NEW BOOK: Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction

Palgrave have recently released a new book of essays, Experiments in Life-Writing, edited by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak. The book is the product of a fantastic conference that Lucia and Julia organised at Goldsmiths back in 2015 on the intersection of fiction with auto-biographical and biographical writing.

I have a chapter in the book on B.S. Johnson, particularly looking at the influence of Samuel Beckett's prose on his 1966 'non-fiction novel' Trawl.  I argue that although Trawl frequently adopts the syntax, tone, and humour of Beckett’s prose—particularly the “trilogy” of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—it ultimately moves beyond imitation to experimentation. Johnson pushes Beckettian style to breaking point by demonstrating how its trademark cynicism and despair are unsuitable for narrating personal memories, particularly Johnson’s traumatic childhood experience as a wartime evacuee. Johnson chooses autobiography, I argue, to extract the experimental novel from the ‘cul-de-sac' he felt Beckett had reached after How It Is (1964).

B.S. Johnson's Albert Angelo

an article for London Fictions

I’m afraid I’ve told you a fib. I’ve led you here with the understanding that you’re going to read all about how B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo is a London fiction. As it turns out, that’s not really the case. You’ve been had. The truth is, Albert Angelo isn’t really a London fiction at all.

Perhaps you’d like to turn on your heels now, and leave, disgusted and betrayed. But before you go, I should perhaps say that I wasn’t fibbing about the London part.

Albert Angelo really is a book about this city and not any of the other ones. It even mentions the A to Z. Twice! How many novels can you say that about?

No, the fib was, appropriately enough, in the fiction part. This is because although Albert Angelo is a novel, it’s more than a little uneasy about being one. It certainly doesn’t want to be a mere story, at least in the usual sense of that word. It wants to be truth. We know this because after 163 pages of what seems like a novel, albeit a rather unconventional one, the narrator breaks down mid-sentence and cries ‘oh, fuck all this LYING!’.

The book doesn’t end there, of course. It enters a section called ‘Disintegration’ in which someone who sounds a lot like B.S. Johnson emerges from behind the curtain of fiction to tell us what he was trying to do. Johnson, who published seven novels between 1963 and 1973 and then killed himself at the age of forty, was a disciple of novelists who had pushed their medium to its very limit: writers like James Joyce, Laurence Sterne and Samuel Beckett. Johnson felt that most novelists of his generation hadn’t really come to terms with the discoveries that these writers had made, and continued to spin stories as if Ulysses or The Unnamable had never been written. Johnson wanted to do something different: ‘telling stories is telling lies’ opines the Johnson-like persona in the penultimate chapter of Albert Angelo. ‘Im [sic] trying to say something not tell a story’.