B S Johnson and Post-War Literature

Possibilities of the Avant-Garde

M. Ryle, J. Jordan, M. Ryle, J. Jordan

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137349552
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria

A collection of essays on the 1960s experimental writer B.S. Johnson, this book draws together new research on all aspects of his work, and, in tracing his connections to a wider circle of continental, British and American avant-garde writers, offers exciting new approaches to reading 1960s experimental fiction.

Part I

Johnson in His Time: Influences and Contemporaries

1

Early Influences and Aesthetic Emergence: Travelling People (1961), Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966) and The Unfortunates (1969)

Philip Tew

Below I will offer a cartography of B.S. Johnson’s early work and its origins, but my initial starting point will not feature such experiential and literary influences (some highly personal in nature), which I will move toward later. Rather this mapping starts with an example of the writer’s aesthetic doubts. This may help explain or at least contextualise the concepts concerning the form and function of the novel that initially animated his aesthetic exploration, and about which later he seemed to harbour some uncertainties.

The travails of Travelling People

As he progressed as a writer Johnson evidently became sceptical about the merits of his first extended piece of published writing, the novel Travelling People (1963), for which he refused republication, as his estate continues to do (unfortunately so in my view). In his often intriguing ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), dated 4 May in the last year of his life, he declares ‘I am not interested in telling lies in my own novels’ (Johnson 1973: 14), but he adds concerning his first novel:

Since Travelling People is part truth and part fiction it now embarrasses me and I will not allow it to be reprinted; though I am still pleased that its devices work. And I learnt a certain amount through it; not least that there was a lot of the writing I could do in my head without having to amass a pile of paper three feet high to see if something worked. (22)

This first novel is a generically complex narrative, highly allusive and even, according to some critics, derivative (although these were certainly not the grounds of the author’s own reservations according to his account above); but it remains fairly straightforward in terms of plot. Johnson started the book on Boxing Day 1959 and completed it in 1961, during which time he supported himself first as a private tutor, then a supply teacher and additionally as a summer barman at the Glyn Club near Abersoch in Wales. The novel reflects and was largely based upon his experiences in this establishment in summer 1959 (marginally supplemented by drawing on some time spent as the club’s manager in summer 1960).

Johnson gives an amusing account of his struggle to find his way into print in an article originally published in a book trade paper and recently reprinted in Well Done God! This piece, entitled ‘The Travails of Travelling People’, details the response of two agents. The first, Rosica Alan, finds the book ‘pretentious and unsaleable’ (Johnson 2013 [1963]: 367). An entry dated 29 September 1961 in the diary and notebook Johnson kept at the time records that he felt troubled, if not traumatised by her response: he writes that the ‘shock paralysed or numbed part of my mind’ (Johnson 1961: 24), and notes that not for the first or last time he became suicidal. He was rescued by a second agent, George Greenfield, who found a potential publisher. ‘The Travails of Travelling People’ records that Greenfield had already suggested surgical cuts, and that the publisher to whom Greenfield had sent the draft typescript insisted on even further excisions. According to Jonathan Coe in Like a Fiery Elephant (Coe 2004: 120), this was Richard Sadler of Constable. ‘Travails’ gives a picture of Johnson’s meeting with Sadler:

Then when we do talk it is more about The Novel than about Travelling People. But finally he wins me over when he says that he found my novel funny, which of all reactions is the one I find most pleasing. Then he starts talking about cuts: ‘flat patches’ he calls them, but really he’s after my novel’s kidneys.

So I take it away, and cut out the kidneys. To my astonishment, Travelling People is a better book for being without its kidneys as well as without its liver. And I’m sure you don’t find many authors saying that the surgery suggested by their agents and publishers results in a better book. It makes me wonder whether people, too, wouldn’t perhaps be better without some of their offal. (Johnson 2013 [1963]: 370)

In Travelling People a young hitchhiker, Henry Henry, during a lift en route to Holyhead for the Dublin ferry, is offered work by the manager of the Stromboli Club, Trevor Tuckerson. This position, which Henry takes up on his return, is similar to Johnson’s holiday job as a factotum. Recently graduated Henry becomes infatuated with another young student working as the cook, ‘super young dolly, Kim’ (Johnson 1967 [1963]: 58); they are both drawn into petty rivalries – ‘a sort of a feud’ (59) – involving the club’s owner, his friend and the older staff. The two phrases quoted here are taken from Johnson’s observations while he was working in the Glyn Club: Coe explains that ‘the entire epistolary section [of Travelling People] is pretty much a word-for-word reproduction of a long letter he wrote at the time to Joyce Yates’ (Coe 2004: 91–2). (Yates, a single mother in her late thirties with two young sons, met the 22-year-old Johnson at Birkbeck College in autumn 1955, becoming his lover and friend, and a key influence on his development.) As Coe stresses, most of the rest of the narrative seems ‘to have been drawn directly from life’, except for ‘the climactic scenes of love-making’ with Kim, which are fictional (92).

If this divergence from the truth caused embarrassment for the young woman depicted, that may have been an important reason for Johnson’s later disavowal of the novel. Positioning Johnson in terms of his aesthetic vision often seems problematic because of his commitment to truth, which certainly involves an adherence to the facticity of his experience. Many commentators have found these twin undertakings to be at odds with his task of ongoing formal innovation in his novels. One senses, however, that this sometimes reflects an unease about Johnson’s challenges to the cultural shibboleths of the establishment and his highlighting of class oppression and prejudice. His meta-realist mimetic impulse might seem to contradict his avant-garde, experimental credentials. Yet as Michael Sheehan notes, such a verdict involves a ‘fallacious division into realist and experimental fiction’, a division which ‘has been going on for almost as long as the novel has existed.’ Sheehan explicitly cites Johnson here, arguing that he is the prime example of those novelists who are victims of ‘the sometimes vicious categorizing and labeling … those whose star of critical appreciation is in the ascendant, or whose all-but-forgotten position is slowly being remedied’ (Sheehan 2011: n.p.).

Early influences: Robert Graves, Michael Bannard, Joyce Yates

Coe’s biographical account of a number of influences on the younger Johnson creates several mysteries, including those related to the author’s putative suppressed homoerotic impulses, his occult beliefs, and the circumstances of his death. Coe also suggests that certain key personal and aesthetic relationships inspired Johnson’s crucial early phase of creativity. His notes for the final trilogy record that his mother bought him a collected edition of Shakespeare for his twenty-first birthday in 1954 (Coe 2004: 370), but his creative capacities in a general aesthetic sense and in terms of various aspects of his subject matter were vitally stimulated by other experiences and influences in his early twenties. First there was his belief that he had literally encountered his muse, or ‘White Goddess’ in January 1955 (37–9, 114, 135); second, the influence between March and August 1955 of the flamboyant and eccentric homosexual and exhibitionist, Michael Bannard, whom he met in March 1955 while working at the Standard-Vacuum Oil Company (41, 69); and third, his affair and subsequent friendship with the intellectually and leftist inclined Joyce Yates during the academic year 1955–56 at Birkbeck College. He shared with Yates his artistic passions such as music and drama, and it was she who introduced him to the novel as a genre (73f); her influence ‘was of great intellectual importance’, but Coe is ‘not sure that he felt for her very deeply’ (110).

Johnson revisited certain of these influences in 1961, as recorded in his diary. In a literal revisiting in October of that year, he travelled alone to stay at the house of Bannard’s parents in Banbury, after this erstwhile friend had gone to travel and work abroad, and after Johnson had moved into Bannard’s vacant flat in Myddleton Square in London. Of this curious provincial and vicariously parental visit Johnson records in an entry dated 13 October 1961: ‘Not nice – M has left my present of Tristram Shandy here: it was intended to take with him’ (Johnson 1961: 32–3). Wanting to influence or amuse Bannard, Johnson chose a book that demonstrated part of his own aesthetic coordinates, for the impact of Sterne’s novel on Johnson’s own fiction is self-evident, and particularly so in Travelling People.

Johnson includes in the same notebook an account, dated 29 September 1961, of certain of his experiences or impulses in 1955 which suggest other, more personal coordinates in that aesthetic journey. Coe quotes part of this in segmented fashion (Coe 2004: 66, 69), but does not indicate anything of the passage’s original layout on the page. This may be important since its format tentatively suggests a quasi-poetic notation, and also resembles a chronological schedule of the major elements of his curious developmental, experiential and spiritualised aesthetic commitment and journey, symbolised by the ‘Goddess’. The appearance of these entries (albeit hand-written) is much as follows:

Jan 55 Physical manifestation of

Goddess; indicates my

Servitude to her, death at

29; never able to have

happy love/marriage as she

was so jealous; but reward

as writer; poetry really starts

from then, NO BLACK MAGIC –

BUT EQUALLY CERTAINLY

Mar 55 NOT XTIAN. Meeting with Michael;

confirmation of all this; unified

concept of art and life; M on

life, I on art – conflict;

M wanted to go too deep, and

I was too scared to follow him;

Aug 55 break freed me, broke

him; real conflict; Back; went

to Rome; own version; pursued

own art-course; went to college

as my way of following;

directed first by Joyce then by

Muriel. (Johnson 1961: 28)

The issues this essay explores suggest another conundrum about Johnson: from where does his sense of truth derive? It is unlikely to be Bannard. Although Coe (2004: 41) acknowledges Bannard as a significant influence, he also refers to his ‘mockery’ of Johnson (436), and even suggests Bannard may have been a mendacious individual and the heckler reported to have shouted, at a British Council lecture in Bangkok, that Johnson was ‘a “porcine lout”’ (428). Rather, the Johnsonian quest for truth would seem to originate at least in part in his early obsession with Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948). Coe calls this ‘the book that had the greatest influence on B.S. Johnson’ (Coe 2004: 39), with the future novelist having ‘certainly read it by 1955’ (60); and he concludes (commenting on the diary entry above) that Johnson indeed believed he had ‘seen a “physical manifestation” of the figure of the White Goddess shortly before his twenty-second birthday: round about the time that he seriously began writing poetry himself’ (39). This would also have been in 1955, the year he met Bannard. Johnson adds in his diary and notebook: ‘The “devil” I “saw” was her punishment for not serving her in Wales. A vision of punishment, now made real’ (Johnson 1961: 29).

Alongside this belief in his punitive muse runs another: Johnson’s faith in veracity of a kind, his vision of truth. This may also in part derive from Graves’ description of the Welsh Bardic ethos, in which although ‘a high degree of mechanical skill was still required of master-poets and the Chair of Poetry was hotly contested in the various courts’, the Bards were ‘pledged to avoid what the Church called “untruth”, meaning the dangerous exercise of poetic imagination in myth or allegory’ (Graves 1961: 18). Graves sees this as part of their ‘adherence to what they conceived to be historical truth’, judging it to be an ‘ossified’ strand as opposed what one finds in the ‘tales and Romances, [which,] on the other hand, are full of colour and incident’ (19). One can reconstruct lines of influence in which the two approaches or styles later synthesised, the formal with the communitarian, to produce ‘perfect faithfulness to the Theme’ (21). If we take such a sense of faithfulness together with Johnson’s socialistic sense of complex dialectics, we may judge that truth for Johnson inhered less in what Graves describes as a ‘more modern, rational language or prose, universally current’ (480) and more in an honesty as to causes and connections with regard to the social fabric and the individual. In this sense Johnson sought what Graves described, in a 1960 postscript to his work, as a mind ‘miraculously attuned and illuminated’ (490) to the muse. Johnson (although he might not have used the terms ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ quite in the Gravesian sense) clearly accepted Graves’ observation that ‘[f]act is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth’ (224). Such ‘truth’ was intensely personal, and here too Johnson’s aesthetic coordinates were the subject of specific influence.

Two novels of development: Albert Angelo and Trawl

Travelling People, with its post-adolescent sexual rites of passage, is an experimental version of the Bildungsroman. Johnson’s three subsequent fictions of the sixties trace even more precisely his emergence as a troubled individual and writer. Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966) and The Unfortunates (1969) chart chronologically the period of his early struggles, from before Johnson, still working as a supply teacher, had many achievements to his name, to the point where he had achieved a degree of success and enjoyed public and financial recognition of his status as a writer. This was a critical phase, but it also involved a sifting or trawling of his past, setting it against the present. This correlation of current circumstances with the origins of his feelings and beliefs informs the structure and plot of all these visceral narratives of suffering. All three incorporate what he considered a more mature aesthetic than that of the first novel. Each is intensely personal, and each conveys an acute sense of Britain’s social milieu while remaining determinedly personal and self-critical. Each is also highly (but differently) experimental. As Frank Kermode notes,

Johnson was fond of Sterne, and aware that from an early moment of the novel’s modern career it was possible to use the flexibility and variety of the form to make fun of narrative convention, and even to set up comic resonances between typography and story. You didn’t have to tell the tale in chronological order. You didn’t have to stick to an ‘omniscient’ point of view. You could do the most extraordinary things, enabling you to go far beyond the possibilities of straightforward story. (Kermode 2004: n.p.)

This is true enough, yet what links these three novels is not just Johnson’s sense of an emergent creative and avant-garde identity and his quest to become a fluent and confident writer. Rather it is his reaching for a mode of novelistic expression that cannot be understood solely in such aesthetic and formal terms: as I have argued at length elsewhere (Tew 2001), Johnson’s sense of the literary was combined with a pronounced emphasis on his intense ideological awareness and commitments.

These novels reflect upon different aspects of Johnson’s life in the sixties and in the years before he enjoyed success. As he trawls his own past, sifting obsessively for causes and examples of his pain and suff...