The Unfortunates


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CONTENTS
 
 INTRODUCTION
 
 NOTE ON THE TEXT
 
 Note to the Boxed Edition of 1969
 
 FIRST
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 LAST
 
 
 SUB INSPIRES CITY TRIUMPH
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION
 
 To a nation of literary amnesiacs, B. S. Johnson is already a forgotten writer. In my experience, at least, blank stares are the most common response to any mention of his
 name. It’s less than thirty years since he died, but his books have been out of print for most of that time, and the tides of literary fashion have ebbed and flowed often enough to wipe his
 name from collective memory. And yet when The Unfortunates appeared, in February 1969, its press release was bold enough to claim that Johnson was ‘the most important young English
 novelist now writing’. Publishers’ hyperbole? Maybe. Or perhaps Johnson even wrote it himself: it would have been perfectly in character. In any case, it wasn’t so wide of the
 mark.
 
 The Unfortunates stands at the centre of Johnson’s output: it was the fourth of his seven novels. The first, Travelling People, was described by Anthony Burgess as
 ‘original in the way that Tristram Shandy and Ulysses are original’, and by the time of his sixth, Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, he was picking up
 endorsements from Samuel Beckett, a man not normally known for his freedom with dust jacket quotations. Johnson was, at the time, one of Britain’s best-known – if not best-selling
 – writers, famous for his uncompromising, bluntly expressed views on the conservatism of most modern fiction, and for the eye-catching devices which tended to characterize his books, such as
 holes cut in the pages and, of course, unbound sections published together in a box. He appeared on television more regularly than most novelists do today, and was a notorious attender and
 disrupter of normally staid writers’ gatherings, such as the Annual General Meeting of the Society of Authors. And yet, following his death by suicide in 1973, at the age of forty, he slipped
 quickly into near-oblivion. Two novels were reissued in the 1980s, with only modest success, and in the meantime his books became the provenance of cultists and obsessives: by the late 1990s,
 copies of The Unfortunates were changing hands for well over one hundred times the original cover price.
 
 Unknown to the general public, fetishized by collectors: this is no fate for a gifted, serious and accessible novelist. It’s time to reclaim B. S. Johnson for the mainstream.
 
 *
 
 Some of Johnson’s admirers might balk at this, and argue that, in his own lifetime, he was anything but a mainstream figure. He may have disdained the label
 ‘experimental’ – as it is the writer’s privilege to disdain all labels – but there’s no denying that his literary politics put him violently at odds with most of
 his contemporaries. He was born in Hammersmith in 1933, and after an education which was badly disrupted by wartime evacuation and left him feeling unfit for university, Johnson filled out his late
 teens with a succession of book-keeping jobs before arriving at King’s College, London in the mid-1950s as a mature student. It was there, in the course of what was otherwise a routine
 induction into the Western canon, that he encountered the works of Sterne, Joyce and Beckett, who promptly became his idols and mentors. From then on, his allegiances were fixed: the primary task
 of the novel, as he saw it, was to interrogate itself, to draw attention to its own artifice, and any writers who saw it merely as a vehicle for linear storytelling were kidding themselves. He
 insisted that after Joyce, the straightforward Dickensian novel had had its day: ‘No matter how good the writers are who now attempt it,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘it
 cannot be made to work for our time, and the writing of it is anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant, and perverse.’
 
 In the same essay (from his collection of prose pieces, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?) Johnson drew up a list of those few writers whom he felt were
 ‘writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter’ and pointedly excluded most of his more celebrated and formally unadventurous contemporaries.
 It was these writers, in his view, who belonged at the margins. Far from being an elitist, or seeing himself as writing for a select coterie, Johnson professed himself baffled by public and
 critical taste. Why shouldn’t his dazzling innovations, his ingenious re-thinkings of the novel’s possibilities, be winning him both critical respect and a wide readership? ‘The
 mainstream’, in other words, was exactly where he wanted to be: but a mainstream defined according to his own terms.
 
 This was not his only instance of literary puritanism. Equally important, but even more difficult to swallow for most readers, was his insistence that the novelist should not be a writer of
 fiction at all. ‘Telling stories is telling lies’: this was Johnson’s mantra, and he maintained that while his own close attention to matters of style and form made him
 something more than an autobiographer, there was no place for invention in the serious novel, no excuse for ‘making things up’. Novelists, if they were to be honest (a quality he prized
 above all others), should confine themselves to one subject only: the simple facts of their own lives. ‘How can you convey truth in a vehicle of fiction?’ he asked, before concluding,
 with childlike directness, ‘The two terms, truth and fiction, are opposites, and it must logically be impossible.’ In his opinion, however, this did not stop him from
 being