BS Johnson Death is a good career move for an art…
BS Johnson
Death is a good career move for an artist. Suicide even better! Well, it didn?t quite work for BS Johnson. He killed himself in 1973 when he was not yet 40. At the time, he was a star of the British literary avant-garde (whatever happened to that?). He was a prolific writer but, until recently, his books have been out of print.
I remember reading ?Albert Angelo? in my early raids on a university library. The book is worth reading just to get a sense of the oppressive dreariness of the real Sixties and early Seventies compared with today?s consumerist variety, but near to the end it changes. There is a hole in a page with the words ?oh, fuck all this LYING!? visible in the space. Last year, the novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates was published by the admirable Picador. The box contains a dozen or so leaflets that the reader can read in any order. It?s a very moving novel, no matter which order you read it. I hope the Omnibus promised by Picador gets published soon.
Christopher Sorrentino has written an interesting article on the writer on an interesting new website. It has links with the Dalkey Archive Press who publish one of my favourite novels, Jacques Roubaud?s The Great Fire of London, which is in the same avant-garde spirit as Johnson, but totally different too. Another time perhaps ?
