All my life I have been underestimated by the educational system, I feel. Now when I win the odd literary or film award it is often against, in spite of those teachers and contemporaries who so misjudged me that I feel I have won them. Not that it matters, of course; no doubt none of them even remember me, and I now know none of them.
Do I sound paranoiac and bitter? Yes, I am, that is indeed the way I feel about my educators, that is the way they made me. No doubt the war was not their fault; no doubt there are worse things than a fractured, fragmented education like mine (David Storey’s novel Pasmore is about someone who has a breakdown at thirty after a long smooth progression on an educational conveyor-belt); perhaps the usual optimist is already contemplating a letter saying ‘Ah, but you did win through in the end, you did get the university education for which your mind qualified you.’
Obviously I was university material, in the end; whether I was or not at sixteen seems doubtful. I tried hard to be an accountant, to be what my education had fitted me for. Even now I have the marginal benefit of being able to touch-type this article; my new novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry leans very heavily on knowledge I gained in learning book-keeping; and I could have annotated almost every paragraph of this account with page references from my books where I have made professional use of material related to my schooldays.
The point is that very few people are writers and thus able to make some positive use of virtually everything that happens to them, including the disasters, the chaos; what do the others do?
Notes by the Editors
1. While he disavowed the term, Johnson nevertheless recognized that there was at this time a group of formally innovative British writers, which included Rayner Heppenstall, Ann Quin, Christine Brooke-Rose and Alan Burns, as he wrote in his essay ‘Experimental British Fiction’, published in 1967: ‘There are not many of us, and in the English way we do not form a “school”. The things we have in common are mostly generalities. First of all, we object to being called “experimental” because of the pejorative sense the term bears for most English critics. We regard the novel as an evolving form in which there is no point whatsoever in doing something that has been done before [...] Our greatest debt is owed to James Joyce, of course.’
2. The agent was Rosica Colin (1903–83). Her distinguished authors included Genet, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus and Sartre, but the fortunate client referred to here was Alan Sillitoe.
3. The district in Islington where Johnson lived after leaving his parents’ home in Barnes at the age of twenty-eight until his death in 1973.
4. George Greenfield, who also represented Enid Blyton, Sidney Sheldon, John le Carré and James Baldwin.
5. The excised chapter was later published (with changes to the characters’ names) as ‘Broad Thoughts from a Home’ in both Statement Against Corpses and Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?.
6. Herbert Read: poet, academic and art critic well-known both for his anarchist views and his championing of modern British artists such as Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Bonamy Dobrée: distinguished academic, recently retired from the University of Leeds and mainly engaged at this time in editing the influential Writers and their Work series for the British Council.
7. Johnson was working as a football reporter for the Observer at the time. The published title of this piece was ‘Same Old Chelsea’.
8. Kate Carney = Army (cockney rhyming slang).
9. Or to be more precise, ‘published but slaughtered’ (by the subs) according to the note on Johnson’s typescript.
10. The published title was ‘Pi Printers’.
11. This Act, based on a draft bill submitted to the Home Office in February 1955 by a Society of Authors committee, had reformed the law relating to obscenity by introducing exceptions for artistic merit or the public good, and abolishing the common law offence of obscene libel.
12. The editors have followed Johnson’s typescript of the lecture, rather than the published version, but some cuts have been made to remove extended passages later repeated verbatim in the ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?.
13. The Licensing Act 1737 awarded the Lord Chamberlain statutory authority to veto performance of any new plays or request any modification to an existing play, for any reason. The Theatres Act 1843 restricted these powers so he might only prohibit a performance where in his opinion ‘it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace so to do.’ This authority was finally abolished under the Theatres Act 1968.
14. Tony Tillinghast’s premature death from cancer would later inspire Johnson to write The Unfortunates.
15. Nathalie Sarraute: author of Portrait of a Man Unknown (1948), famously described by Sartre as an ‘anti-novel’. Her essay The Age of Suspicion (1956) became a key manifesto for the nouveau roman.
16. Rayner Heppenstall: working-class English experimental novelist, born in 1911, who from the early 1960s associated with a British avant-garde set that included Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin and Stefan Themerson. Philip Toynbee: experimental writer and influential reviewer for the Observer, born 1916. Johnson had favourably reviewed his novel Pantaloon (1961). Christine Brooke-Rose: writer, critic and French-based academic, best known at this stage for her experimental novel Out (1964).
17. Pakistani-born poet, novelist and close friend of Johnson. They had previously collaborated on the editing of Universities Poetry, and the writing of an unpublished satire, Prepar-a-Tory (1960).
18. Alison (1928–93) and Peter Smithson (1923–2003) were leaders of the New Brutalism movement in British architecture. Inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe (one of Johnson’s own heroes), their first notable design had been Hunstanton School (1954), and they were considered by many to be at the forefront of architectural and urban theory. Johnson became friendly with them during the failed campaign to save the Euston Arch in the early 1960s, and saw many parallels between their values and his own. His 1970 BBC film, The Smithsons on Housing, documents the design and construction of the controversial Robin Hood Gardens estate in East London, their third and last major public building in the UK.
19. The International Poetry Incarnation, a live poetry event which took place at London’s Royal Albert Hall on 11 June 1965. It attracted an audience of 7,000 and featured readings by, among others, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, George Macbeth, Michael Horovitz, Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell.
20. Editorial cuts have been made to these pieces where Johnson was reviewing authors other than Beckett; and to avoid repetition.
