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  The central principle of absolute fealty to truth is also an articulation of the importance of memory. Johnson’s challenge to himself is to lay bare the causes of things, by a continual dredging up of formative experience: to trace the contingency of events backwards. Johnson’s present is determined by an intrusive and insistent past. Decisions made when young – to join the army at eighteen to make oneself more attractive to women, for instance – will continue to exert their influence long after they have been made: conscription scripts. Equally, his characters feel the unremitting pressing of chance and the random, both as paradoxically fated (it will always be One Sodding Thing After Another), and as seductively liberating (it might even ‘[trip] some trap of unbidden memory’ in ‘Instructions for the Use of Women’). But if Johnson can be said to be reading contingency backwards, he is also concerned with its forwards trajectory; one of his great themes could be described as a kind of proleptic anxiety, as Woyzeck articulates in One Sodding Thing . . . : ‘[it] comes over me, Andres, a great black feeling of a disaster about to happen, or my luck running out, something catching up with me....’

  Though he hated the term, the plays are, for the most part, less ‘experimental, than the prose.1 In the six plays published here Johnson exhibits sustained ease and formal playfulness. Liberated from the constrictions of the traditional novel form, Johnson seemed to find in dramatic form a ready vehicle, already able to contain a polyphony of ideas and voices. It is also in the drama, in Compressor (1972), that Johnson best expressed his fascination with new media and his sustained interest in the possibilities of the visual and the photographic. The play is notable for an acute enthusiasm for new forms, seeing them not as extraneous to literature but as a new way of invigorating narrative and form. As Sleeper says, ‘a man taking pictures of a man taking pictures: there is something in that!’ This play also demonstrates Johnson’s consistent preoccupation with the ludic: from flipping coins and games of squash, to the suggestion that ‘there’s no doubt, too, that games are one of [God’s] chief diversions’. Following the random bounce of a squash ball, its erratic movements delimited by court and wall, we understand Johnson’s characters as similarly bound by their own ludic rules, bouncing chaotically around an indifferent universe. The characters of many of these pieces are aware of their own fictive natures in a classically Johnsonian way, one that is characteristic of a writer pivotally positioned between the modern and the postmodern. In Compressor, his characters echo and double each other uncannily: ‘finally, standing together’ they ‘both independently but at the same time write: I am beside myself.’ In Down Red Lane the protagonist’s belly is independently wilful, just as subject to melancholy, nostalgia, depression, and humour as he is. And in all the plays published here there is a sustained problematizing of the artificiality of chronology: One Sodding Thing After Another, set in ‘The Army. Any Time’, gives us meditations on death and eternity, and as Ghent puts it in What is the Right Thing and Am I Doing It?: ‘Life is a holiday from the great nothing, a vacation from the void — and, like all holidays, it seems interminable’.

  Loss haunts Johnson’s work: it is the fundamental determinism that he allowed for and conjured with. This sense of grief, though, is usually mingled with a clear-eyed compassion, and a desire to tot up life’s losses and gains. In You’re Human Like the Rest of Them, his play of 1967, the generosity of the title is tempered by the clear-sighted confrontation of the centrality of death:

