LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

ALAN BROWNJOHN AND THE DESPERADO AGE

Fiction

● As a Desperado, Brownjohn is terrified of any invasion of the reader’s privacy. He hates to dictate what the reaction of his audience should be. He gives no clues, he recoils from making his presence felt. The poems are promontories of meaning. He stretches out a hand, an idea, and the emotion waits patiently to be dug out, far behind. The reader is not overwhelmed, as he was by all previous writers. The author is genuinely discreet and quiet. It is up to the reading eyes to peer till they catch a glimpse of him, and decide whether they enjoy the sight or not.

● The conversational tone of Brownjohn’s poetry is essentially Desperado, too. He works hard on his technique, but surrounds it with words that suggest he is not declaiming, but merely talking at ease, whispering actually. Eliot used to shout, Joyce was no less agitated. Brownjohn looks like a man handcuffed to the page. No great gestures, no final words, no decorousness. The incident is the core of the poem, and the meaning concentrates in it. The images help along, but are not essential. Lyricism trips into fiction again and again.

● The addiction to dystopia, both in poetry (where he builds dystopic incidents, short negative plots that generate fear because they defamiliarize) and fiction, makes Brownjohn a Desperado, too. Two of his novels, The Way You Tell Them and The Long Shadows, envisage a world which is not the author’s, and which he dreads. The Way You Tell Them was published in 1990, but describes 1999 ahead of time. It ends in the death of a writer. The Long Shadows tackles communism before and after the fall, as a space that Brownjohn feels very insecure in, and would like to keep as far away as possible. Travelling into the communist land is all right, but leaving it is best. In the meantime, he gets to know and understand it, but, again, the book turns around the death of an English novelist that dared cross the border. Brownjohn’s dystopia is deeply and subtly connected with his well concealed, muffled fear of the future, which might be said to be the fear of the century.

● The Desperado characters are usually non-characters. They live in an apocalypse – whether future or present, it does not matter – which tears them apart, so coherence and logic would be false for them. They scatter their memories and emotions at random, leaving the narrative as enigmatic as they entered. The exit of the novels is a dark pit where unborn personalities sleep till a reader fishes them out and makes an emotional map. We can only vaguely guess what a Desperado hero looks like (we usually have absolutely no idea), but we know exactly what his soul is made of. The inheritance of the stream of consciousness is strong and also contradicted. We are inside an imaginary soul all right, but we look outside, we never try to go into the depth of it. We swim to the surface, using it to rearrange the puzzle of the plot. Incident comes before thought, the novel returns to the outer world.

● The Desperado’s forte is the bitterly disappointed hero. Brownjohn’s characters never end happily. Happy endings are strongly discouraged by Desperadoes, as unlikely to live in an apocalyptic world. The major achievement of all heroes is the fact that the reader figures them out. After this communion with the readers, they can, and usually do die. When a hero is left by the reader at the end of a narrative, he is twice doomed: first by the plot (he dies or is too old to enjoy life), second by the revolving force of the reader’s mind leaving him, upon which he disintegrates. A hero is not an idyllic refuge from life, but the burden of reality weighing heavily on a deeply disappointed reader, whom the writer persuades to fall in love with his own disappointment.

● Delicately ironic in his poetry, Brownjohn resorts to bitter irony in fiction. His heroes are half serious, half destroyed by the author’s mocking suggestions. We are not meant to laugh, we are not meant to commiserate, either. The Desperado merely warns us to keep our distance. Which we can hardly do, since we are also meant to identify with the character as we reconstruct him. In the end, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of both approval and disapproval. Do we love the hero? We do not. Do we hate him? We cannot. Desperado irony results in fact in a huge sense of helplessness.

● Displacement, another Desperado major concern, is present in Brownjohn’s poetry and fiction, too. Whether lyrical or narrative, Brownjohn’s beings do not feel at home in their bodies and souls. Their minds keep fluttering, like the broken wheels of an old watch out of use, making our heads spin with the fury of finding the map of a plot. These minds reveal stories that bruise the souls of all heroes involved and leave no serenity. Every story is the story of an exile.

● Interpreting a Desperado writer, Brownjohn included, is a very lonely task. Besides the fact that loneliness is the very essence of all characters, the reader feels utterly on his own when he tries to formulate a conclusion, which the author refuses to state in as many words. The poem or novel is meant to gape open for ever, like a sentence without a full stop. The predicate makes the meaning quite clear, only we are denied any sense of closure. The Desperado wants his haunting text to live on and on, beyond the experience of the written page. He writes directly in the reader’s soul.

● The Iron Curtain has slowly been replaced by trips into communism, so the western Desperado is characterized by a curiosity that makes him partake of communism. Some write dystopias imagining communism in their own countries (Burgess, Lessing), others merely go on a brief, terrifying pilgrimage and come back a better man (Bradbury, Brownjohn). Crossing the border into dictatorship used to be a rich mine of plots before communism fell. It is now slipping into science fiction nightmare. If communism is no longer the fear, despair has to find another spring. If not politics, then economy. If not economy, human nature. And we come back full circle to Jonathan Swift.

● The communist dissident was, similarly, a major figure in the novel before the fall of communism. It appeared in Burgess, Orwell, Huxley, Lodge, Brownjohn. The new political situation has made him obsolete. The same writers, or others, create local dissent to replace the former, foreign revolt. Going against the crowd, against the wrong tunnel of time has become a pattern of the Desperado hero.

● The Desperado makes a point of creating unlikable heroes. The character must be loaded with meaning, not agreeable. Consequently, the reader is angry, he leaves the narrative in a frenzy of un-attachment.

● Desperado books, whether poetry or fiction, are defeated books. They do not plan to conquer, to succeed, they merely give in. Brownjohn’s novels end helplessly and depressingly, Ishiguro’s novels weigh us down with the burden of bruised souls that find no comfort. Desperadoes are uncomforted and highly uncomfortable writers.

● Physicality is a bone of contention with Desperadoes. Many are unspeakably bold. Some are both bold and shy. Brownjohn is desperately decent. Alasdair Gray confesses he shocked himself in 1982 Janine. Whatever the outcome, physicality is not so bad with literary Desperadoes as it is with other kinds of Desperado creators or mere Desperado audiences.

● A Desperado will never admit he is one. He will reject all affiliation. He must be on his own. The world is his own secret discovery and he will only impart it to his readers, not critics. Brownjohn has his secret world, just like every other writer. He has his own reticence about belonging. He does not much like the idea of Desperado literature, which is, in fact, just a pretext to define a few common features which might bring a sense of order to an age that uses all devices ever, which rediscovers tradition and forces it upon innovation with breathless impatience. Is anybody a Desperado? They do share an exasperated mood. But we should not go too far. It might be enough if we called Alan Brownjohn an unwilling Desperado, who illustrates the second ‘millennium’s close’ and the third millennium’s start much better than many. Whatever the name, in fact, he is a really good writer, who has something to say and who will not be drawn into defining of his texts. He is an unwilling Desperado who wills his readers into reading. As he himself put it, ‘The book will always be with us.