21. The novel’s title was actually Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Since Johnson wrote this, both books have been republished and have remained consistently in print.
22. The Evacuees was an anthology published by Gollancz in 1968, for which Johnson collected reminiscences, letters, and extracts of writing about the experience of wartime evacuation from a wide range of contributors, including Michael Aspel, Barry Cole, Ruth Fainlight, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Sillitoe.
23. Women’s Voluntary Services for Air Raid Precautions.
24. The Evacuees, p. 114. Writer: John Furse.
25. The Evacuees, p. 248. Writer: Alison Smithson.
26. The Evacuees, p. 41. Writer: Gloria Cigman.
27. The Evacuees, p. 208. Writer: Mary Owen.
28. The Evacuees, p. 197. Writer: Claire Meltzer.
29. Johnson’s full text is restored here.
30. In the article ‘Censorship by Printers’.
31. This was the generic title of a column to which Johnson made regular, anonymous contributions.
32. American-born poet who had settled in Britain in the 1950s. Variously a printer, a typographer, and book designer, from 1965 he managed the Trigram Press, which published work by George Barker, Ivor Cutler, Gavin Ewart, B. S. Johnson, Jeff Nuttall and J. H. Prynne, among many others.
33. The date of
composition was late December 1972.
34. Influential literary magazine, founded by Joe McCrindle in 1959 and published both in London and New York. Johnson was the poetry editor at the London end. His New York counterpart, George Garrett, later wrote that Johnson’s role made him ‘closely in touch with what was happening in English-language poetry; more so, probably, than any other poet in England or America at the time’.
35. Booksellers in Bishop’s Court, Chancery Lane, much favoured by professional reviewers who knew that they would be offered 50 per cent of the cover price for pristine review copies.
36. Oxbridge-educated biographer, editor, poet and publisher: a key figure in the London literary circles of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. His collection The Visit had come out in 1970, and for most of Johnson’s tenure at Transatlantic Review he was poetry and fiction editor at the TLS, making them natural antagonists.
37. A loose-knit British militant group which undertook a series of bomb attacks in London from 1970 to 1972. Targets included banks, embassies, the BBC’s coverage of the 1970 Miss World event, and homes of several Conservative MPs including the then Secretary of State for Employment, Robert Carr. The trial of 1972 became a cause célèbre.
38. The Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians. As a working film and television director Johnson was a paid-up member of this union, made regular contributions to its journal Film and Television Technician, and found its hard-line politics far more to his taste than those of that other, more genteel writers’ organisation, the Society of Authors. For Freeprop films, the union’s production wing, he made a satirical propaganda film, Unfair!, attacking the Conservative government’s Industrial Relations Bill. The Bill proposed to limit wildcat strikes, introduce prohibitive limits on legitimate strikes and establish a National Industrial Relations Court. It provoked widespread opposition, and the General Secretary of the TUC, Vic Feather, organized a nationwide ‘Kill the Bill’ campaign which included a ‘day of action’ on 12 January 1971.
39. German leader of radical student protest, who fled to the UK in 1968 after an attempt on his life. Despite having been accepted to study for a degree at Cambridge, he was expelled from Britain as an ‘undesirable alien’ by the Conservative government in 1971.
40. Ernest Bond, Commander of the Metropolitan Police Bomb Squad, and later Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Operations). In 1976 on retirement he was awarded an OBE, and was later revealed to be a freemason (from the 2003 Masonic Year Book).
41. The satirical magazine Oz was the subject of a celebrated obscenity trial in 1971, when editors Jim Anderson, Felix Dennis and Richard Neville were prosecuted for an archaic offence, ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’. The ‘Oz Three’ were found not guilty on the conspiracy charge, but were convicted and imprisoned on lesser offences – though on appeal this was overturned, and it was found that Justice Argyle had grossly misdirected the jury on numerous occasions in the original trial.
42. The Post Office (later British Telecom) Tower was at this time open to the public, with a revolving 34th-floor restaurant. A bomb exploded in the men’s toilet on 31 October 1971, with the Provisional IRA claiming responsibility. The restaurant was closed to the public for security reasons in 1980, and all public access to the tower ceased in 1981.
43. The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) was established in 1959. Unlike the Society of Authors, the Writers’ Guild is a trade union affiliated both with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds (IAWG).
44. Campaigning organisation led by the novelists Maureen Duffy and Brigid Brophy, spearheading the movement to introduce Public Lending Right. The PLR was finally passed in March 1979.
45. Royal Army Ordnance Corps.
46. Later Sir Edward Britton (1909–2005). Distinguished educationalist, who became President and later General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers.
47. The School Certificate was the precursor to O-Level examinations for each subject, and, later, GCSEs.
About the Editors
Jonathan Coe’s biography of B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in 2005. He is also the author of nine novels, including What a Carve Up! (1994), The Rotters’ Club (2001) and The Rain Before It Falls (2007).
Philip Tew is both Professor in English (Post-1900 Literature) and Deputy Head for Research of the School of Arts at Brunei University. His publications include B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester UP, 2001) and, co-edited with Glyn White, Re-reading B. S. Johnson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Julia Jordan is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Cardiff University. She is the author of Chance and the Modern British Novel (2010).
Also by B. S. Johnson
NOVELS
Travelling People
Albert Angelo
Trawl
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
First published 2013 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2017 by Picador
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www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-4472-2712-0
Copyright © The Estate of B. S. Johnson 2013
Selection and editorial material copyright © Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan 2013
The right of the editors to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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