  You are human just like the rest of them/

  And your one certainty is that you’ll die — /

  Our dying is the only certainty/

  Certainty is always a good in itself, even if it brings about this terrible knowledge of mortality. Indeed, throughout the pieces in this collection, Johnson returns to the virtues of certainty: of counting, of reckoning, and of calculation. Like the counting commanding officer in One Sodding Thing After Another, who needs to enumerate time (as he reminds Woyzeck: ‘Just think of it, Woyzeck, all that time going on and bloody on’, reminding him that ‘Thirty years. . . .that means 360 months. . . .thousands and thousands of days, God knows how many minutes, an eternity of seconds. . . . .’), or the husband in Not Counting the Savages (the title of which, too, articulates the limits of enumeration) whose inability to respect the number on the calendar signals to us his moral decrepitude – Johnson’s characters mediate existential anxiety through their desire to account for their lives. His will-to-exactitude often produces a note of half-comic bathos: life, for Johnson, scrupulously accounted for, is usually a disappointment. In the early play The Proper End (not included here, though again with a title that signals a need for clear and appropriate demarcation), Johnson explores his metaphor of existential accountancy later developed to such effect in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973): ‘The double-entry theory of love: love automatically creates a force of hatred which is its opposite, its equal, its complement, its corollary.’ The desire to count up the injustices, the pleasures, and the events that make up a life is eventually just another version of the urge to represent the truth of existence. As Johnson writes in ‘A Few Selected Sentences’ – it is imperative to ‘Accommodate that mess.’ Because, eventually, ‘someone has to keep the records.’

  Prologue by Philip Tew

  Preparing this anthology involved visits by its editors to the B. S. Johnson archive now held in the British Library on the Euston Road in London. This collection consists of a series of folders, files, boxes and notebooks that in essence are just as they were in autumn 1973 when B. S. Johnson left them, about a mile away as the crow flies, stored in the small work room he maintained at the top of his house in Islington. Their journey via Sotheby’s was not a long one geographically, but potentially an important one for scholars. Certainly it allowed the production of this volume of Johnson’s writing. One significant strand of our editorial work meant going through numerous lever-arch and other files containing the carbon copies of his efforts, including the journalism and short prose Johnson undertook for a variety of purposes, commissions and publications. They were often littered with notes and corrections, which is part of the joy of such material. Of course to do so we had to make a special request for this as yet un-catalogued material and each box was delivered rather portentously in large open wooden, leather-lined trays. Such ceremony! Johnson might well either have shuddered, or much more likely laughed out loud. Clearly for us as editors there was a certain thrill about such archival retrieval. But most of all it offered in complex ways certain concrete impressions of Johnson himself, as both a man and a professional writer, and in a sense that too is what the examples of his work published in this anthology seek to convey. We want Johnson to be given voice once more.

  Returning to the British Library, the first impression given by the contents of each of the files is that they are exceedingly neat and efficiently organized, no doubt the product of Johnson’s commercial education and experience, but perhaps also expressive of his need to maintain more than a semblance of order to defy any encroaching chaos. So despite his admission and avowal of the inchoate and randomness in his fiction, here his commercial training and instincts allowed him to stave these off, exhibiting perhaps underlying obsessional and controlling impulses. And they offer far more than this, for the contents of these varied pieces were certainly intriguing in at least one sense: the very persistence of his sense of radical annoyance and anger, a certain strident tone creeping in at times, at others a determination that people ought to comprehend the unfairness of certain of the ideological perversities of the powers-that-be, more precisely those actions of the authorities that led to diminishing freedom. Below I hope to illustrate something of the man by drawing upon work that as editors we had to omit from our final selection, and by doing so redeem certain passages that will allow our readers a glimpse at the remaining archive.

  Johnson could be uncannily perceptive, almost prescient, in his political observations. In one piece written in 1971 for a regula
r column in his trade union journal, he sees Rupert Murdoch’s motivations in a clear light, remarking that the publisher and magnate ‘give[s] the impression of wanting money like normal people want sex.’ Johnson adds of Murdoch’s apparent proprietorial success:

  But while I’m on about the Digger, let’s lay another myth: what he’s done with the Sun, in any case, is the sort of thing that gets success a bad name. For his technique was simply to copy the Daily Mirror to the point (one would have thought) of plagiarism in features and typography, and therefore to exploit what we call in the trade the margarine syndrome: those idiots who can’t tell one from the other. IPC could not have adopted this tactic since they also own the Mirror; so to say that Murdoch has succeeded with the Sun where IPC failed is patent nonsense. Murdoch has not increased the total readership of newspapers; he has simply altered the balance of readership by unscrupulous low cunning.

