From the Oxford Companion to English Literature:
(5th ed. 1987)
JOHNSON, Bryan Stanley William (1933-73), London-born
novelist whose works include Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl
(1966), The Unfortunates (1969, consisting of 27 unbound sections in a
box), House Mother Normal (1971), and Christy Malry's Own
Double-Entry (1973). Johnson was an experimental novelist, an admirer of Joyce and
Beckett, and his works combine verbal inventiveness with typographical innovations that
resemble the techniques of concrete poetry, (black pages, diagrammatic type etc). He
died by suicide.
From Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series Volume 9
Born February 5, 1933 in London, England; died by his own hand, November 13, 1973; son of
Stanley Wilfred and Emily Jane Johnson; married Virginia Ann Kimpton; children: two.
EDUCATION: King's College, London, B.A. (with Honours in English), 1959.
CAREER: Writer, film and television director and producer. Member of Writer's
Guild, Equity, Society of Authors.
AWARDS HONOURS:Gregory Awards for Travelling People and
Poems; Somerset Maugham Award, 1967 for Trawl;
Grand Prix, Tours International Short Film Festival, and Melbourne International Short
Film Festival, 1968 for You're Human Like the Rest of Them; First
gregynog Arts Fellow, University of Wales, 1970
SIDELIGHTS:B.S. Johnson, generally regarded as an experimental writer, utilised
his art to probe the structure of the novel by creating new forms of prose and by
manipulating the basic conventions of the medium to suit his own avant-garde vision.
"For ten years," wrote Robert S. Ryf in Critique:
Studies in Modern Fiction, "in seven novels, and a number of short pieces,
Johnson single-mindedly and belligerently pushed at the frontiers of the novel and prowled
the shifting and nebulous borders between fiction and fact. He was centrally concerned
with the relationships of the writer to his material as well as to his readers."
Called a "caricature ... of the classical novelist ... who sees through the
fiction game and its weary conventions" by D.Keith Mano
in the New York Times Book Review, Johnson believed the traditional form of the
novel was outdated and the structure of the modern novel had to be extended to reflect
modern man's expanded perception of reality. A critic for the Times Literary Supplement
asserted that Johnson was "against narrative, against fiction of all kinds, against
novels which require effort to appreciate and balefully serious about his conception fo
the way his medium should develop."
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B.
S. Johnson's works |
