B. S. JOHNSON

Albert Angelo

1964

ONE OF THE BEST WRITERS we’ve got,” proclaims a strap across the dust jacket of Trawl, the novel B. S. (Bryan Stanley) Johnson published in 1966. The words are not attributed to anyone and it may very well be that he wrote them himself. He lived in a handsome square not far from the City with a favorite restaurant at one corner. After a meal he’d go to some bookshop alone and once or twice with me. If he found one of his own novels, he made sure to prop it up conspicuously, in the window most likely or on top of a pile. If the shop had no copies, he’d rebuke the assistant along the lines of “You do realize, don’t you, that the Sunday Times calls this author clever and funny and likens him to Rabelais?” He carried on even after one assistant said, “There, there, Mr. Johnson, it’s quite all right.” Oh how desperately he wanted to be famous.

I was the Sunday Times reviewer who had praised his first novel, Travelling People, published in 1963. Maurie Bunde, one of its characters, is the victim of a heart attack and normally the pun on the name would have stopped me from reading any further. But here is an experimental search for new forms in fiction. The standard he-said she-said narrative has been exhausted, worked to death. In this novel, wavy black lines on three quarters of a page replace conventional story telling. Death is represented by two and a half black pages. These experiments come thick and fast. “It requires no small talent,” I wrote a bit heavily, “to make an engaging subject-matter out of style.” The letter thanking me for my review was an appeal for friendship.

Bryan gave off unhappiness like a scent. Born in 1933, he had some bad experience as a child evacuated in the war. Clay, a poem of his, has two final lines that may hold the key: “Doing the best thing for me to their mind:/war or parents: which did more to destroy?” He’d left his secondary modern school early and only the public library had made him a widely read and cultured man. I see him as he was in that local restaurant, hungrily eating, his face overweight with melancholy.

The poet Paul Engle had set up and still ran the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. I recommended Bryan to him. “Engle seems to have misunderstood,” Bryan wrote to me, adding, “I did not want to go this year.” Besides, he’d met someone just leaving for Iowa, who was “generally not looking forward to it.”

In 1969, Bryan published The Unfortunates, a novel of loose sheets with no pagination, supposedly to be read whimsically in any order. The author was therefore offering to share creativity with the reader. The French were doing that kind of thing. Bryan might have had all the fame he’d ever wanted as a homegrown Robbe-Grillet. The next thing I knew was that he’d got away, taking his own life and leaving something of a cult.