I hate these women who only want bits of me. I offer her the enormous totality of me, and she says, yes, I’ll have the conversation bit, and the company bit, but not the bed bit, nor even the handsonmybigtits bit. I hate the partial livers. I’m an allornothinger. (Albert Angelo)
B. S. Johnson, like the protagonist of his 1964 novel Albert Angelo, was an ‘allornothinger’. The writing collected in this volume seeks to represent ‘the enormous totality’ of the prolific Johnson; if, in the recent past, his novels have been the only widely disseminated part of his oeuvre, here the editors offer an encounter with a broader variety of Johnson’s eclectic range of forms. We say ‘yes’ to all his ‘bits’. This anthology seeks to recover some of these long inaccessible pieces of work and to deliver them to his – recently reinvigorated – readership. While we could not include all of his unpublished and out-of-print work, the editors hope that his spirit of capaciousness has been recreated here: included are the major plays, for television and stage; the short prose collected in Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?; journalism; essays; literary criticism; autobiography; single-issue polemics. These pieces throw new light onto the novels and poetry for which Johnson is best known, and show him ‘in progress’, in the process of working out the concerns to which he would return throughout his career.
The sheer bulk of Johnson’s output demands the principle of selection. A man with serious affection for objects – a collector even of paperclips – Johnson is driven, like his Customs Officer in ‘Instructions for the Use of Women’, by the ‘desire to see objects declared’. So, walking down Bournemouth’s arcades, one Johnsonian narrator scrutinizes the ‘locked, mahogany and brass’ advertising cases, looking through their ‘angled glass’ to read ‘hand-lettered posterpaint showcards for hairdressing and tinting, dancing, restaurants, the Bournemouth Casino (members only), two discotheques, theatre and cinema’, itemizing ‘pictures advertising the Foot Clinic and the Public Baths Department’. The exhaustive nature of Johnson’s depiction is both generous and inclusive, and yet unavoidably selective. To collect is, by necessity, to select, and to omit.
Selection, in turn, necessitates interpretation: the aim has been to include the pieces of Johnson’s writing that are significant in relation to his major themes. Indeed, the reader can trace Johnson’s lifelong preoccupations: the slippery distinction between truth and representation; the proper role of the author; fictionality and storytelling; the accuracy of memory and the importance of memorialisation; the vagaries of chance, contingency, and randomness. In the establishing of these themes we see repetition itself emerge as a characteristically Johnsonian rhetorical device: for Johnson, certainty is achieved through accumulation, through the testing and extension of his ideas. Johnson’s repetitions display him in the act of gaining certainty through these accretions – a certainty which inevitably reveals itself to be precarious even in its vigour and appetite – and many of the works here are the results of the creative alchemizing of these fundamental literary precepts. The editors’ explicit goal was to give a sense of the trajectory of his literary development, and to this end a sense of the chronological order of the pieces has been maintained where possible in order to uncover changes of style and tonal shifts.
At times it seems that Johnson is at open war with the very notion of fiction. ‘Telling stories is telling lies’, he declares, declining to perform such cheap party-tricks: as he writes in Albert Angelo, ‘fuck all this lying’. Consequently, Johnson’s subsequent refusal to delineate between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ informs the organization of this anthology, which distinguishes only between the dramatic works and the shorter prose, allowing the autobiographical to sit alongside the imaginative. For Johnson, these genres cannot remain hermetically discrete; it is in their interaction that the line between ‘telling stories’ and truth-telling is effaced. ‘There’s a lot of me in this house’, as the protagonist of What is the Right Thing and Am I Doing It? admits: ‘Literally, when you think of it. I’ve spent thirty years here, and most of the skin I shed in that time must be in the dust, in the crevices, in the air’. The reader of this anthology, and of Johnson’s work in general, will feel the corporeal presence of the man in his writing; his autobiographical dust is in the air throughout this anthology. This intimacy is there, too, in Johnson’s feel for the material stuff of life – for food, for sex, for objects – for consuming and being consumed. Indeed, an almost uncomfortable proximity to the physical pervades these text; the confines of the body and its demands press down on his characters and on his readers. Naked women in the play One Sodding Thing After Another, the ‘Nudies’, are evoked by the image of ‘skinless sausages’, as Woyzeck is starved by military doctors in the name of science. A stage direction in One Sodding Thing . . . reads, tellingly: ‘then he returns to his preoccupation with food: hold this as long as it will bear.’ Similarly, both Down Red Lane and Not Counting the Savages are plays that portray corpulence and compulsive eating as correlatives of the generous capaciousness evoked elsewhere. Johnson asks us to ‘bear’ gluttony frequently, as indicative of a visceral self-loathing and as a marker of compassion. As the diner of Down Red Lane admits: ‘I do know I have suffered from my appetite, my grossness, my peculiarity.’
Johnson does not flinch in the face of the gross, or the peculiar. Yet at the heart of his governing authorial injunction – to tell the truth – lies a perceptible trace of uncertainty, a concession of unease: while attesting a belief that truth can be represented, Johnson betrays his fear that it may be a mirage. Truth is an opaque thing, and Johnson’s anxious attempts to fix it to the page are palpable in the works collected here. His is a poetics of frustration: his prose fluctuates between cohesion (certainty) and fragmentation (the failure of representation to do its work). The demand for truth and contempt for artifice inform Johnson’s desire to abolish the distance between author and reader. Indeed, to read Johnson is to find oneself in active struggle for control over the text, negotiating with a confrontational author, who seems at times to be let down, disappointed by our readerly shortcomings. As he says in ‘Holes, Syllables . . .’
But my character is something like Shandy’s father, who had—‘...such a skirmishing, cutting kind of a slashing way with him, in his disputations, thrusting and ripping, and giving every one a stroke to remember him by in his turn – that if there were twenty people in company – in less than half an hour he was sure to have every one of them against him.’
In his various direct addresses, his cajolements or confrontational indictments, his flirtatious asides – these elegiac calls into the void – Johnson articulates a kind of mourning for the reader’s presence. The pleasures of the text, for him, are a resolutely consensual matter, and must be negotiated via constant dialogue: ‘you can provide your own surmises or even your own ending, as you are inclined’. ‘For that matter’, he continues, ‘I have conveniently left enough obscure or even unknown for you to suggest your own beginning; and your own middle, as well, if you reject mine. But I know you love a story with gunplay in it’.
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.’