Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson

The unpityingness of this project (he is sometimes so savage that it must not always have been pleasant to be in the same room as him, and he is sometimes so self-savaging that it must have been very painful indeed to have been in the same head as him) is leavened by a Beckettian and boyish (usually 16ish) sense of humour.

Repeatedly he rebuked other novelists for failing to realise that James Joyce was the ‘Einstein of the novel’ and that the world had to be different after Ulysses. He wanted in his fiction to show things as they are – bodies, pain, cancers, vomits, the gruesomeness of dying, the endless self-indulgence of memory – without letting anybody, least of all himself, escape into the cosy world of what he termed Dickensian fiction. He was preoccupied with telling the truth, the main characteristic of which, so far as he was concerned, was its opposition to convention. Having read Johnson and about him I avoid using the word ‘experimental’ in my static-clearing version of his life, partly out of piety to the dead (‘Experimental’, he said, ‘to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for “unsuccessful”’) and partly because that word misses the point of his writing. It was a perfect recipe for writerly torment. In his fiction, drama and film he sought to be both devilishly avant-garde and a popular success. Much of this is gathered together, and some of it published for the first time, in Well Done God! He also wrote football match reports for the Observer. He also left behind a number of plays (many of which were not performed and some of which were unperformable), several TV scripts, an array of polemical essays and some shorter pieces of fiction. Before his death he had published six novels, which were completed in the course of little more than a decade, and had written one more, which was to have been the first part of a trilogy about his mother’s death from cancer. He left (as the obituarists say) a wife and two children. Johnson, who died after slitting his wrists at the age of forty on 13 November 1973. To clear the static first: these reprints are to celebrate what would have been the eightieth birthday of the novelist B.S.

I had a staticky reminiscence of what he might have been, which could be represented, using his own idiosyncratic conventions for marking the lapses that run through our consciousness of the world, as ‘experimental …. Until very recently I had never read any B.S.

Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson