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Johnson edited The Evacuees (1968), a collection of accounts of evacuation written by former wartime evacuees such as himself, following the completion of The Unfortunates (published 1969) in the Autumn of 1967. According to Jonathan Coe's deservedly award-winning biography, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (2004), Johnson actually did much of the work during his two-month spell in Paris over the turn of 1967 into 1968 (246). As such it falls into the period between the writing of The Unfortunates and House Mother Normal (1971) and can usefully be considered as part of that transition in Johnson's novels from the autobiographical into what Patricia Waugh has described in Harvest of the Sixties (1995) as the "ostentatiously fantastic and darkly Jacobean" (131). Indeed, we can already see some sort of transition within Johnson's introduction to The Evacuees, in the way that Johnson uses personal experience to legitimise a role as public spokesman. In Albert Angelo (1964), for example, Johnson chiefly articulates a private sense of melancholy, which in a rare moment of paternal intimacy is shared between Albert and his father: "Chelsea lose three—two after leading two—nil at one point. Satisfied with our dissatisfaction, I and my father and the crowd squirm away from Stamford Bridge" (AA 25). By The Evacuees, this desire for dissatisfaction has become the hallmark of a generation: "… in us the tendency to expect the worst from any situation, to cut our losses and accept disappointment (indeed, to feel something near disappointment in any case when the worst does not happen) is perhaps more evident than in earlier or later generations' (1968: 9).

DOI: 10.1057/9780230286122_12

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