had to show was a bound set of page-proofs of my first novel : high hopes as I had of it, I do not remember it as being sufficient to set against the car, the whisky, and the Swiss mistress.

  What other news from Hoxton ?

  A finished copy before publication I took around to dinner at their flat, still in Pimlico, some (presumably short) while later. I do not remember what Robin said about the book on this occasion : at some time previously he had expressed great scepticism about what it was trying to do. He was right if the amount of money garnered was his criterion. Perhaps it was; or was not. Present was a very pleasant, charming and witty man of about our age called Charles, who was by way of being a printer and an actor, though not necessarily in that order. I think Robin had meanwhile made a daring leap from the Standard to a young, vital organ which was highly relevant and called Topic. Robin became either its business manager or writer on business affairs, business editor : I think the latter. Much talk of a world I did not know, very high-powered, men who were coming or all the go at the time, have since gone even further, some of them, his colleagues in print.

  Have I finished with the Abortive Effort(s) yet ?

  I have recently become aware that an uncomfortable number of my contemporaries are dying before what I had imagined to be their times, simply jacking it all in, for one reason or another.

  There was another, hardly remembered. The landlady of a friend with the same forename as myself. Her daughter came up to attend to the disposition of the remains and remnants. She was married to a naval officer, the daughter. My friend made (he convinced me) steamy love with her, unexpectedly, in some sort of consolatory reaction to the mother’s death. She had drunk a bottle of gin and sealed the drawing-room cracks and turned the gas on. Probably for her a comfortable, euphoric occasion, making herself comfy : I imagine her not desperate. The day after, the daughter and my friend were alone in the house, the naval officer as if nowhere. She had to stay the night, it was only nature, my friend was sure. My friend was also a colleague at work in a sweet factory, and he was remarkable amongst my acquaintance in that each morning after an evening on the beer he would wake up to find the plimsols he used as slippers seeping with urine. It could clearly be no one else’s but his own, though at the same time he could never remember having risen in the night to perform. He would relate each occasion to me, baffled, whenever we . . . but I digress, and the XLCR Plotfinder leaves me unclear as to whether digressions are permitted.

  Oh, I look forward to my own deathbed scene : the thing I shall have to say which I could not say before !

  The Topic job was a great success but the magazine collapsed, ahead of its time in some respects, I seem to remember. Robin went (though there may have been a hiatus) back to the Standard as full-blown City Editor. We were proud of him, Bengs and I, and others, too. I meant to tear it out, I was in a foreign country, I never did.

  My wife and I, newly married, visited Robin and the Swiss girl, Vivienne, something like as newly-married, now, I think, at their new small house in Maida Vale, very demure, bijou. We had a meal, supper or dinner as usual. He showed me the room that he intended to fill with his files. A comprehensive filing system, he informed me, was a major factor in the success of any journalist : one simply collected facts together from many sources, filed them under subjects, and regurgitated them in new combinations as one’s own articles.

  Soon we must arrive at the Resolution or Point of Solution. . . .

  Not long afterwards we took him up on the offer of the gift of a large wardrobe he had made himself from battens and hardboard, collected it in the old navyblue banger of a van which was the first fourwheeled vehicle I had ever owned. He described how the wardrobe was the first thing he had made for the home in the palmy days of the curls, how it was constructed over-elaborately and uneconomically due to his lack of craftsmanlike experience. He had, unexpectedly and soon, an opportunity to demonstrate its methods of construction since it became stuck on the third flight of stairs up to our second-floor flat and we had to take it to pieces there to move it any higher. They had decently followed us in their car, a bigger car, and helped us carry the wardrobe. But there we were, unsocially stuck, we above having access to our flat, they below ; it was hardly possible to pass even refreshments between. I have taken it to pieces myself since then, on moving out five years later. I reassembled it for lodgers, and then on another advent I had it in bits again, roughly, crudely, with the children. It had served us well, I burnt it in the yard. Except for one piece I shall keep, have before me for this piece, having cut a foot specially with his writing on it, in pencil curious things that confirm how he said he made it : OSSPIECE, it says, cut off by the removal necessary for a tee-halving joint, TOP BACK. Yes, the point is in. SCREW TOP ONTO X1 PIECE. IT WILL HAVE TO BE SHORTENED BY TWICE THE WIDTH OF THIS. What writing ! It was always rickety, was unsightly from the first, too, we accepted it only because we had no money for a proper one.

