Albert Angelo
A Review in Five Parts Submitted to a Book Review Contest in which I Did Not Place
“Does the text provide students with cultural capital and/or useful knowledge?”
(Andy Thurby, Making Every English Lesson Count, p.13)
ONE: Prologue
My copy of Albert Angelo – written by B.S. Johnson and originally published in 1964, though my reprint dates from 2004 – has holes three quarters of the way down pages 149/150 and 151/152. The holes are 1.0cm tall and about 9.5cm across. They are deliberate and would have caused a lot of stress for B.S. Johnson's printers back in 1964. A fair amount of ink has been spilled over those holes in the discussion of the book, but most of that ink has been digital since B.S. Johnson's work only gained significant attention here in Britain after the publication of Jonathan Coe's heliographic biography Like a Fiery Elephant in 2004, explaining the publication of Albert Angelo alongside Trawl (1966) and House Mother Normal (1971) in the omnibus edition I am quoting from. Johnson's own explanation for the holes is provided late in the novel in a chapter titled 'FOUR: Disintegration' in which he asserts that the “printer's art should be at the command of the writer” and that the “future-seeing holes” are “as much to draw attention to the possibilities (sic.) as to make my point about death and poetry” (pp. 175-176).
This would all be well and good if Johnson used the holes as a vehicle for dramatic irony, undercutting suspense by revealing a later plot point that the reader of page 149 should not be expected to know. Instead, however, page 153 contains a seemingly wholly incongruous and narratively irrelevant description of the death of the 16th century playwright Christopher Marlowe who suffered “a mortal wound above his right eye […] from which he died instantly” (p. 153). Johnson's formal experimentation is thus used in the service of a bad joke, with the reader tricked into thinking that the novel's teacher protagonist Albert Angelo is due to be stabbed to death, only to be revealed that this is not the case. Pathos is undercut by bathos – save for the majority of readers who come to Albert Angelo knowing that Johnson, like Marlowe, died at the end of a blade – though one wielded not by an assassin or assailant, but by himself.
TWO: Exposition
Albert Angelo begins with a hefty half-a-page quotation from Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable (1953) and the omnibus edition has a endorsement from Beckett himself on the dust cover, praising Johnson as, “A most gifted writer”. Johnson adored Beckett's writing and beginning his novel with a sizeable quote from one of his heroes is a statement of intent, with Johnson self-consciously placing himself in the same avant-gardist tradition of his critically lauded forbearer.
To compare the style of Johnson's writing to that of Beckett, we might contrast a snatch of the quote Johnson provides, to a section from Chapter 'THREE: Development' in which Johnson pays tribute to the lavatory scene of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Beckett's run-on sentences feel like they've been suspended in the process of hurtling towards the void: “... I had me, on the premises, within easy reach, tottering under my own skin and bones, real ones, rotting with solitude and neglect, till I doubted my own existence...” (p. 5) By contrast, the stagnation expressed through Johnson's excretions – “Where did all that lot come from? I didn't eat that much. unearned (sic.) excrement, that's what it is. But perhaps it was all those compressed sawdust savouries that Marlene brought” (p. 106) – is the stagnation of the simple, stocky sentences of British kitchen sink realism. As much as Johnson placed himself in the high modernist tradition of Joyce and Beckett, he wasn't a middle-class, multi-lingual, thrice-honoured darling of the academy. In his biography, Coe interviews a girlfriend of Johnson's, Joyce Yates, he met at Birkbeck College, who tells Coe, “I refused to read any poetry he wrote. I just used to say to him, 'You don't know enough about philosophy or the things that poetry is concerned with – these sorts of high-flown things – but what you know about is working class life, your own life'” (p. 74).
In Albert Angelo the eponymous Albert has to slog away as a supply teacher in an inner-city London school when really he wants to be an architect. In reality, Johnson had to slog away as a supply teacher in an inner-city London school when he really wanted to be a poet.
THREE: Development
Yates might have been right about Johnson. Of course, the poetry of 19th century Chartists, music hall songs, and broadside ballads already composed a considerable corpus of working class poetry by the time Johnson was born. In Johnson's own time, the Liverpool Poets – Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough – would not, I suspect, have been impressed by Yates's advice. Like Johnson, they didn't think that being literary precluded being funny and plain-spoken. However, unlike Johnson, they also had a great sense of rhythm.
Johnson loved jazz and tried for years to learn the trumpet. However, the rhythms of his poetry are often ungainly, even leaden. For instance, an unpublished poem from February 5, 1960 recounts his students bringing him birthday gifts with the lines: “And yet today the children bring small gifts / for me, on this my birthday; although they / have not known me long at all, a month in / fact”. The rhythms do not sound – as Johnson might have wished – like the snare drum and cymbal accompaniment to a Louis Armstrong solo, but like the stilted, self-conscious writing of a man who has not studied very much poetry, but hopes that the reader will think that he has.
