Ending Up
An Appreciation of B.S. Johnson
Even today, when asked at an annual physical if I entertain suicidal thoughts, I answer, no. I’ve never been so desperate as B. S. Johnson; because, I knew at a young age, I had to get away from London. True, I also suffered from desperation, it’s not uncommon among those that are young, but its force drove me away from England.
I’m 80, older than B. S. Johnson’s 40. I’ve overtaken the eleven years he had on me and then some. I was born in London during an air-raid in 1944 when he had already experienced four years of war. I’m finding many parallels now that I did not see then on those two occasions we met. It seems more might have been lost in the fog of beery crowds that appeared at events held by the Poetry Society in London where I heard MacDiarmid and Bunting both give readings in the days of Eric Mottram.
I can claim to have one up on B. S. Johnson. My initials are R. M. F. R. I’m Michael Friend book-ended by two letter Rs. In the U.S., where I live, BS is short for bullshit and MF means motherfucker. A much worse imprecation.
BS spent the war years separated from his parents, encouraged by letters from them to study hard for his eleven-plus, which he failed the same year that MF was born. MF also failed his, eleven years later. What was left of the war, MF spent frequently separated from his mother in the care of his grandmother.
We both went to night school while working day jobs. We both started degrees. He finished his, having studied Latin and English. I dropped out in my second term, part-time, having lost interest in the Sciences and discovered computer programming. I didn’t study Latin until in my seventies. We both had a communication with Samuel Beckett.
From reading Jonathan Coe’s biography, it seems B. S. Johnson never stepped over into the Computer Age. Ironically, while he toiled as a bookkeeper and accountant, Lyons the Caterers, of Lyons Corner House fame, were demonstrating it was possible to replace humans with a computer named Leo. Their factory in London seems a likely template for Tapper’s, a place where Christie worked in BSJ’s Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry. The first humans affected would be clerks capable of working with double entry bookkeeping, a topic with which Johnson was familiar. He knew of its origins in a work by a Tuscan monk, Pacioli. With his domain knowledge, a thorough grounding in accounting basics and how companies kept their books, he could have started a software company, Better Books, although that name had already been taken by John Calder.
Despite his erudition, BS missed the boat when it came to digital computing. Just as I, with my computer skills, missed the boat when it came to writing. I stopped writing and started making money, which turns out to be a somewhat creative process. He missed having an ability to make a living at something other than being a freelance writer dependent on a London literary world to give him a living but mostly dependent on being a sports journalist writing about soccer. MF experienced a little of the London literary scene and was happy to be well out of it.
I remember telling two friends in London once, that a poet should be able to make a living with his voice. For me, that has meant being able to do well at interviews and obtain access to exciting opportunities. Ultimately, I became a successful salesman, selling Cray-1 supercomputers worldwide. Coe’s biography shows BSJ capable of asserting that he was somebody special in his dealings with publishers and others. I never had such illusions although I always had confidence in myself.
BSJ lived in a world whose people were becoming surplus to requirements. I escaped that world trained as a computer programmer by IBM. Because of the money I earned in New York, tax-free, as a programmer with a science background, working for UNESCO, I could take time, several years, in England and Spain to write. Mostly poetry. As far as I can tell, BSJ never took several years off to write. It seems ironic that he never had time because he was a full-time writer.
When I was writing in England, I lived in a remote forestry commission farmhouse called Roughside, in Northumberland. At other times, in Holland Park, or Cabbell Street in London, and even, sometimes, at Foyers in the New Forest. At the time, I met B. S. Johnson, I had run out of savings but been given an Arts Council Bursary of 500 pounds which kept me afloat for long enough for me to realize that life as a full-time poet meant a life of poverty and of mooching on friends. I went back to work as a freelance programmer at British Rail making as much in a few weeks as I made in a year by writing.
While Christie Malry helped deliver wage packets to employees by hand, systems analysis was underway designing the software that would replace that function. In an air conditioned, pristine computer room at Whitbread, I got my start in computing and saw first-hand how systems analysis was done at Whitbread’s head office during the early sixties. I was a programmer analyst in a purpose-built computer command center below the street but above the cobblestoned cellars which dated from Shakespearean times. We programmers had our own kitchen facilities and a fully stocked refrigerator. We translated the logic flow charts the systems analysts gave us into computer programs. We often worked through the night debugging software. Given the nature of the business, there were also crates of beer in the kitchen.
