Re-reading B. S. Johnson by Philip Tew, Glyn White

Abstract

MLR, 104.2, 2009 563 reviews as well as poetry, drama, and fiction, and managed to inject these genres with a recognizable style, vision, and voice that extend their narrow frame. For writers such as Dorothy Parker and Anita Loos, for instance, fashion captions and silent film scripts provided themwith early training in finding thewitty mot juste thatwould serve themwell when they tackled poetry and fiction. Hammill structures her book around case studies, and each chapter features one author and the major works (sometimes a single one) on which her fame and popularity rested at the time of publication. While women such asMae West and Margaret Kennedy may seem to belong to opposite universes on the surface, Hammill succeeds in foregrounding theways inwhich each author in her study developed a distinct literarypersona. Each section not only portrays the context fromwhich their texts emerged, it also documents the sometimes tumultuous or controversial reception of theworks and traces the impact of this reception on the authors subsequent efforts. While each chapter could be read separately according to one's interest in a particular figure, the cumulative effectof reading about these women and their struggle to achieve critical acceptance and respect despite their financial success highlights striking continuities between theirvarying experiences. At the same time,Hammill neatly draws the individual circumstances, style, and voice of each writer, and the fact thatmost of her authors wrote in comic modes (one-liners, satire, parody) provides her with a wealth of entertaining sources to analyse. Perhaps themost important effectof reading Hammill's study is the interest itgenerates for the sources themselves. Ifher book brings more readers to Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, for example, it would more than justify its publication. In and of itself,Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between theWars amply rewards both the common reader look ing for a glimpse into a fascinating period inwomen's literature and the scholar ofmodernity seeking new areas of research or simply confirmation that studying inter-war literaturebywomen is indeed aworthwhile and richly rewarding pursuit. University of Portland Genevieve Brassard Re-reading B. S. Johnson. Ed. by Philip Tew and Glyn White. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. xviii+246 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-230-52492-7. In his prefatory essay to this new collection of essays on thework of B. S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe tells of finding a note in Johnson's papers for his last, unfinished trilogy,House Mother Normal. Apparently the worst possible outcome Johnson could imagine for thework was that 'some academic cuntwill produce a study on if (p. xvi)?a typical outburst from theman pithily described by one of his contempo raries as being continually wracked by self-certainties'. An awareness of its subject's would-have-been resistance to itsproject pervades this study of the late Johnson, his work, and the critical field that has latterly sprung up around him, and its edi tors acknowledge the book's own part in creating a field of Johnson 'studies'. This collection thus rather self-consciously takes on themantle of crowning a period of rediscovery ofhis work, one largely instigated byCoe's justlypraised 2004 biography 564 Reviews of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story ofB. S. Johnson (London: Picador). This rediscovery of his work is inseparable from the idea that Johnson is somehow more suited to our critical landscape than he was to his own: Johnson's work was un dervalued in his own era, for reasons the editors of this collection make clear: In the 1960s and 70s literary criticism, like the nation, was less diverse, lesswilling to countenance difference, and B. S. Johnson's work offered a strong challenge to this cultural hegemony (p. 4). As such, Johnson's reputation needed rescuing from the literary establishment that had sought tomarginalize him, a marginalization that came about in no small part because of his resistance to neat categorization, and because of his unrepentant, alienating refusal to compromise his experimentalism. The aim, then, is explicit: rereadings are needed of his work partly due to a desire to pay him the belated respect of taking him seriously, of repaying a debt that the critical establishment has long owed...