Christie malrys own doub.., p.1
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, page 1
INTRODUCTION
Many people, entirely reasonably, regard the novel as an exhausted form, one whose heroic period at the centre of human culture has passed. Others choose to dedicate all their creative efforts to the novel, as if it were still an all-important medium. It is difficult to belong simultaneously to both groups, but B. S. Johnson did, and the resultant tension fuelled the extraordinary decade of creativity he enjoyed between the publication of his first novel, Travelling People, in 1963, and his death by suicide, at the age of forty, in 1973.
Johnson was born in Hammersmith on 5 February 1933, the only child of unaffluent but respectable parents. On leaving school at the age of sixteen he took a series of office jobs, one of them in the accounts department of a local factory (an experience he drew on in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry). After six years in an office, Johnson went to King’s College, London to take a degree in English. He graduated in 1959 and began to work as a supply teacher, and also as a football match reporter for the Observer (an experience he used in The Unfortunates). He began to write fiction.
Travelling People came out in 1963 and won a Gregory Award – judged by, inter alia, T. S. Eliot. The novel was in nine sections, each of them with a different narrator or narrative device (typographical tricks, screenplay form, letters). It clearly illustrated Johnson’s view that the English novel needed to move on from the discoveries of James Joyce and to reflect the fact that reality had changed since the nineteenth century. This was central to Johnson’s aesthetics ; all his books challenge the realistic consensus which had come to dominate British writing. This project earnt his work the reputation of being ‘experimental’, a term which he resented on the valid grounds that it ‘is almost always a synonym for “unsuccessful”.’ Johnson tried to find new ways of making the novel live. He believed that the use of nineteenth-century narrative techniques – which raged unchecked in Johnson’s day, and rages unchecked still – was ‘anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant and perverse’. He thought that the story-telling function of the novel had been super-seded by other media, specifically by film and television. (‘If a writer’s chief interest is in telling stories . . . then the best place to do it now is in television, which is technically better equipped and will reach more people than a novel can today.’) The novel’s job was to concentrate on the depiction of interior states, which was the thing it did better than any other medium. The passionately determined attempt at depicting the inside of his character’s heads was the central thrust of Johnson’s oeuvre.
His second book, Albert Angelo, which came out in 1964, had holes in the pages so that the reader could skip forward into the future of the narrative. Trawl, published in 1966, was an interior account of a trawler voyage to the Barents sea, making use of a range of devices to capture the inner motions of consciousness. The Unfortunates (1969), the famous ‘novel in a box’, was another attempt at capturing the way the mind worked : it was published in sections which were supposed to be shuffled and read in no particular order. House Mother Normal (1971) was narrated by the inhabitants of an old people’s home, most of them in various states of mental disintegration. Then in 1973 came Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, of which more in a minute. His last book was the posthumously published See the Old Lady Decently, which included photographs and documents from Johnson’s own family.
That might sound like enough work for anyone to have accomplished in a lifetime, let alone a single decade, but the list needs to be expanded with Johnson’s short stories (Statement Against Corpses), his film-making (You’re Human Like the Rest of Them, which won the Grand Prix at two festivals), his work in television (over a dozen pieces, including the autobiographical Fat Man on a Beach), his journalism, his plays (One Sodding Thing After Another, Whose Dog Are You ?, B. S. Johnson Versus God), his books of poetry, his miscellaneous writings (collected in Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs ?, along with an introduction which is the clearest statement of his aesthetics), the anthologies he edited (The Evacuees, All Bull : The National Servicemen), his chairmanship of the Greater London Arts Association Literature Panel. And then there was real life, too ; Johnson had married Virginia Kimpton in 1964, had two small children, and was a much-loved friend, collaborator, and drinking buddy. Johnson’s talents and energies were so great that, given another decade or two of productivity, he could have blotted out the sun. Instead it is Johnson’s reputation and work which are in eclipse.
Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the most accessible, exuberant and despairing of all these works, was the last novel to be published in its author’s lifetime. The title refers to the invention which made modern accounting techniques, and therefore all of modern business life, and therefore the whole structure of capitalism and the organization of contemporary society, possible : double-entry bookkeeping. This was devised by Florentine merchants in the fifteenth century and first recorded by a Benedictine monk, Fra Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli, in a 1494 treatise called Suma de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni et Proportionalita, which Johnson quotes several times in the novel. Non-accountants and those uninitiated into the mysteries of the double-entry system tend to underrate its importance ; at the risk of making heavy weather of something Johnson handles with a light touch, double-entry bookkeeping (which is still relied on by every going concern in the developed world) has a claim to be the most important business tool ever invented. Johnson the socialist knew this very well ; his novel is an attempt at exposing one of the fundamental pillars of the given order. Double-entry bookkeeping is also a way of structuring and comprehending the world, one which, in Christie Malry, Johnson uses to organize his character’s perceptions of the wrongs done to him, and the possibilities for justice and revenge.
