Well Done God! Read online

  The play scripts in this volume follow established conventions of dramatic notation, with the exception of Compressor, when Johnson uses a column-like layout to convey simultaneous speech and action; although the reader obviously cannot read both at once, when she has read both she will have seen that they are simultaneous and be able to enact such simultaneity for herself. This alignment has been reproduced relatively, allowing the text to reflow and be re-sized, rather than using a fixed layout. These sections will be best displayed using your ereader’s default settings for font size and zoom.

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

  for Michael Bakewell

  Contents

  Introduction

  Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs ? (1967)

  Mean Point of Impact (1970)

  What Did You Say the Name of the Place Was ? (1969)

  Never Heard it Called That Before (1961)

  A Few Selected Sentences (1973)

  Instructions for the Use of Women ; or, Here, You’ve Been Done ! (1970)

  Broad Thoughts from a Home (1960)

  These Count as Fictions (1966)

  Everyone Knows Somebody Who’s Dead (1972)

  Acknowledgments

  All but two of these pieces were first published in the following:

  Covent Garden Press Pamphlets

  Encounter

  Penguin Modern Stories Seven

  Stand

  Statement Against Corpses

  Transatlantic Review

  Winter’s Tales Fourteen

  One was read on BBC Radio Three.

  The author would like to thank György Novàk and Philip Pacey.

  Introduction

  It is a fact of crucial significance in the history of the novel this century that James Joyce opened the first cinema in Dublin in 1909. Joyce saw very early on that film must usurp some of the prerogatives which until then had belonged almost exclusively to the novelist. Film could tell a story more directly, in less time and with more concrete detail than a novel ; certain aspects of character could be more easily delineated and kept constantly before the audience (for example, physical characteristics like a limp, a scar, particular ugliness or beauty) ; no novelist’s description of a battle squadron at sea in a gale could really hope to compete with that in a well-shot film ; and why should anyone who simply wanted to be told a story spend all his spare time for a week or weeks reading a book when he could experience the same thing in a version in some ways superior at his local cinema in only one evening ?

  It was not the first time that storytelling had passed from one medium to another. Originally it had been the chief concern of poetry, and long narrative poems were bestsellers right up to the works of Walter Scott and Byron. The latter supplanted the former in the favours of the public, and Scott adroitly turned from narrative poems to narrative novels and continued to be a bestseller. You will agree it would be perversely anachronistic to write a long narrative poem today ? People still do, of course ; but such works are rarely published, and, if they are, the writer is thought of as a literary flatearther. But poetry did not die when storytelling moved on. It concentrated on the things it was still best able to do : the short, economical lyric, the intense emotional statement, depth rather than scale, the exploitation of rhythms which made their optimum impact at short lengths but which would have become monotonous and unreadable if maintained longer than a few pages. In the same way, the novel may not only survive but evolve to greater achievements by concentrating on those things it can still do best : the precise use of language, exploitation of the technological fact of the book, the explication of thought. Film is an excellent medium for showing things, but it is very poor at taking an audience inside characters’ minds, at telling it what people are thinking. Again, Joyce saw this at once, and developed the technique of interior monologue within a few years of the appearance of the cinema. In some ways the history of the novel in the twentieth century has seen large areas of the old territory of the novelist increasingly taken over by other media, until the only thing the novelist can with any certainty call exclusively his own is the inside of his own skull : and that is what he should be exploring, rather than anachronistically fighting a battle he is bound to lose.

  Joyce is the Einstein of the novel. His subject-matter in Ulysses was available to anyone, the events of one day in one place ; but by means of form, style and technique in language he made it into something very much more, a novel, not a story about anything. What happens is nothing like as important as how it is written, as the medium of the words and form through which it is made to happen to the reader. And for style alone Ulysses would have been a revolution. Or, rather, styles. For Joyce saw that such a huge range of subject matter could not be conveyed in one style, and accordingly used many. Just in this one innovation (and there are many others) lie a great advance and freedom offered to subsequent generations of writers.

  But how many have seen it, have followed him ? Very few. It is not a question of influence, of writing like Joyce. It is a matter of realising that the novel is an evolving form, not a static one, of accepting that for practical purposes where Joyce left off should ever since have been regarded as the starting point. As Sterne said a long time ago :

  “Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another ? Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope ? For ever in the same track—for ever at the same pace ?”