Perhaps it is this mismatch between Johnson's aspirations and abilities as a poet that lead him to make his authorial stand-in, Albert, not an aspiring poet, but an aspiring architect. The sections of the novel in which Albert walks the streets of London are dense with architectural imagery: “Percy Circus can be dated early Victorian by the windows, which have stucco surrounds as wide as the reveals are deep, with a scroll-bracket on either side at the top. The proportions are quite good, though the move away from Georgian is obvious except in the top and leadflashed dormers” (p. 14). The trick here is that, as a reader, you have to be familiar with architectural language to create any picture of this in your mind – otherwise phrases like “leadflashed dormers”, “stucco surrounds” and “scroll-bracket” just become free floating signifiers of high-faluting expertise. I can confirm from looking up 'Percy Circus' on Google Image Search that Johnson's technical description appears to be accurate, but it is only when I looked up the image as a reference that the location became real for me.
However, while Albert's architectural designs might lie as dead on the page as Johnson's poetry, the opposite is true of Johnson's impressively vivid portraits of the inner-city London kids that Albert teaches. While Johnson directly tells the reader, “I'm trying to tell you something of what I feel about being a poet in a world where only poetry care anything real about poetry, through the objective correlative of an architect who has to earn his living as a teacher” (p. 168) it's the final, neglected, part of that sentence that rings true... the part about what it's like to earn your living as a teacher. Later in that same self-confessional chapter in which Johnson directly addresses the reader, he adds, almost as an aside: “Didactic, too, social comment on teaching, to draw attention, too, to improve: but with less hope, for if the government wanted better education it could be provided easily enough, so I must conclude, again, that they specifically want the majority of children to be only partially educated” (p. 176).
This helps explain, in retrospect, an earlier exchange of dialogue in which Albert enters into an argument with another teacher, Miss Crossthwaite, about the spoken grammar of the children of the school. Miss Crossthwaite complains that the children do not speak in Standard English; Albert, meanwhile, contends that language is always changing and evolving, and that the working class are always at the forefront of these linguistically exciting changes. It is in writing the dialogue of these children that Johnson clearly has the most fun and his writing is at its most expressive. In the most enjoyable sequence in the novel, we get to read the completed homework assignments of Albert's class who have all been tasked with writing a description of their teacher. This gives rise to such memorable insults as “a fat, porky selfish drip” (p. 161) and “A FAT FOMF OXEN NIT LOLOP RABBI FART-FACE” (p. 162). Here Johnson leans into the working-class schoolboy language that he was often at pains to leave behind. The fact that, in doing so, he composes a dozen pages of insults largely directed as his own authorial stand-in's obesity makes the laughter stick in the throat when you remember – if you have read Coe – that Johnson was often deeply depressed and self-conscious about his size. Yet, this section of the novel is undoubtedly when Johnson's writing sings true.
The avant-garde qualities of Johnson's writing come to the fore abruptly in the fourth chapter of the novel. Before then, we have been mostly presented with day-to-day snapshots of the life of Albert as he teaches classes, visits his parents and goes to a football match with his dad, and fritters away his day off. Johnson moves stylistically between first-person stream-of-consciousness, second-person sequences in which you are directly pulled into the experience of teaching, and split-page dialogues which intersperse Albert's reveries with his students' whispered conversations and banter. The effect would be disorientating, were it not for—— OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING!
FOUR: Disintegration
——fuck all this lying look what I'm really trying to write about is how being a teacher in the uk is basically the same now in 2022 than it was when Johnson was writing except even harder because Johnson was teaching before you had to do a lot more paperwork and adhere to the teaching standards framework. whereas the most inspiring part of Albert's teaching is a sequence in which he goes completely off piste and tells the students how even a man in the papers who murdered his wife is still a human being even though unthinking people call him inhuman. How we are all humans all in the same condition even though as a teacher you have to pretend to not be a human on some level and have kids not see you as human. And I find this bit really moving because the most transformative parts of teaching are those moments of common shared humanity.
——and I write all this knowing it is a risk not just because I am a trainee teacher but because I am aware that Freddie might not appreciate this formal experimentation in a review and find it overly cute that I am trying to imitate Johnson's style when the money would be really useful as a trainee teacher because there are no longer bursaries for English teachers though I do have some money.
——and a large part of teaching now is about teaching cultural capital and useful knowledge and I hope there is a place for Johnson in that and the kind of speech that my students speak rather than just standard English and the language of architects.
FIVE: Coda
A couple of weeks before writing this review. A Year 7 student asked me what my PhD was in and I told her philosophy and she replied, “Yeah, you look the type”. This was the first time since leaving academia I felt a sense of humour about no longer really being an academic and, with it, some of the fog of insecurity about my new profession lifted and I felt glad to be a teacher.