B.S. Johnson — Travelling People [1963]

And so, an almighty aposiopesis leapt from the page (Albert Angelo) in an all-caps fury, and a legend was born. The fiery elephant’s fiction debut is, like lesser-known Canadian novelist Chris Scott’s Bartleby, a comic homage to Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Rabelais. Unlike Chris Scott’s Pythonesque assault on taste and historical correctness, Johnson’s offering is a far milder picking—a likeable and autobiographical tale of his own exploits at a luxury Welsh resort, making use of light (by Johnsonian standards) experimental techniques, such as a screenplay, letters to a friend, metafictional interruptions, stream-of-thought, and the Sternean black page (preceded by his own innovation—waves engulfing the page to indicate the near-drowning of a character). The curious thing about this novel is that, in spite of Johnson’s steadfast refusal of the conventional, as with other items in his career, he wrestles with simple autobiographical material (comic scenes, romantic encounters), and must reinvent the wheel to tell a simple tale. In this novel, straight third-person narrative is the dominant mode, punctuated with the usual shruggish authorial interjections (which reached a mordant peak in the hilarious Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry), and yields the most interesting and insightful material from the Johnson pen. The novel was heavily championed by, among others, Johnson himself, who in writing the blurb made the assessment ‘it seems likely B.S. Johnson will develop into one of the most original writers this century’, and later attempted to quote Beckett without the master’s permission. The short oeuvre of this fightin’ writer (a 2010 study of his work by Nicolas Tredell is aptly titled Fighting Fictions) is blissful in its range and humour, from this pomo picaresque, to the loose leaf novel The Unfortunates, to the pitch-black ‘geriatric comedy’ House Mother Normal. Too intense and too sensitive for this uncaring world, Johnson ended his life, like his female counterpart Ann Quin, in a watery manner in 1973. I first read Johnson’s novel in hardback in 2011 one summer, holed up in Edinburgh’s National Library, reading for no other reason than the pleasure of discovering Johnson (a freedom my undemanding girlfriend at the time bestowed me), and read the paperback in 2015 for this book. This mirrors the original publication history: hardback in 1963, paperback in 1967. (Fascinating, no? No). Johnson’s refusal to have this reprinted means we will need to wait until 2038 before this is reissued.

Editions: 

Hardback, Constable, 1963. 

Paperback, Panther, 1967.

Bibliography: 

Novels: 

Travelling People, 1963, Constable. 

Albert Angelo, 1964, Constable.

Trawl, 1967, Secker & Warburg.

The Unfortunates, 1969, Secker & Warburg.

House Mother Normal, 1971, Collins.

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry,1973, Viking.

See the Old Lady Decently, 1975, Hutchinson.

Short Fiction:

Statement Against Corpses, 1964,  Constable.

Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, 1973, Constable.