Gulls still follow us, in the expectation of offal: the Arctic Skua rides fatly on the swell, past us, inspects our wake, rises to show the white flash on its dun-brown wings, beats forward, eyes still on the wake, to overtake us and settle again: the Fulmar glides for long periods, following the swell a few inches above it by tilting as the sea determines, white head, the eyebrow as though pencilled in: the Herring Gull, no herrings here, nor little else at the moment, thuds flatly around, powerful wingbeat to catch up, wheels, heels in the wind awkwardly, staring-you-out eye, vicious beak: but most of all the Kittiwakes, smaller than any of the others, demure, delicate yellow beaks, some with a smudge behind the eye marking them as juveniles, the eye itself redringed, the only birds I have noticed who will perch, not within reach, certainly, but they will perch on the ship: I do not see the Common Gull, nor either the Lesser nor the Great Black-Backed Gull, not the Iceland, not the Glaucous, not the Ross’s, especially, not the Ivory, not the Black-Headed, not the Slender-Billed, not the Little, not the Great Black-Headed, not Bonaparte’s, nor yet Sabine’s, Gulls: I take these words from a book the Mate has, the Skipper identifies for me, suggests I feed them with scraps to see them more closely, insists I take a photograph of a kittiwake, his favourite, as it glides near us on the bridge. · · · · · The Norwegian pilot stares ahead, not the one who was on duty last night, his relief, they work in pairs: he stares at the fells, the openings ahead, the clear waters through the fjords. I meditate on the rightness of the derivation of gull: Welsh gwylan, to weep, to wail, the gull a wailer, from its cry: beautiful, exact.
At one, the BBC news, presented by some foreign service department beamed at the Middle East, apparently, picked up by us through some freak, or by being on the same longitude, or something, I do not like to ask Molloy: news, preceded by some martial, patriotic music, and read far more pompously than home bulletins, very conscious of presenting an image of Britain to the world. I am not proud of this, this seems like deception.
A cleft mountain to pass through, it seems. · · · · · Mounting on either side, black, wet. · · · · · · · · Then out into clear water, the land falls back on either side, an island ahead. · · · · · · · · Now the sea begins to be choppy, I shall be sick again, I feel it, but not yet: the sea is breaking against the foot of the cliffs as far as distance will show, I shall be sick, the inevitability of it, but I can accept it again, I have lived through it, again, now, before. · · · · · · · · A band of cloud emerges from a fjord on our starboard, held at a height by mannered air currents, so that I can see the black bases of the wavewashed cliffs below and the snowcovered heads of the mountains above, separated by this band of cloud, this dense drifting mass. · · · · · · · · One pointed mountain like a triangle on the horizon. Nearer, become three-dimensional, nearly a cone. · · · · · · · · A curiously rural scene on the deck, as the men pick at the net spread around them, repairing it with wooden braiding needles, hung up with nethooks to keep it square, sorting, checking, a rural craft, seemingly, yet this is a modern net, of nylon, Japanese, to a certain extent experimental, trusted to this skipper since he is known not to lose gear often, some skippers lose a net or more each trip, and nylon is far more expensive than hemp: this is the third voyage that this net has been brought back safely. Duff climbs the rigging, his great feet steadily finding the holds, his hands grasping the shrouds, that small red woollen cap staying on his head despite the wind. He secures the derrick arm, which has landed our cod-end all the trip, after it is pivoted upward from its near right angle to nearly parallel with the foremast. The washer has been dismantled and bolted against the bulkhead of the net locker under the whaleback, the fishroom hatches are secured, no warps to make the deck dangerous with their sudden grinding movements, the dahn buoy, unused this trip, leans roped against the rigging, and the men now work with an easiness that was not in the gutting, talking and laughing.
I realise suddenly that we are not passing one of the towns which lie in between the mountains, or on the slopes, or on a shore, that we are no longer pointed at the next open sea between the fells: but are heading towards a town: and a small boat, tiny standing wheelhouse and motor tyres lashed as fenders, is metallically putputting towards us. So this must be the southern extent of the northern fjords. I should have realised it from the time, that we were reaching the southern limits. Duff grins at me, in anticipation, All downhill from here, he says, arcing his arm over the curvature of the hemisphere and grinning wider as I protest at his joke’s weakness. · · · · · Both pilots time their jumps carefully on to the small railed deck, from just forward of the aft gallows. Festy lifts a basket of berghylts over to the captain of the pilot boat, a tip for the pilots, and receives a fistful of letters to the ship in exchange. The pilots’ cases are handed over, the Norwegians disappear into the wheelhouse, the boat revs, and the gap between us wedges out. We turn towards the gaps again.
Now the last land I shall see for three days left behind, the short day ending. And we begin to rock, in the unease of the sea’s swelling, I shall be—I shall not be sick!