  Of course Johnson saw such matters in terms of social class and not at all as an abstract issue, rather finding expressed in people’s actions, inactions and instincts their class affiliations, their ideological blindness. He offers in this piece a memorable aphorism: ‘“Business ethics”, indeed, is a contradiction in terms.’ One finds other instances of his ideological awareness and commitment when he railed constantly about the unfairness of payments to authors, and the volume of money made by publishers from their efforts. In a speech he gave to the Society of Authors at their Annual General Meeting on 26 July 1973, printed on orange paper – again a piece not included in this volume – he complained that a recent survey of authors’ earnings shows them lower than they were in 1965, and his motion ‘questions whether the administration and leadership have been effective in promoting the Society of Authors; and recommends that all those responsible for such administration and leadership should resign forthwith.’ He goes further. In his speech he complains of this governing committee ‘What else have they done recently? It’s easier to say what they haven’t done.’ This is classic Johnson in combative mode, personal and accusatory. However, the file in which this speech is contained also amply demonstrates how Johnson was both methodical and well-prepared. For this occasion he not only drafted a complete five-page script in advance word for word for his speech, but another page on white representing a concluding address with which he would wind up as the proposer. All of the above evokes a man who believed in the fights he undertook, demonstrating his commitment and his engagement, but ever the consummate professional he would draw on each effort of research and thinking more than once, regarding it as hard work but also as an investment intellectually. Some of the same material from this speech reappears in a piece (on green paper) entitled ‘On Writer’s Organisations’ which opens with that 1965 survey again. Clearly he had developed strategies for recycling the efforts of his labour.

  In ‘The Revolution Ignored’, an article written for Vogue in 1966, Johnson showed the same persistence and fervour with regard to the form of the novel, its generic requirement to adapt, to reflect on a contemporary world that had changed when compared to the nineteenth century, and to demonstrate the randomness and chaos (whatever his own organizational instincts) that characterized existence. This is a constant refrain, a set of principles and beliefs he returned to repeatedly. In this essay he complains of many of his contemporaries just ‘how staggeringly un-modern are the vast majority of novelists, who forty-odd years on still write as though the revolution of Ulysses had never happened.’ He rejects the idea that that a novel must tell a story, insisting on a range of points that were later also made in the ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973). However, these essays do not simply represent examples of Johnson’s strategic recycling of ideas and efforts. In ‘The Revolution Ignored’ there is at least one intriguing additional critical comment, exhibiting the fullness and value the archive may promise for the Johnson scholar. Johnson says, ‘After all, no one asks that a poem tells a story any longer, and has anyone ever asked it of a piece of music?’ At least implicitly this is testament to Johnson’s desire that the relationship of writers and readers toward the text be more sophisticated, and as he indicates amply elsewhere, be more ideologically informed. Much of the material quoted above also appeared in an earlier essay called ‘Anti or Ultra’ (published in the Bookseller in May 1963) where he offers a close account of the various formal problems he faced in his fiction and he believed that he addressed, at least partially. Nevertheless, perhaps tellingly, in ‘Anti or Ultra’ he does add something concerning his first novel not found quite as emphatically in his ‘Introduction’: he insists, ‘to make people laugh seems to me the supreme virtue any book can have,’ adding ‘While by definition no other book could be written as Travelling People is because no other book would have exactly the same subject-matter . . . I still hope that perhaps it will encourage other writers to re-think the form for themselves.’

  As indicated above, many of the essays in the archive did not make the cut for full and final inclusion in our anthology, largely because we wanted to offer readers as diverse a range of elements by Johnson as possible. However, I shall risk quoting just a few more choice examples of the material we left out. In ‘The Disintegrating Novel 2’ (Books and Bookmen, September 1970) he refers to rivals to the novel – ones that drew upon new technological advantages – that he felt would marginalize the book’s public presence:

  And the book as a technological object is itself threatened with obsolescence, for the Japanese now have a miniature television set the size of a telephone handpiece, with cassette programmes on tiny reels of wire: within ten years these will be as common as transistor radios, and the few unique advantages the book still has (portability, privacy, and ease of reference backwards and forwards) will be unique no longer.

