Trawl

"B. S. Johnson is one of my favourite writers. He’s one of the best-known, now, of a circle of writers that you might call neo-modernist, operating in Britain in the 60s and 70s in response to the angry young men in theatre and kitchen-sink realism. They are writers who would still use the banalities of everyday life we’ve been talking about, but in a formally innovative and, I think, interesting way. Over the last ten to fifteen years these writers—Ann Quin, Rayner Heppenstall—have been starting to get a lot more critical attention, but the most has gone to B. S. Johnson. B. S. Johnson’s literary career was a failure. There’s no two ways about that. He had this dream of transforming the world through writing, which failed. He had this dream of writing almost entirely from life. There’s this famous line in one of his books where he says “telling stories is telling lies.” In his second novel, Albert Angelo , he just breaks off, breaks off from trying to convince the reader that what he’s doing has any sort of unity or reality to it, and just says “fuck all this lying.” It chimes with an essay published by Nathalie Sarraute at about the same time called “ The Age of Suspicion ,” where she says that we’ve got to the point where creating great characters—like Dickens or Tolstoy—is no longer possible, and that readers don’t believe characters are anything other than aspects of the author’s consciousness. People like Johnson or Heppenstall embrace that. Trawl fascinates me as someone who has written a lot about one particular facet of my life. Johnson really believed you should write from life, from experience. But even by the time of Trawl , which I think is his third novel, he’s already running out of material. He’s not that old, he’s in his early thirties. He has this idea that he wants to write a novel that intertwines a stream of consciousness where the narrator is digging up memories with a quite crude metaphor for it, which is he’s on a fishing trawler and it hauls up fish. It’s a lot better than that makes it sound. It’s a really beautiful book, probably his best novel. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I became fascinated by the ethics of contriving an experience in order to write about it. Does that make it genuine or not? In Jonathan Coe’s book about Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant (one of the best biographies I’ve ever read), he quotes a letter Johnson writes to someone saying “I want to go on a trawler, can you sort this out for me?” He says up front “I’m a writer,” and what he’s published and says it’s to write a novel. He was known as the pleasure tripper on the trawler because he didn’t help out in any practical way. “The body is where we live before we live anywhere else.” When I started doing the Guardian series, my life got tied up with my writing in a really problematic way. There was this flash of thought: “Do I put myself in harm’s way so I get more emblematic experiences of transphobia to write about and improve my copy?” Of course, in the book I say very quickly that I realise that’s awful. I talk about Mike Penner/Christine Daniels, the LA Times blogger who started a transition blog, de-transitioned and committed suicide, and the blog was taken down. That made me see that I had to be a lot more careful about what I was doing. So I went back to Trawl at that point and found the dynamics behind its writing fascinating all over again."