There is a lot of anger in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry ; and a lot of pain. (Johnson, from his introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs ? : ‘I write especially to exorcise, to remove from myself, from my mind, the burden having to bear some pain, the hurt of some experience : in order that it may be over there, in a book, and not in here in my mind.’) There is a fair amount of story, too. Johnson’s pronouncements on aesthetics were clear-cut, but his novels themselves were more mixed and ambivalent, as artists’ works tend to be. He loved story and character and the traditional appurtenances of the novel that he at the same time despised. He felt strongly about his characters at the same time as he felt obliged to remind the reader that this was a made-up story, a work of fiction, and that the characters are not real. So the novel has a plot, and strong currents of feeling, which run counter to its determination to expose its own techniques and devices.
These moments of self-exposure are often comic, as when after a lengthy speech, Christie’s mentor Headlam ‘paused to provide a paragraph break for resting the reader’s eye in what might otherwise have been a daunting mass of type’. Or there’s the dialogue between Christie and the narrator, who warns his creation, with an apology, that ‘it does not seem to me possible to take this novel much further’, only to be consolingly told that ‘the writing of a long novel is in itself an anachronistic act : it was relevant only to a society and a set of social conditions which no longer exist.’ (Johnson took Christie’s advice : the book is not much over 20,000 words long.) It is one of the mysteries of Johnson’s talent that these moments enhance, rather than undercut, the feelings of grief and rage which fill Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.
The film of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is the best chance for Johnson’s work to expand its readership since his premature death ; the imminent biography by Jonathan Coe will be at least as important. Let’s hope that the world is more ready for B. S. Johnson than it was in his lifetime. The shorthand term ‘post-modern’ (used to describe techniques which have been thriving at least since the publication of Tristram Shandy in 1759) may provide critics with a more positive label than the ‘experimental’ tag which restricted his readership when he was alive. Readers, and viewers, are now well aware that grief and comedy and jokes about form can thrive in the same work. With good writers it can take some time for us to become their contemporaries.
John Lanchester
February 2001
Publisher’s Note
B. S. Johnson was a formally innovative writer. During his life he took an active interest in the typography and production of the print editions of his books.
In producing electronic editions of his work, it was necessary to balance our desire to respect the integrity of his texts with our desire to make his writing available to the widest possible readership, including those who read digitally. We have tried to represent Johnson’s original work in this new medium faithfully; however, the print book is a fixed format and the ebook a fluid one, so it is undesirable to make a facsimile in most circumstances. Johnson was rigorous about his writing, and resisted editorial intervention: we have sought to work in this spirit by adhering to a principle of non-interference. We have prepared these digital books from the first print editions and retained all Johnsonian idiosyncrasies of language and syntax. We have used a digital font that most closely approximates to the original typeface. The text has been optimised for the default type-size setting on most electronic devices.
Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry was the most straightforward of Johnson’s novels to reproduce digitally. The idea is that a young man who has learned the double-entry system of book-keeping starts to apply his knowledge to society and life. Form fo
CHRISTIE MALRY'S OWN DOUBLE ENTRY
Contents
CHAPTER I. The Industrious Pilgrim : an Exposition without which You might have felt Unhappy
CHAPTER II. Here is Christie’s Great Idea !
CHAPTER III. Ave Atque Vale to Christie’s Mother
CHAPTER IV. In which a Goat is Succoured
CHAPTER V. The Duel of Dictionary Words Between Skater and Wagner; and the Revelation of the Latter’s Nickname
THE FIRST RECKONING
CHAPTER VI. Christie Described; and the Shrike created
CHAPTER VII. The Shrike’s Two Rules; and other Observables
CHAPTER VIII. Christie and the Nutladies, amongst others
CHAPTER IX. A Promise Fulfilled, and Christie’s Younger Life; a Failed Chapter
THE SECOND RECKONING
CHAPTER X. Christie Codifies his Great Idea
CHAPTER XI. Christie Begins in Earnest; and (Something to please all Model Railway Enthusiasts) an Account of the Little Vermifuge
CHAPTER XII. Scotland Yard is Baffled
CHAPTER XIII. Christie Argues with Himself !
THE THIRD RECKONING
CHAPTER XIV. Christie sees the Possibilities as Endless
CHAPTER XV. Christie (in his Wisdom) Overhears
CHAPTER XVI. Keep Britain Tidy; or, Dispose of This Bottle Thoughtfully
CHAPTER XVII. The No Doubt Welcome Return of the Shrike
CHAPTER XVIII. Christie’s Biggest Yet
THE FOURTH RECKONING
CHAPTER XIX. The Shrike’s Old Mum; a Use for Shaving Foam scarcely Envisaged by the Manufacturers; and the Shrike’s Last Rule
CHAPTER XX. Not the Longest Chapter in this Novel
CHAPTER XXI. In which Christie and I have it All Out; and which You may care to Miss Out
CHAPTER XXII. In which an Important Question is Answered; and Christie thinks he has Everything
CHAPTER XXIII. Now Christie really does have Everything
CHAPTER XXIV. The Actual End, leading to . . .
