B. S. Johnson
British
Born in London, England in 1933
Lived most of his life in London
Married, and fathered two children
Committed suicide in 1973
Published Works
FICTION
1973 See the Old Lady Decently [Hutchinson]
1973 Christie Malry's Own Double Entry [Collins],[New Directions]
1971 House Mother Normal [Collins],[New Directions]
1969 the Unfortunates [Panther],[Picador]
1966 Trawl [Secker & Warburg],[Picador]
1964 Albert Angelo [Constable],[New Directions]
1963 Traveling People [Constable],[Panther]
SHORT STORIES
1971 Penguin Modern Stories 7
1964 Statement Against Corpses
1964 Street Children
VERSE & VERSE
1975 Pengin Modern Poets 25
1972 Poems 2
1964 Poems
NONFICTION
1973 Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs
PLAYS
1974 Down Red Lane
1973 Christie Malry's Own Double Entry
1971 B.S. Johnson vs. God
1967 Whose Dog are You?
1965 Entry
1964 You're Human Like the Rest of Them
TELEVISION
1974 Fat Man On a Beach
1972 Hafod a Hendref
1972 Not Counting the Savages
1971 On Reflection: Alexander Herzen
1971 On Reflection: Samuel Johnson
1970 the Smithsons on Housing
1969 This City Is Dying - Look to your Heads!
1969 The Unfortunates
1968 the Evacuees
FILM
2000 Christie Malry's Own Double Entry
1971 March!
1969 Unfair
1970 Paradigm
1968 Up Yours Too, Guillaume Apollinaire
1967 You're Human Like the Rest of Them
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Excerpt
From Christie Malry's Own Double Entry
...
A total of just over twenty thousand people died of cyanide poisoning that morning. This was the first figure
that came to hand as it is roughly the number of words of which the novel consists so far.
Be assured there are not many more, neither deaths nor words.
Their deaths were not painful, nor prolonged. Virtually all of them (as I have explained before: but it is important) were easily
replaceable, according to society. What can be wrong? Can Christie be condemned?
Christie himself wondered: Am I not overdrawn? What wrong has society done me that I can offset more
than twenty thousand deaths against it? Everything, he decided after a pause, everything.
The wrongs done to fifty-odd million others, for just a start.
But what about their relatives, you must be asking. What about their relatives? They will blame it on the
Government, argued Christie, and not on me. And that is entirely proper: the Government is responsible in every way for
letting such things be and become and remain possible. Guilt at a Double-Entry overdraft or personal responsibility would be
liberal wishiwashiness. One must subtly oppose the Government with its own weapons of casualness, indifference, mass
carelessness.
Three days later, having read in the evening papers what the Government maintained were definitive totals of the dead, and
succoured the Shrike, Christie left her in a deep post-coital sleep and returned home to catch up on his accounts.
Any entries/reviews to add? Any corrections or additions to make?