Colonel Whitbread lived upstairs in a private apartment. He had a butler. Gentlemen from the shires, sons of brewing families from Somerset or Warwickshire, had rooms across Chiswell street. They also worked through the night supervising the brewery. The Lord Mayor’s carriage was kept in view of passing pedestrians under the archway leading into the brewery courtyard. It was rumored that the Queen Mother would frequently visit The City Cellars, a wine bar beneath the pub on the brewery corner nearest Moorgate. We frequented both pubs but preferred the one facing Aldgate.
It was from such surroundings that cyber warfare began. First computer programs took over the Finance Department, one ledger at a time. They then conquered Sales. Before long, they invaded Personnel, as well as Payroll, Supply Chain, Inventory. Process control was robotized. Paper stock certificates became a thing of the past. Archives started to become digitized on memory devices, not records on paper. B. S. Johnson knew chaos was the coming thing. But he didn’t live to see it commoditized.
He would have made a good programmer. Putting together, or comprehending, Latin sentences is not unlike computer programming. He seemed to approach the art of the novel as if it was a structure. He wanted to furnish the structure with things like tunnels cut through the pages to give a glimpse of what was coming. If only he had lived to realize how a novel could be packaged by a computer. How special effects could be programmed into the text to leap from a Kindle-like screen so that a sex scene with Shrike and a vacuum cleaner could be re-enacted by actors, or, the splash of cyanide barrels falling into a reservoir could be heard.
As a programmer, he could have made a decent living, supported his wife and family. True, it would have taken time away from writing but how much writing did he do? Eric Mottram once told me that my own writing was a means for survival. At the time, I did not understand what he meant although I agreed with his premise that whatever else I did, I would write, even if it was only a few lines here and there, as months and years went by.
One of Ezra Pound’s last poems was his translation of a famous poem by Horace. No matter how it is translated, the same assertion is made: “My poems will live on long after I am dead. I will not die.” Horace asserted this. Pound did as well. B. S. Johnson?
I first heard about B. S. Johnson when I was living in Manhattan, New York City. My programming skills had snagged a tax-free job working for the International Education Authority (IEA) which was part of UNESCO. IEA’s computer project was based at Columbia University, so I lived in a university-run apartment building, just off campus, Butler Hall, where the famous Indian journalist and novelist Inderjit Badhwar once pissed in the elevator to show his disdain of the building manager, a fierce thin woman with an Irish temper. Inder and his wife Shama were about my age, early twenties, and we became friends. One afternoon he and his wife took me to visit the New York office of Transatlantic Review, where we met Joseph McCrindle. I was introduced as a poet. McCrindle was looking for a poetry editor. Was I meant to take him seriously? At that point, I was an unpublished poet. Inder had a job with a upmarket publishing house and was probably already in contact with Jack Anderson, whose syndicated column he would soon help write as an investigative reporter. B.S. Johnson was not pleased when he heard this story.
The last time I met B. S. Johnson was in a dingy, smoke filled, pub. Frenchies comes to mind. It was his suggestion. I seldom went into pubs. Most of my evenings were spent happily stoned with friends or writing articles I might try and get published, desperate for an income. I remember having no more than half a pint, then leaving, probably unable to stand a round. I was living on Barclaycard cash advances at the time and always short of cash not yet having taken the fateful step of getting another programming job. I cannot remember who paid for my beer. Probably the great man himself. But it was clear we were not going to get on. Michael Horowitz showed up, a slight, wiry man compared to bulky Brian, but I was not in a good mood. Poverty isn’t any fun. I was interested in setting up The Co-operative Front, whatever that was. B. S. was looking to set up a cooperative publishing venture to allow authors to make more money from their work. The meeting was to talk about this, but we never talked about it, or anything else, as far as I can remember.
Some months later, I remember hearing BSJ’s name come up in conversation. There was a classical guitarist, Brad, who was, it was implied, more than just a guitar teacher to BSJ’s wife. I remembered that conversation when, later that year, married, living in the U.S., I read BSJ had killed himself.
I put pennies on a railway line in a poem published in Wolfprints 1971. He did the same in Christie Malry. His last contact with me was a letter rejecting some poems for Transatlantic Review. He said my earlier work was better. It was.
Dick Russell © 2024
Richard M Russell