  . . . which can admit of a Surprise Ending.

  Mostly professional things. They must have visited us in that flat when we had straightened it ; I was very careful about reciprocating hospitality in those days. We learnt at one point he had been demoted to Assistant through the return of a former City Editor, a star ; this was an uncomfortable arrangement but we understood he accepted it. Not so very much later he was promoted again when the star ascended ever higher. One anecdote he told us concerned travelling in a taxi with the super star and Vivienne : a carefree cyclist overtook them, dodging in and out, glorying in his mobility amongst the impacted cars in Regent Street, until some minutes later near the Vigo Street junction he was involved in a jam of his own causing which he was unable to avoid since his brain was now distributed hither and thither.

  All that time, and the only exact words of his I remember are some of those spoken in the Malet Street coffee bar on that one occasion : “Life is a series of clichés, each more banal than the last.”

  I certainly do not feel up to inventing dialogue for your sake, going into oratio recta and all that would mean. These reconstructed things can never be managed exactly right, anyway. I suppose I could curry a dialogue in which Robin and I argued the rights and wrongs of his Conflictful Situation, but it would be only me arguing with myself : which would be even more absurd than trying to write of someone else’s life.

  The last I think I saw of him was at the home of a smart lawyer to whom I had originally introduced him. I remember feeling resentful that they now knew each other better than I knew either of them. We have diverged, I thought, arrogantly, geometrical progression cannot be unwelcome.

  It must have been perhaps two years later that I attended some quiet function and met again the charming Charles. He said he was very relieved to be able to tell me that our mutual friend Robin appeared to have sorted himself out at last, after his trouble. I had not heard of any trouble, I told him apologetically. With genuine sorrow, Charles explained that Robin had become involved with another girl and Vivienne had as a result successfully gassed herself. I was equally genuinely shocked, and guilty, too, that I had not been in touch with him for the period within which this had happened. Then I shared his relief that Robin had recovered to the extent that he was living with another girl : whether this was the same another girl I do not remember Charles telling me. No doubt I could find out by ringing him now and perhaps inviting him round for one of supper, dinner, or a drink.

  Patience : we are about to reach the Solution Point.

  I was for three months in Paris at the time, and nervously keeping in touch by purchasing the airmail edition of The Times perhaps every third day. Thus I was again genuinely shocked to read of his death only by a one-in-three chance. I cannot at this stage remember if I read a news story and the obituary, or only the latter
. I seem to know that he too employed the good offices of the North Thames Gas Board, but whether this was from the newspaper or later from the splendid Charles, or some other source, I cannot ascertain. I meant to tear it out, the way one does, and never does. It cannot happen with North Sea Gas, I am assured. But certainly I read the obituary, which was without a photograph, I think. It was not very long. After some facts, the only opinion expressed as to how he might be remembered, or had been in any way remarkable, concerned the way in which he had helped to find out what was in the minds of businessmen by organising a luncheon club at which they were invited to meet the press. There was more than that, but that is all it said, all there was to say, his life summed up, the obituary, full point.

  There. I have fully satisfied the XLCR rules, I think. Popular acclaim must surely follow.

  Six Plays

  You’re Human Like the Rest of Them

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  This stage version of You’re Human Like The Rest of Them was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of Expeditions III, an evening of short experimental plays, in 1964. It was not performed at the time, but Johnson went on to direct a film adaptation, under the auspices of the BFI production board, in 1967. Premiered at the National Film Theatre on 5 May that year, the film starred William Hoyland as Haakon, and won the Grands Prix at both the Tours and Melbourne Short Film Festivals in 1968. The play finally received its stage premiere as part of B. S. Johnson vs God, which ran at the Basement Theatre, London, from 18 to 29 January 1971. It was published twice in Johnson’s lifetime: in Transatlantic Review, 19 (Autumn 1965) and New English Dramatists 14 (Penguin, 1970). We have followed the second of these versions, which incorporates later revisions by Johnson, such as the insertion of an obscene joke at the expense of long-running radio soap opera The Archers. The distinctive punctuation of this decasyllabic verse play, to which we have adhered, includes the insertion of a slash (/) at every line break.