Living Life as a Transaction: Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry by B. S. Johnson

SEB GARDINER | CONTENT WRITER

In2014, Jonathan Coe published the biography of the avant-garde novelist B. S. Johnson, four decades after the author's untimely death in 1973. The biography focuses on the passion and commitment of the author, someone devoted to honesty and truth in their experimental writing. The biography is titled Like a Fiery Elephant, after a comment made to Johnson about him by one of his students when he was a teacher.

Christie Malry’s Own DoubleEntry is the sixth of Johnson’s major works. The character Malry, a man who confesses that he is driven by money and sex and is open with the reader about how simply he leads his life. He is determined to learn how money works, how it is gained, controlled, used, and stolen, and so he takes a job at a bank. It is here that he formulates the idea of a double-entry; every time he is treated unfairly, having done no wrong himself, he will enact proportional revenge upon society. He is initially inconvenienced by having to walk on the other side of the road due to building works, so every day that he must do this he scratches a line into a wall nearby, a way of repaying society for causing him trouble. We get to know Malry as a character who believes he is owed a perfect life.

The novel is filled with metafiction, the characters apparently aware that they are not real. Malry’s mother acknowledges that she only exists because he is telling a story, and Johnson often jumps in with his own notes. At the end of the novel, Johnson writes himself in as a character and appears to Malry, apologising that he will not be able to continue the story anymore, just as Johnson was approaching the end of his life outside of this fictional world. Malry tells Johnson not to assume that a short novel is a bad one—just as Johnson told his agent the day before he died, “I shall be much more famous once I’m dead”.

Although Malry is a simple man and Johnson a “fiery elephant”, the two both end up facing the transactional inequality of the working world. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry was the last work Johnson lived to see publish, released only months before his suicide. At 186 pages long, it is a short reflection on the problems of transactional living; money is not gained in a fair way, nor does life treat you fairly—a lesson that Malry comes to learn himself.

The Great American Writer: Saul Bellow’s A Silver Dish

RILEY MOORE | CONTENT WRITER

Saul Bellow is the great American writer. Above Faulkner, above Nabokov, above Updike, Bellow sits beautifully, convincingly, above suspicion. No American writer is as decorated as Bellow. He won three National Book Awards. He won the Pulitzer Prize. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Generally, writing is not viewed as a competitive endeavour. But if it was: Bellow is the winner. Where to begin? Begin with A Silver Dish, Bellow’s finest short story. Published in 1978 in The New Yorker, A Silver Dish follows Woody Selbst, a Chicago businessman mourning the death of his father, Morris.

Bellow’s short stories are like novels, they include everything imaginable: death, life, hope, worry, heartbreak, anxiety, awkward family relations, and money troubles. He manages to do what Nietzsche hoped. That is, to say in a paragraph what would take others a whole book. Bellow is a great compiler of experience, leaving nothing untouched. It is intensely human, yet idiosyncratic, and juggles nostalgia, guilt, and regret powerfully, masterfully, oscillating seamlessly from Woody’s unfortunate childhood during the Great Depression to his experienced, rugged adulthood as a carpenter and caretaker.

A Silver Dish would be considered a classic, due its well-coordinated plot, but it is Bellow’s prose which solidifies it as such. Woody, for instance, recalls when his father abandons his family. He comes to Woody in the backyard. It was hot outside. Bellow writes that, “when [Pop] took off his fedora the skin of his head was marked with a deep ring and the sweat was sprinkled over his scalp—more drops than hairs”. Bellow lives in detail, but his detail is of a moral kind. Indeed, Bellow once traced the origins of his want to write. He wrote that all that appeared was a “blind and obstinate” impulse that expressed itself in “bursts of foolishness”. He evidently tamed this foolishness into a true art, for A Silver Dish handles universal, deeply human problems.

Woody buries Pop, and reddens with emotion. He is forced to remind himself that Pop, who had been so overbearing and abusive, yet somehow touching and understandable, is truly gone. “First Thursday in the grave,” Woody would whisper to himself, and, soon after, “First Saturday; he’s got to be getting used to it”. Bellow is able to properly weave the narrative such that the reader does not explicitly notice when they have been transported to a different portion of Woody’s history. Indeed, in less than 50-pages, Bellow tracks 50-years of Woody’s life. Part of his talent is his ability to do this seamlessly. It is like a Persian rug. The stitches are somewhere—but where? He does not abruptly drag the reader through time with underdeveloped characters. Characters, in fact, may be inaccurate.

A Silver Dish is about people. People one would meet in life, who have honest struggles, and have felt the turbulence of hard experiences. Bellow’s fiction transcends the imaginary, and his short story is the perfect introduction to his corpus. It is the perfect introduction to anything.