Book: Like a Fiery Elephant
Author: Jonathan Coe
Price: (Picador, ?20)
As Britain's most committed avant-garde novelist of the 1960s and early 1970s, BS Johnson bears a strong resemblance to Wyndham Lewis, who occupied the same position in the 1920s and early 1930s. Both were modernists who were left stranded by modernism. The novels that most coherently manifested BS Johnson's formal beliefs - The Unfortunates, Trawl and House Mother Normal - made as little popular impact as Lewis's The Childermass and The Apes of God had 40 years before. The big difference between them was that Lewis wrote two of his best books, Rotting Hill and Self Condemned, late in life and made it to old age, whereas Bryan Stanley Johnson died by his own hand in November 1973, at the age of 40.
Modernism is above all a passionate vector, always for or against. Lewis, along with his friends Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, detested the Victorians for their idealism and selective romanticism. Their modernism wanted new forms that would force words, under pressure, to acquire a hardness that conveyed their era and revealed new potentialities. Yet that early modernism was an errant movement, a rebellion of the sort that rebels against everything, including itself. Booby-trapped by a weakness for highly formalised art, it failed to live up to its promise - of an authentic, assertively Anglo-Saxon genius.
So much of this pattern is repeated in the arc of BS Johnson's troubled career that one wants to say, as one is reading Jonathan Coe's account, "I could have warned you." But as Coe himself says in this singular, superb biography, "One of the most bracing things for any reader coming face to face with Johnson's work is that it immediately throws down gauntlets... forces you to question your most fundamental assumptions about any kind of writing process. He is the most challenging of literary figures, in that respect."
As a sympathetic reader of Johnson, Coe's own response to the challenge is several-fold. He recognises that Johnson's unshakeable faith in his own theories - the chief one being that "life does not tell stories," and that therefore the truthful writer must also avoid telling them - leaves him, as biographer, in a difficult position. "How, then," he asks, "can a biography be anything other than one big lie?" He decides to perform a Virgilian role, leading the reader down, circle by circle, into the workings of Johnson's life and mind. Beginning with "an exposition without which you may have felt unhappy," he writes about his own enthusiasm for Johnson's writing, rooted in seeing his documentary, Fat Man on a Beach, at the age of 13. He gently navigates those who will not have read any of Johnson's work through his seven novels, then through "A life in 160 fragments," a collection of refracted views of his subject through Johnson's own writings. He makes no pretence at objectivity, inserting himself into the narrative, exposing all of the usually hidden biographer's uncertainty to the reader.
Reaching the point where Johnson has finished filming Fat Man on a Beach, 17 days before his suicide, Coe pauses. It has taken him eight years of work to get so far, and he has been putting off this moment for some time - the moment when he has to write the narrative of a man's death "in a few pages." (One can feel here Coe's sense of weariness and even anger that, having got so far in Johnson's life, he still can't save him.) He decides to take his cue from a letter, written by Johnson but never sent to Charles Clark, his editor, defending his latest novel See the Old Lady Decently. "He justified some of the more personal, discursive elements in the book - the passages about being disturbed by his children, for instance - on the grounds (as usual) of honesty: 'To be absolutely honest, the process of writing must enter into it, for that is the actual thing one is doing - the basic true thing.'" He then goes on to describe how he, Coe, has rented "for three days only" for the purpose of writing this part of the book, an 18th-century folly from the Landmark Trust. This autobiographising of Johnson's death - Coe's account not of the death but of his experience of the death - could have been a mawkish, look-at-me retelling, floundering in the biographer's feelings. Mainly because of Coe's talent as a novelist, it is instead one of the book's many high points, a sane and sound tribute to a writer he loves.
Part critical work, part journey around his subject, part dialogue (one section, "A life in 44 voices," is given to a slightly disturbing but highly effective arrangement of unmediated viewpoints of those whom Coe talked to in his research), Coe's biography is a profound departure from the novels with which he himself has entertained us over the last decade. His passion for the writing of Johnson is, as he admits in the opening pages, a cuckoo in the nest of his own writing process. Those radical Johnsonian formal ventures - the pages with holes cut in them (Albert Angelo) and the notorious book in a box, its unbound chapters offered to the reader in any order (The Unfortunates) - sit oddly with Coe's practice as a "realistic" novelist, committed to providing characters and a selective, metaphorical, fictional illusion of reality. The biographer's admiration for his subject's "command of language, his freshness" and the seriousness with which he approached his art, is not difficult to share, and one can only cheer when Coe writes that it is the dilettantes who pose the greatest threat to the novel as a form, "the resting actors and the bored journalists" - but the two writers are worlds apart. (This is perhaps the secret of good literary colloquy.) The novel, Johnson said repeatedly, after the "almighty aposiopesis" towards the end of Albert Angelo - "Oh, fuck all this LYING" - must be drawn only from experience. "Telling stories really is telling lies." A serious novel must tell the truth. Anything else was "both immoral and artistically contemptible."