  His fears seem ironic now, given the technological fact of ebook readers such as the Kindle, which might have delighted Johnson on one level; but still he would have deplored the continuing output of neo-traditionalists, and no doubt he would have excoriated the numerous untalented amateur writers publishing their own fiction online. His kind of authenticity came at a personal cost, as he hints in ‘Moment of Truth – and Birth of a New Novel’ (Morning Star, February 1969) when he reveals of The Unfortunates: ‘Certainly I know very well that this one cost me more of myself than anything else I have ever written.’ And yet, as he concludes in ‘Anti and Ultra’, many of his peers failed in a formal sense to convey the essence of their world, by neglecting its contemporaneity, thus not fully capturing the life of their times: ‘It seems to me absurd that writers should be governed or even influenced by conventions of style and technique which were already out of date by the end of Dickens’ life, and within which the truth of the human situation in 1963 cannot be expressed at all satisfactorily.’

  As the whole archive amply demonstrates, as an avant-garde and committed ‘experimental’ writer, Johnson resisted wilful obscurity, seeking a prose that was clear and precise, truthful and honest. What will be the effect of this volume? Our hope is that it brings its many examples of Johnson’s commitments to as wide a readership as possible, and that these selections will encourage scholars who follow our footsteps to the British Library on the Euston Road – which seems a fitting location, for the study of this lifelong Londoner, rather than having to decamp to some library in Texas – to explore the many other, multiple possibilities of Johnson as both a writer and a living human being memorialized in his collected documents. Almost certainly this would have tickled Johnson’s fancy, had he had an inkling of such future literary homage.

  Editors’ Note

  The text of Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, a volume which Johnson himself prepared for publication, has been reproduced exactly from the Hutchinson edition of 1973.

  The plays and journalistic pieces which follow have been transcribed from the surviving manuscripts and typescripts held by the British Library. Johnson was exacting about his writing, and resisted
editorial intervention: we have sought to work in this spirit by adhering to a principle of non-interference wherever possible. The texts should, we agreed, be published as Johnson intended, whether from a published edition of a journal or newspaper, a typescript or a hand-written fair copy. This necessitated a degree of flexibility: where it is clear that the published text was Johnson’s approved version we have used it; where he has indicated a preference for the unexpurgated version we have restored the original text from typescript. Johnson’s original titles have been retained wherever possible; where this has not been possible – when none existed in the original, or to distinguish two identically titled pieces – we have followed convention and indicated our added titles by the use of square brackets. Footnotes have been added only where a contemporary reference or allusion would have proved distractingly opaque for today’s reader. Cuts are indicated in the text by ‘[...]’, but have been kept to an absolute minimum, and have only been made to avoid verbatim repetition, or, in the case of one piece (‘London: the Moron-Made City . . .’), to remove long passages of quotation from sources other than Johnson himself. We have only corrected the text where a mistake is clearly a slip of the typewriter; otherwise, all Johnsonian idiosyncrasies of language and syntax have been retained.

  Publisher’s Note

  B. S. Johnson was a formally innovative writer. During his life he took an active interest in the typography and production of the print editions of his books.

  In producing electronic editions of his work, it was necessary to balance our desire to respect the integrity of his texts with our desire to make his writing available to the widest possible readership, including those who read digitally. We have tried to represent Johnson’s original work in this new medium faithfully; however, the print book is a fixed format and the ebook a fluid one, so it is undesirable to make a facsimile in most circumstances. Johnson was rigorous about his writing, and resisted editorial intervention: we have sought to work in this spirit by adhering to a principle of non-interference. We have prepared these digital books from the first print editions and retained all Johnsonian idiosyncrasies of language and syntax. We have used a digital font that most closely approximates to the original typeface. The text has been optimised for the default type-size setting on most electronic devices.