. . . THE FINAL RECKONING
CHAPTER I
The Industrious Pilgrim: an Exposition without which You might have felt Unhappy
Christie Malry was a simple person.
It did not take him long to realise that he had not been born into money ; that he would therefore have to acquire it as best he could ; that there were unpleasant (and to him unacceptable) penalties for acquiring it by those methods considered to be criminal by society ; that there were other methods not (somewhat arbitrarily) considered criminal by society; and that the course most likely to benefit him would be to place himself next to the money, or at least next to those who were making it. He therefore decided that he should become a bank employee.
I did tell you Christie was a simple person.
At the interview formally granted to all new employees by one of the bank’s General Managers at Head Office, Christie’s minimal qualifications were laid bare, his appearance scrutinised, and his nervousness remarked on. Then he was asked why he wished to join the bank. Christie was lost, could not think of his answer. One was shortly supplied for him : most young men joined the bank for the security, for the very liberal pension which amounted to two-thirds of whatever salary the employee was receiving at retiring age. And this retiring age itself was as an act of generosity sixty, and not sixty-five !
Not only was Christie simple, he was young, too, a few weeks past his seventeenth birthday at the time of this interview.
Christie was silent even at the information that he had only forty-three and not forty-eight years to wait before he was free. The whole impetus of the interview was towards his providing a standard set of correct answers : or of losing points for wrong answers. Did Christie have to play ? The General Manager made him very much aware of his power. What Christie thought, however (and how privileged we are to be able to know it) was that he would consider himself to be a failure if he had to depend on a bank pension at sixty ; and that it would show a remarkable lack of spirit even to be thinking, at the age of seventeen, of pensions and retirement. The truth, that he was interested in placing himself next to some money, seemed not to be required in the context. The offices of a General Manager of one of the few national banks is not the place to exeleutherostomise.
From this you might think that Christie was mad for money as some are mad for sex : but that is not so. Christie, like almost all of us, had to think of earning a living first ; the economics dictate to an extent sometimes not fully realised the real (as distinct from the imaginary) possibilities open to one to move in other directions. But be assured that sex was one of the things for which Christie wanted money ; sex was always, particularly at this age, one of the things he thought about most, had very often in mind.
Christie was accepted into the service of the bank despite his inadequacy at providing the correct answers ; his failure to give any answers at all did not count against him as much as a succession of wrong answers. And, for reasons Christie was just about to experience for himself, the bank had difficulty in holding on to recruits of his age and therefore deliberately took on far more than it knew would stay the long course to early retirement and two-thirds of an honest penny.
So Christie started at the Hammersmith branch (conveniently near his home) of this nationally-known concern one Monday morning in October. From the comparative shelter of his school (of which I shall probably not tell you much) it was a painful transposition. Christie had expected to have to work hard, and to find the work both uncongenial and menial, at first. What he did not expect was the atmosphere in which he was expected to work, and which was created by his fellow-employees or colleagues as they were in the habit of calling one another. This atmosphere was acrid with frustration, boredom and jealousy, black with acrimony, pettiness and bureaucracy. It was partly a result of the obsolescence of the premises in which the bank had set out to carry on business : for despite the modernity of computer-based accounts and to every colleague his own personal adding machine, the original investment in mahogany, marble and brass had been so great as to make it impossible to sweep it away and think about banking all over again.
In this atmosphere Christie quickly became bitter and unhappy himself. Nor did he feel himself to be nearer, in any sense that mattered, money. His job consisted of listing the amounts of cheques on an adding machine and at the end of the day agreeing his total with that of the cashiers. Two days out of three it did not agree ; and on these days he had to go through the cheques again, calling the amounts to a girl who checked them on the list until they found the error. Sometimes they could shorten the process by looking for an exact amount that had been missed or included twice. But this was rare. Usually it would be a variation in the decimal point one way or the other which would throw the whole thing out. Very rarely indeed it would be the cashier who had made an error and not Christie.
The girl’s name was Margaret. She made the tea : Christie was not as lowly as that. On the other hand, he was not allowed to open the post in the morning ; while he was allowed to seal it at night. Opening and sealing are not the same : Christie was quite clear as to his preference, but there was no chance of his being allowed to exercise it.
The Manager of the branch Christie most infrequently saw ; he remained in his office and summoned underlings. Christie did not rank high enough to be an underling, in this sense. The Chief Accountant and the Assistant Accountant hardly noticed Christie either, except to lambaste him icily on those occasions when totals did not agree or when he (as often happened) committed some other banking solecism.
The clerks and cashiers formed a closed, median group : they were mature men and women, tiny.
The only colleague apart from Margaret who spoke to Christie at times other than when he had made a mistake was Joan. Joan was nineteen, plain, androgynous and Christie’s immediate superior. She it was who showed him how to operate his (it had been her) adding machine, she who showed him where he could have coffee in the mornings and tea in the afternoons, she with whom as time went on (and it did, in this case, go on for a short while) he could share a small joke at the expense of a cashier who had (say) ten pounds more than he should have done at the end of the working day.