  The last thirty years have seen the storytelling function pass on yet again. Now anyone who wants simply to be told a story has the need satisfied by television ; serials like Coronation Street and so on do very little more than answer the question ‘What happens next ?’ All other writing possibilities are subjugated to narrative. If a writer’s chief interest is in telling stories (even remembering that telling stories is a euphemism for telling lies ; and I shall come to that) then the best place to do it now is in television, which is technically better equipped and will reach more people than a novel can today. And the most aware film-makers have realised this, and directors such as Godard, Resnais, and Antonioni no longer make the chief point of their films a story ; their work concentrates on those things film can do solely and those things it can do best.

  Literary forms do become exhausted, clapped out, as well. Look what had happened to five-act blank verse drama by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Tennyson all wrote blank-verse, quasi-Elizabethan plays ; and all of them, without exception, are resounding failures. They are so not because the men who wrote them were inferior poets, but because the form was finished, worn out, exhausted, and everything that could be done with it had been done too many times already.

  That is what seems to have happened to the nineteenth century narrative novel, too, by the outbreak of the First World War. No matter how good the writers are who now attempt it, it cannot be made to work for our time, and the writing of it is anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant, and perverse.

  Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random ; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies. Philip Pacey took me up on this to express it thus :

  “Telling stories is telling lies is telling lies about people is creating or hardening prejudices is providing an alternative to real communication not a stimulus to communication and/or communication itself is an escape from the challenge of coming to terms with real people”

  I am not interested in telling lies in my own novels. A useful distinction between literature and other writing for me is that the former teaches one something true about life : and how can you convey truth in a vehicle of fiction ? The two terms, truth and fiction, are opposites, and it must logically be impossible.

  The two terms novel and fiction are not, incidentally, synonymous, as many
seem to suppose in the way they use them interchangeably. The publisher of Trawl wished to classify it as autobiography, not as a novel. It is a novel, I insisted and could prove ; what it is not is fiction. The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form ; within that form, one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel.

  In any case, surely it must be a confession of failure on the part of any novelist to rely on that primitive, vulgar and idle curiosity of the reader to know ‘what happens next’ (however banal or hackneyed it may be) to hold interest ? Can he not face the fact that it is his choice of words, his style, which ought to keep the reader reading ? Have such novelists no pride ? The drunk who tells you the story of his troubles in a pub relies on the same curiosity.

  And when they consider the other arts, are they not ashamed ? Imagine the reception of someone producing a nineteenth-century symphony or a Pre-Raphaelite painting today ! The avant garde of even ten years ago is now accepted in music and painting, is the establishment in these arts in some cases. But today the neo-Dickensian novel not only receives great praise, review space and sales but also acts as a qualification to elevate its authors to chairs at universities. On reflection, perhaps the latter is not so surprising ; let the dead live with the dead.

  All I have said about the history of the novel so far seems to me logical, and to have been available and obvious to anyone starting seriously to write in the form today. Why then do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses had never happened, still rely on the crutch of storytelling ? Why, more damningly for my case you might think, do hundreds of thousands of readers still gorge the stuff to surfeit ?

  I do not know. I can only assume that just as there seem to be so many writers imitating the act of being nineteenth-century novelists, so there must be large numbers imitating the act of being nineteenth-century readers, too. But it does not affect the logic of my case, nor the practice of my own work in the novel form. It may simply be a matter of education, or of communication ; when I proposed this book to my publisher and outlined its thesis, he said it would be necessary for me to speak very clearly and very loudly. Perhaps the din of the marketplace vendors in pap and propaganda is so high that even doing that will not be enough.

  The architects can teach us something : their aesthetic problems are combined with functional ones in a way that dramatises the crucial nature of their final actions. Form follows function said Louis Sullivan, mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright, and just listen to Mies van der Rohe :

  To create form out of the nature of our tasks with the methods of our time—this is our task.

  We must make clear, step by step, what things are possible, necessary, and significant.

  Only an architecture honestly arrived at by the explicit use of available building materials can be justified in moral terms.

  Subject matter is everywhere, general, is brick, concrete, plastic ; the ways of putting it together are particular, are crucial. But I recognise that there are not simply problems of form, but problems of writing. Form is not the aim, but the result. If form were the aim then one would have formalism ; and I reject formalism.

