The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson

Author:B. S. Johnson [Johnson, B. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9780330353298
Publisher: Picador; Pan Macmillan
Published: 1969-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

FIRST

LAST

The opera singer the Easter before Finals, again at his parents’ house, during the vacation they were down so I saw them, went over to tea, almost certainly a Sunday, with the opera singer I was using or trying to use to try to forget, no, not to forget, to take the place of, Wendy. Impossible. She said far less than Wendy, anyway, a tiny girl, an odd pair we must have looked, I large, overweight, ugly, she so small, bird-like, spark-like. Dyed red hair, a virgin perforce, she had a maidenhead hard as dry washleather, I tried it, penetration, with her full permission, once, failed, and sighing she said, I’ll have to have the operation. But not during my tenure she didn’t, she could never bring herself to, for some reason, though she was well on, about thirty, I should guess, while I was still 25, I suppose, then, or perhaps 26. The things Tony’s death throws up, throws up. His father drove us back to some station, Ewell I suppose it was, and we went on to Waterloo where I put her on some train back to her opera-loving mother. A curious affair or failed affair altogether. Can’t remember even if I liked her.

It must have been about this time, indeed it must have been on this visit, that we argued almost viciously about criticism. To Tony, the criticism of literature was a study, a pursuit, a discipline of the highest kind in itself: to me, I told him, the only use of criticism was if it helped people to write better books. This he took as a challenge, this he accepted. Or perhaps I made the challenge, said that I would show him the novel as I wrote it, the novel I had in mind or was writing: and that he would therefore have a chance of influencing, of making better, a piece of what set out to be literature, for the sake of argument, rather than expend himself on dead men’s work. Let the dead live with the dead, I must have said, too, I would not have let pass a chance of saying something like that, or in those exact words. That period was a fertile one, it seemed the nearer Finals came, the more I wanted to write myself: the more involved I became with other people’s crap, the more I wanted nothing more than to get on with my own crap. Zulf remarked the same thing in himself.

And he accepted it, the challenge, if it was a challenge, Tony, at the same time, at that time.

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