Great men of difficulty

Published today on The Millions, it's my primer on the formally daring, drawn-straight-from-life novels of the contradictorily traditional 1960s/70s avant-gardist B.S. Johnson:

Though they get conflated, Johnson’s novelistic Weltanschauung has two planks. The first is that the novelistic form has ossified, thus preventing closer alignment with substance. The second is that fiction is by its very nature dishonest, and to that extent immoral. While the latter seems a function of personal ethical cosmology and is thus difficult to comment on, the former rings a little true. It’s a distant ring, but a lingering, plaintive one nonetheless; once you’ve heard it, it doesn’t fade. The suspicion that he may well be at least half-right brought me to B.S. Johnson’s work.

But [Nick] Hornby didn’t buy Johnson’s package, even in part. Comparing Johnson and his quest to separate himself from the “what-happened-next brigade” to the school inspector in Hard Times, he writes, “Like communists and fascists, Johnson and the dismal inspector wander off in opposite directions, only to discover that the world is round. I’m glad that they both lost cultural Cold War.” But I’ve felt so often that novels do still, in the main, clutch for dear life to the forms of plodding, pandering relics. I’ve wondered if our compulsion to find out the next step in some made-up causal chain at least a little juvenile, a little squirrely, a little intellectually atrophic. Haven’t you?

Though I'll never forget his books, I'm more surprised by the way B.S. Johnson the man has haunted me. The other night, I'm pretty sure I woke up terrified that I'd wind up like him. Here was a writer doing for the novel just what it so badly needed — notably, without retreating into academia — yet he ended up broke, frustrated, separated from his family, and dead in the bathtub. This does not diminish the body of work he left behind, a shockingly substantial one given his short life and constant clashes with gatekeepers. But he was living proof that dedication won't save you.

Hence his appearance in The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part IV. B.S. Johnson was by no account a particularly easy man to deal with. I myself go along to get along much more than he ever did — something I keep telling myself — but then again, would I have had the literary guts to demand my books published with holes cut in their pages, with invented punctuation marks, or in 27 separate pamphlets?

Comments

[coach suitcase]

Just for today I will have a program, I may not follow it exactly, but I will have it. I will save myself from two pests: hurry and indecision.

[Tiffany sale]

I may not follow it exactly, but I will have it. I will save myself from two pests: hurry and indecision.