B.S. Johnson railed intemperately at life, but in his fiction at least he found a lugubrious comedy in human failings. In 1973, aged 40, he killed himself by slashing his wrists in a bath while drunk. Today, in spite of his former high reputation as Britain’s ‘most subversive novelist’, Johnson is pretty well forgotten. On the evidence of the prose and plays collected in Well Done God!, however, it would be a mistake to consign him to the frivolous pastures of the literary bagatelle.
Samuel Beckett, for one, enjoyed the irreverent boisterousness of his writing, and the admiration was mutual. Included here are several articles for The Spectator in which Beckett is hailed as a theologian of doom, whose tramps, waifs and other crotchety moribunds display the compulsive talkativeness of the Irish bar-room virtuoso. (‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’).
Like Beckett before him, Johnson was conspicuous among so-called ‘modernists’ for his refusal to be glum.
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