  The novelist cannot legitimately or successfully embody present-day reality in exhausted forms. If he is serious, he will be making a statement which attempts to change society towards a condition he conceives to be better, and he will be making at least implicitly a statement of faith in the evolution of the form in which he is working. Both these aspects of making are radical ; this is inescapable unless he chooses escapism. Present-day reality is changing rapidly ; it always has done, but for each generation it appears to be speeding up. Novelists must evolve (by inventing, borrowing, stealing or cobbling from other media) forms which will more or less satisfactorily contain an ever-changing reality, their own reality and not Dickens’ reality or Hardy’s reality or even James Joyce’s reality.

  Present-day reality is markedly different from say nineteenth-century reality. Then it was possible to believe in pattern and eternity, but today what characterises our reality is the probability that chaos is the most likely explanation ; while at the same time recognising that even to seek an explanation represents a denial of chaos. Samuel Beckett, who of all living is the man I believe most worth reading and listening to, is reported thus :

  “What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos, and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The forms and the chaos remain separate . . . to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”

  Whether or not it can be demonstrated that all is chaos, certainly all is change : the very process of life itself is growth and decay at an enormous variety of rates. Change is a condition of life. Rather than deplore this, or hunt the chimæræ of stability or reversal, one should perhaps embrace change as all there is. Or might be. For change is never for the better or for the worse ; change simply is. No sooner is a style or technique established than the reasons for its adoption have vanished or become irrelevant. We have to make allowances and imaginative, lying leaps for Shakespeare, for even Noel Coward, to try to understand how they must have seemed to their contemporaries. I feel myself fortunate sometimes that I can laugh at the joke that just as I was beginning to think I knew something about how to write a novel it is no longer of any use to me in attempting the next one. Even in this introduction I am trying to make patterns, to impose patterns on the chaos, in the doubtful interest of helping you (and myself) to understand what I am saying. When lecturing on the same material I ought to drop my notes, refer to them in any chaotic order. Order and chaos are opposites, too.

  This (and other things I have said) must appear paradoxical. But why should novelists be expected to avoid paradox any more than philosophers ?

  While I believe (as far as I believe anything) that there may be (how can I know ?) chaos underlying it all, another paradox is that I still go on behaving as though pattern could exist, as though day will follow night will follow breakfast. Or whatever the order should be.

  I do not really know why I write. Sometimes I think it is simply because I can do nothing better. Certainly there is no single reason, but many. I can, and will, enumerate some of them ; but in general I prefer not to think about them.

  I think I write because I have something to say that I fail to say satisfactorily in conversation, in person. Then there are things like conceit, stubbornness, a desire to retaliate on those who have hurt me paralleled by a desire to repay those who have helped me, a need to try to create something which may live after me (which I take to be the detritus of the religious feeling), the sheer technical joy of forcing almost intractable words into patterns of meaning and form that are uniquely (for the moment at least) mine, a need to make people laugh with me in case they laugh at me, a desire to codify experience, to come to terms with things that have happened to me, and to try to tell the truth (to discover what is the truth) about them. And I write especially to exorcise, to remove from myself, from my mind, the burden having to bear some pain, the hurt of some experience : in order that it may be over there, in a book, and not here in my mind.

  The following tries to grope towards it, in another way :

  I have a (vision) of something that (happened) to me

  something which (affected) me

  something which meant (something) to me

  and I (wrote) (filmed) it

  because

  I wanted it to be fixed

  so that I could refer to it

  so that I could build on it

  so that I would not have to repeat it

  Such a hostage to fortune !

  What I have been trying to do in the novel form has been too much refracted through the conservativeness of reviewers and others ; the reasons why I have written in the ways that I have done have become lost, have nev
er reached as many people, nor in anything like a definitive form. ‘Experimental’ to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for ‘unsuccessful’. I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful : that is, it has been the best way I could find of solving particular writing problems. Where I depart from convention, it is because the convention has failed, is inadequate for conveying what I have to say. The relevant questions are surely whether each device works or not, whether it achieves what it set out to achieve, and how less good were the alternatives. So for every device I have used there is a literary rationale and a technical justification ; anyone who cannot accept this has simply not understood the problem which to be solved.

  I do not propose to go through the reasons for all the devices, not least because the novels should speak for themselves ; and they are clear enough to a reader who will think about them, let alone be open and sympathetic towards them. But I will mention some of them, and deal in detail with The Unfortunates, since its form seems perhaps the most extreme.