Now this cold North Sea morning the trawlermen move around the ship cleaning her like charwomen, sousing and scrubbing and burnishing, stoning the gut-stained deckboards until they come up white again, everywhere swilling with hoses, rubbing brass, sweeping with springy brooms. The ship shines with this honest effort. I go on the bridge, but cannot find a place out of me way since the floor gratings are up: I am in these men’s way as I never was when we were fishing, nor on passage out. The deck foams with whitening, even the boatdeck is occupied by men bashing the filth out of copra mats, my favoured place by the jury steering at the stern made untenable by clouds of fibre, dust, dirt. On the whaleback men are busy: when I try to find a place amongst them, I am for the first time cursed for my idleness, the first expressed resentment of my pleasuretripping. Just when I want to be, think of myself as being, one of them, up and around, there is no place for me, no place, I am replaced in my isolation yet again. At least my bunk is my own, I’ll go back there, who only an hour ago rose, from my new non-isolation.
No, this is ludicrous, this out-of-placeness is only a reminder of what was. The feeling of having been exorcised returns, rise through me again. Look, I have come through! · · Come through! · · · · · It is as though I have at last paid off some vast emotional debt that I had incurred through all my years: that I have earned enough to repay that debt, in these last three weeks. But how? · · · · · I still do not know exactly why I felt isolated, how it had come about that I was isolated: but I do know now that I feel it no longer, that, rather, I accept the isolation, such as it was, can encompass it and move on. No, again, I feel as though I have repaid at usurious interest some debt, which has occupied all my thoughts, all my energy, impossible of limitation or definition: and worst of all, I can never remember having had benefit from the loan in the first place. The lifting of this—images fail, and are unimportant, as are the reasons: what use are reasons? To know that one is because, is no more use than knowing one is: and to believe the condition is made any more bearable for knowing why, is to be deluded. It is the condition must be suffered in itself, because of itself, not for any reason. So I eccentrically feel. What use is knowing a reason? I have found few reasons in analysis of my past, so the benefit must have come from the rehearsal of the experiences themselves, like writing an experience down, it fixes it, takes the hurt out of it: one remembers then that one was hurt, but not the hurt itself. Similarly what use is it pointing to this ship as a womb, for instance, as a symbol, these men’s refuge as well as their purgatory, and all that balls? What use would it be? All this, all reasons, are in the limbo of the unconscious, the nomansland of the unknown: which perhaps soon may be revealed by scientific advance, perhaps not, but now (the concern is always with now) is not known, cannot b
e known, and concern with it, with reasons, must always be delusion. It is what I am now that is important.
Full of pity for the boy I was, recalling the girls my women were. Yes, yes, all those loves and wished-for loves, I need never think of you again, have exorcised you, I need never worry about what you did or what I should have done: have distanced you in mind as well as time: you will never enter my thoughts again in the same way, only by accident, by association with the impersonal: I am glad to be rid of you.
And I feel it will now be right with her, with Ginnie, that it must be right with her, that I have cleared my life or the dead weight of its past, can face her completely, honestly. And it must be right, for this is the last chance I give this bizarre structure of thought and laws and impressions called life, called existence, with its absurd problem, which I no more wish to solve than to have posed. · · · · · · · · So: towards this vision of a future not more than five years off: Ginnie as wife, a child, a son, perhaps, the chyme sliding down his chin, freedom to work as I have to work, a home: in the far hope of that happiness, I give life one more chance: towards the chance of that future I shall voyage honestly and hopefully.
I am only what I am now · · · · · I am not what I have been · · · · · It is as if I am free to be what I may be · · · · · I am not what I shall be · · · · · I am what I am now.
And things do slowly become better, the vision does come, as I see it, slowly: only have patience with the slowness, more and more belong with the movement forward, which is as well the movement away from my own isolation, if only it can be borne, the slowness of this advance. · · · · · I should give this feeling form, I should make a gesture of faith in this future, to the nearest thing, which is a woman, which is Ginnie: so up. · · · · · In the wireless room Molloy tells me I can cable a pound’s worth of flowers from this North Sea position for another pound: I do so.
Calm today, Bollocky calm, the Skipper says, a useful expression, I think: and sun, diffused albeit, but sun, the disc just discernible, the afternoon brighter than I have noticed it to be for months, the sea almost blue here, as it has not been before, and those who say one area of sea is much like another are quite wrong, the sea can look different far more ways than I realised. · · · · · · · · A Belgian trawler hauls across us, slowly, fishing in a place which is passage water to us. Staring down into the water, just below the surface I see a large cod, or perhaps it is a sprag, swimming: odd, until I realise it must have escaped from the Belgian’s deck. · · · · · · · · Johnny asks me to take photographs of two great spider crabs he has, their legs spanning at least two feet, that he has dried out in the engine room and wants to varnish to take home to his children. He stands squarely on the deck outside the galley alleyway door, in his thigh waders with the tops turned down to his ankles, a rough rag filling the gap his smock neck leaves, unsmiling in his flat cap, a formal face for the photograph of him holding his spider crabs.
