The Unfortunates Sees the Light of Day

I was thumbing through New Directions' spring 2008 catalog and was somewhat surprised to see that they are taking the daring step of publishing B.S. Johnson's "novel in a box" The Unfortunates as it was originally intended to be published.

What's interesting here is that Johnson, who wrote this book in the 1960s, intended it to be published as a collection of chapters lying loose in a box. The reader was to withdraw a chapter randomly, read it, and continue on in this manner until all were read.

Although Johnson, a fierce experimenter, managed to wrangle quite a few sacrifices form his publishers, he was unable to get anyone to bite on this book. If memory serves, as Jonathan Coe recounts in his masterful biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, there was an extremely small run of the actual boxed book, and then a normal-sized run of the book bound as a normal novel with instructions at the front for how readers could randomly choose chapters. (Johnson was rather unsatisfied by this.)

But now it appears that New Directions is not only publishing the work of a somewhat obscure, highly challenging, dead writer from across the Atlantic, but is also publishing the book in an extremely unconventional format. Good for them.

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Comments

[DerikB]

Very exciting. Thanks for the heads-up.

[Nigel Beale]

Coe is a droll, insightful writer. I agree with you, Like a Fiery Elephant is an excellent bio. In it Coe has some interesting things to say about the genre. For example,he believes that literature has never been less valued, despite it being discussed nowadays more than ever before. Ironically he blames literary biography ‘for which the British have a unique passion’ for this state of affairs, and quotes Milan Kundera dismissing the genre: "the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel. A novelist’s biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undid. All their labour cannot illuminate either the value or the meaning of a novel, can scarcely even identify a few of the bricks. The moment Kafka attracts more attention than Joseph K, Kafka’s posthumous death begins."

On The Unfortunates Coe doesn't think much of Johnson's central conceit: randomly ordered pages as a tangible metaphor for the random interplay of memories and impressions in the human mind...but he says, "if Johnson's work stands up better today than most of the writing of his 'experimental' peers, this has everything to do with the fact that he refused - or was unable - to sacrifice intensity of feeling on the alter of formal ingenuity, and The Unfortunates is the supreme example of this. To read it is to be drawn, inexorably, by the coiled, unyielding threads of Johnson's prose, into a vortex of shared grief."

Coe has single handedly revived the reputation of Johnson. Wonder if there are other examples of this kind? Boswell on another Johnson perhaps...not that Samuel needed it.

[dan visel]

Picador published an edition of this in the UK a couple years ago - maybe 1999? well before the Coe biography came out, though he was certainly working on it by then. It's not as hard as you'd think to find the Picador edition used in the U.S.

(Bad) pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/visel/tags/bookinabox/ illustrating a post that touched on Johnson as well as Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1, the other book-in-a-box, which Simon & Schuster published - in translation! - in 1962.

[Scott]

Dan,

You're right about Picador. They've actually reissued all of Johnson's books in the UK, and I think that's great.

You probably can get a copy of the Picador edition on this side of the pond, but I'm still glad to see an American publisher getting behind Johnson like this.

Nigel,

Thanks for digging up those Coe quotes. My copy of the book is in a box somewhere, probably beneath about 5 other boxes of books.

I have an unread copy of the Picador edition that I was actually thinking about putting on Ebay. It's now out of print in the UK, and used copies are selling there for just under £20, i.e. around $42. I'd be happy to sell my copy for $50 (via PayPal), shipping included, if anyone's interested.