So why did one of the most talented writers of the 1960s kill himself? "Value this man. His writing sings. He walks like a fiery elephant," the poet Adrian Mitchell concluded in a Sunday Times review of Albert Angelo, Johnson's second novel. The elephant was an only child - overweight, fair-haired, devoted to his mother, and full of lively interest until abandoned in High Wycombe, unvalued as it must have seemed, as an evacuee during the second world war.
Johnson's solitary, melancholy, observant personality seems to have started from here. As a late-entry English student at King's College London, he was noticed for his outspokenness, his clumsiness and an intensity that drove girls away. One such alliance, rapidly ended by the girl in question, produced a lifelong bitterness. It was at about this time he also met the mysterious Michael Bannard, a homosexual and flamboyant, almost occult figure, whom Coe believes may have exerted, as a powerful opposite, a double's hold over Johnson (though Johnson married and his family meant everything to him). The transformation in his creative life came from a reading of Robert Graves's The White Goddess - a book that nailed him to confrontation with his muse, leaving no room for art that was less than pure. He became possessed by what can only be described as a hysterical perfectionism; even one of his closest friends, Anthony Smith, who worked with him on a poetry magazine and later as literary editor of the Western Daily Press, conceded that he could be an "absolutely dogmatic bastard."
Relentlessly energetic and efficient, Johnson felt slighted when publishers did not respond with similar energy. After his first two novels he obtained a salaried contract from Secker & Warburg, practically unheard of at the time, but this proved insufficient, and childhood feelings of abandonment evolved into a refusal to believe that the world could be on his side. A feeling that he was always about to be dumped runs through this account like the threnody of a tragedy foretold.
The same paranoid tendency may account, too, for the tenacity with which Johnson stuck to his formalist guns. Coe remarks that many who knew BS Johnson felt that his "dogmatic insistence on high modernist innovation as the only way forward for the novel was not really a serious literary aesthetic at all - more of a defensive posture, adopted to mask his insecurities." These were sexual, intellectual, class insecurities. To be better than the rest he had to be totally different, so that other writers were not just not as good as him, they were "not even writing the right kind of novel." He succeeded in making friends with his hero Samuel Beckett in Paris - but this gesture of solidarity, mutual though it was, also emphasises how his idea of the avant garde was already being superseded. He was, as Coe points out, an aesthetic elitist located in modernism's previous chapter; he had no interest in the pop art aspects of the 1960s avant garde.
The "large, blonde maudlin man" continued to work with deep application at his fiction - as at his other ventures, his poetry, drama, film scripts and football reporting for the Observer and the Times of India. If he had a single quality that gradually unbalanced all the others, it was his ability to bear a grudge: against women, publishers, the very randomness of life which he sought to extol over the selectivity of the conventional novelist. Johnson claimed that he possessed "an enormous protection of laughter," but those he worked with - publishers, agents, editors, directors - though they admired his work, did not find it easy to locate his laughing side.
So what is the tragedy of BS Johnson? That he would have been a great - commercially and literarily successful - writer if he had been less depressed, more normal? Or that he was 30 years too early for an anger management course? Flippant though this sounds, Johnson's story cries out for psychoanalytical attention. In his destructive relations with the London cultural establishment you can identify the constant tantrums of a boy in search of attention. In that respect, Like a Fiery Elephant is a cautionary tale - there, but for some redeeming grace, goes many a writer "hurt... into poetry" to use WH Auden's phrase. But do writers ever listen to the lessons of their own autobiographies? In his review of Sylvia Plath's Ariel in 1965 Johnson noted that "while to read Sylvia Plath's book is a remarkable experience... I must yet question the value of these poems to me: after all, they did not save her, did they?" I wonder, if Johnson had been given himself to review, whether he would have approved of his own method. It didn't save him, did it? And that is the concern at the heart of Coe's marvellous book. Beyond the discussion of the value of any avant garde, it is a book about the limits of the novel's ability to console us.