Duff pummels me on the point of my shoulder, points as I round on him, and I see a porpoise mimicking the waves’ shape on this calm sea. You can tell it’s not a dolphin because it hasn’t got a long beak, says Duff. My arm still aches where he has thumped me.
When you come ashore, says Duff, You feel ten feet tall, all these people on land just don’t know what life’s about!
Despite that calmness across the North Sea, we are half an hour late for the evening tide. Tugs park us in order first out in the roads. I can see the lights of a seaside promenade to the south, other lights along the river. We shall go in in the morning. I refuse a chance to go ashore, as Festy, Scouse, Stagg and Johnny do not, in the tug, to have an extra night in their own beds.
We start to move, the tug shepherds us. She rolls, very slightly, and I am sick yet again, the final sickness: the bitterness rises in my throat, no bile, no green bile, I retch twice, am almost glad for this reminder of what I have withstood, and then am recovered: it is finished. · · · · · · · · I stare from the rail, the sky lightening behind me. Red lights ashore, we head towards red lights with shadowed bulks below them just darker than the sky. And the tower! That square Florentine tower stands high against the sky, its castellations hinted at in outline, its top pointed by a red light. The tug grunts away in front of us, to one side. A clock on a tiny building, between the red lights, which now I see are on diamonds, the lights, their daylight representations, on either side of each lock entrance. The tug eases us towards the lefthand entrance at what seems to be too fast a speed. On the lockside are the shapes of men waiting. They call out as we fill the entrance, as we dully shoulder the righthand lock wall, call out to Duff, standing honourably, magnificently, at the very point of the whaleback. And then we are through, into the outer basin, the tug casts off and we head for a gap in the long row of sheds along the farther side, under our own power. Duff shouts that we must bear slightly to port: the Skipper beside me says if we do that we shall only hit the other side. · · The ship grates slightly on the starboard side. Now we are through and can see our berth, first on the far side of the fish market, open buildings, long, low. And a small group of people waiting where we shall berth, women from the colours of their coats, fawn, red, blue. Mick comes forward with his duffelcoat and suitcase, ready to land. Duff’s wife and sister-in-law, says the Skipper, drawing my attention again to the quay by where we shall berth. It is too far to see faces: he must tell by their coats: fawn, blue, red, another blue, the red just like the coat that Ginnie has—Ginnie? Can it be her? She could not know what time I was due in, nor even which ship I was on, for I would not tell her. But she could have found out, if she had tried hard enough, of her own accord she might have tried to break my isolation in the only way it could be broken. Ginnie! But is it she? My eyes narrow, strain to see through the early-morning light, the mist, the shadows on the quay, to the face of that figure in red. It must be of her own accord, to contain, to accept the knowledge, the certainty. . . . · · I, always with I · · · · · · · · one always starts with I · · · · · · · · And ends with I.
Editor’s notes
1 ‘Supernumerary’ being Johnson’s preferred designation; the crew, to his indignation, insisted on calling him ‘the pleasuretripper’.
2 From a letter to Miles Huddleston, a publicist at Johnson’s publishing house, written shortly before the voyage. Taken from Jonathan Coe’s biography, Like A Fiery Elephant.
3 The unconscious part of the idea-gaining process, meanwhile, is so complex and convoluted and untraceable (broadly: just about everything I have ever seen or read or heard or tasted or crashed into has given me the neurological structures which form the parameters within which the unconscious mind might serve up the starting points for an idea about a story) as to render the question meaningless, or at least unanswerable.
4 B. S. Johnson’s dedication to truth-telling often pushed him towards a very straight-faced kind of literalism. It’s perhaps fortunate that he hadn’t decided to mine or excavate his own memories.
5 See p28 (here): ‘I took Duff up again on calling me a pleasuretripper, I who am here to work as hard as anyone, at my own task.’ Oh, Bryan. Really?
6 (Sorry.)
7 Deliberately so. See p172 (here), which has the narrator declaring (angrily?) that ‘Solipsism is the only truth.’
TRAWL
B. S. Johnson (1933–1973), an admirer of Joyce and Beckett, was a novelist whose works combine verbal inventiveness with typographical innovations. His books include Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966), The Unfortunates (1969) and House Mother Normal (1971).
Also by B. S. Johnson
NOVELS
Travelling People
Albert Angelo
The Unfortunates
House Mother Normal
Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry
; See the Old Lady Decently
POETRY
Poems
Poems Two
SHORT PROSE
Street Children
(with Julia Trevelyan Oman)
Statement Against Corpses
(with Zulfikar Ghose)
Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?
ANTHOLOGIES
(as editor)
The Evacuees
All Bull: The National Servicemen
You Always Remember the First Time
MISCELLANEOUS
Well Done God!: Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson
(edited by Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan)
First published 1966 by Martin Secker & Warburg
First published 2014 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2017 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Trawl Page 14