B. S.

Johnson
Bryan Stanley Johnson (5 February 1933 – 13 November 1973) was an English
B. S. Johnson
experimental novelist, poet and literary critic. He also produced television
Born Bryan Stanley
programmes and made films.
Johnson
5 February 1933
Died 13 November 1973
Contents (aged 40)
London, England
Early life
Occupation Novelist, poet and
Career
director
Death and legacy
Period Early 1960s to early
Bibliography
1970s
Novels
Poetry and anthologies, including those edited by Johnson Genre Fictional prose

Selected filmography
Literary Modernism
movement
Biography
Academic studies
Notable Albert Angelo,
works Christie Malry's Own
References
Double-Entry
External links

Early life
Born into a working class family, Johnson was evacuated from London during World War II and left school at sixteen to work
variously as an accounting clerk, bank junior and clerk at Standard Oil Company. However, he taught himself Latin in the evenings,
attended a year's pre-university course at Birkbeck College and, with this preparation, managed to pass the university entrance exam
for King's College London.

Career
After he graduated with a 2:2, Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels that would now
be considered visual writing. In his early years he collaborated on several projects with a close friend and fellow writer, Zulfikar
Ghose, with whom he produced a joint collection of stories, Statement Against Corpses. Like Johnson's early stories (at least
superficially) his first two novels, Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964), at first appear relatively conventional in plot
terms. However, the first novel uses several innovative devices and includes a section set out as a filmscript. The second includes
famously cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward. His work became progressively even more experimental. The
Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked, apart from the
chapters marked 'First' and 'Last' which did indicate preferred terminal points) and House Mother Normal (1971) was written in
purely chronological order such that the various characters' thoughts and experiences would cross each other and become intertwined,
not just page by page, but sentence by sentence.He won the Eric Gregory Award in 1962.

Johnson led and associated with a loosely constituted circle of "experimental" authors in Sixties Britain, which included Alan Burns,
Eva Figes, Rayner Heppenstall, Ann Quin, Stefan Themerson, and Wilson Harris among others. Many of these figures contributed to
London Consequences, a novel consisting of a palimpsest of chapters passed between a range of participating authors and set in
London, edited by Margaret Drabble and Johnson. Johnson also made numerous experimental films, published poetry, and wrote
reviews, short stories and plays. For many years he was the poetry editor of
Transatlantic Review.
He is mentioned several times inPaul Theroux's account of his friendship withV. S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow.

Death and legacy

At the age of 40, increasingly depressed by his failure to succeed commercially, and beset by family problems, Johnson committed
suicide by slitting his wrists.[1]

Johnson was largely unknown to the wider reading public at the time of his death, but has a growing cult following. A critically
acclaimed film adaptation of the last of the novels published while he was alive, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973), was
released in 2000.[2] Singer-songwriter Joe Pernice paid tribute to Johnson on the 2006 Pernice Brothers album Live a Little. Jonathan
Coe's 2004 biography Like a Fiery Elephant (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize) has already led to a renewal of interest in
Johnson's work.

In April 2013, the British Film Institute released You're Human Like the Rest of Them, a collection of Johnson's films, as part of the
BFI Flipside DVD series.[3]

In 2015, Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham held an event called "But I Know This City!" based around Johnson's novel The
Unfortunates, set in Nottingham, which allowed participants to travel around the city and listen to live readings of the novel's sections
in whichever order they chose.

There is a large collection of literary papers and correspondence of B. S. Johnson in theBritish Library (Add MS 89001).

Bibliography

Novels
Travelling People (1963)
Albert Angelo (1964)
Trawl (1966)
The Unfortunates (1969)
House Mother Normal (1971)
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry(1973)
See the Old Lady Decently(1975)

Poetry and anthologies, including those edited by Johnson

Poems (1964)
The Evacuees (1968)
London Consequences: A Novel(1972). A novel with each chapter composed by a dif ferent author including
Johnson, Margaret Drabble, Paul Ableman and others
All Bull: The National Servicemen(1973)
Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973). A collection of Johnson's shorter prose written
between 1960 and 1973
You Always Remember the First Time (1975)

Selected filmography
You're Human Like the Rest of Them(1967)
The Unfortunates (1969)
The Smithsons on Housing(1970)[4]
Paradigm (1969)
B.S. Johnson on Dr. Samuel Johnson (1971)
 Unfair! (1970)
Fat Man On A Beach (1973)

Biography
Jonathan Coe. (2004) Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
. Picador

Academic studies
Philip Tew. (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading. Manchester University Press,ISBN 978-0719056260
Krystyna Stamirowska, (2006) B. S. Johnson's Novels: A Paradigm of T ruth. Kraków: Universitas, ISBN 8324207457
Philip Tew, Glyn White. (2007) Re-reading B.S. Johnson. Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-0230524927
Vanessa Guignery. (2009) Ceci n’est pas une fiction. Les romans vrais de B.S. Johnson . Presses de l’Université
Paris-Sorbonne, ISBN 978-2840506430
Nicolas Tredell, (2010) Fighting Fictions: The Novels of B.S.Johnson. Paupers' Press, ISBN 978-0946650996
Vanessa Guignery, ed.. (2015)The B.S. Johnson / Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence . Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
ISBN 978-1443872669

References
1. Coe, Jonathan (2004).Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
. London: Picador. p. 480.
ISBN 033035048X.
2. Reviews of "Christie Malry's Own Double Entry"(http://bsjohnson.info/film/content.aspx?title=christiemalryfilm&type=
home)
3. Citation required
4. Sukhdev Sandhu "You're Human Like The Rest Of Them – theNFT's celebration of BS Johnson"(http://blogs.telegr
aph.co.uk/culture/sukhdevsandhu/10070597/youre_human_like_the_rest_of_them__the_nfts_celebration_of_bs_joh
nson/), telegraph.co.uk, 16 June 2009

External links
A 'B.S. Johnson' Website.
Interview with Paul Tickell, director of 'Christie Malry's Own Double Entry'
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Andy Wimbush's write-up of 'Albert Angelo' on the London Fictions website

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