Picador £20 pp400

In the course of his brief life, BSJohnson was hailed as Britain’s most subversive novelist. His avant-garde devices from the 1960s included holes cut in chapters (so the reader could see what was coming) and the use of a black page to signify a character’s death by heart attack. Samuel Beckett enjoyed the irreverent boisterousness of Johnson’s experiments; he and Johnson were kindred spirits. Like the older Beckett, Johnson railed at life but found a lugubrious comedy in human failings. In 1973, aged 40, he killed himself by slashing his wrists in the bath while drunk. His body was found by his estranged and long-suffering wife, Virginia. They had two children.

Today, in spite of his former high reputation, Johnson is virtually forgotten. The son of a servant and book-keeper, he was born in London’s Hammersmith in 1933 and lived in the city for most of his life. At school he was known as “Pork and Beans” for his bullish, podgy figure. Always keen to appear plebeian, he later enjoyed several abrasive encounters with Oxbridge literary “toffs” (as he called the Auden and Isherwood brigade). After attending King ’s College, London, to read English, at the late age of 23, he worked as a supply teacher in a series of tough north London schools. His novels celebrate the ordinary working-class decencies of Lyons corner houses, Green Shield stamps and the “salt satisfaction” of hot gammon. Their exuberant humanity and affection for language are a delight to discover.

In this marvellous biography Jonathan Coe documents the life of this controversial writer in all its variety. Johnson was conspicuous among modernists for his refusal to be glum. Yet he had a grimly puritanical dislike of the imagination and believed that storytelling was a euphemism for lying. “How can you convey truth in a vehicle of fiction?” he asked peevishly. “The two terms, truth and fiction, are opposites.”

Disturbed by this contradiction, the “fiery elephant” (as the poet Adrian Mitchell dubbed Johnson) set out to write a series of “truth-telling” novels in which details from his life would provide a documentary authenticity. His most extreme experiment was The Unfortunates (1969), which is still a novel of immense power and poignancy. The narrator (Johnson) is sent to Nottingham to report on a football match for a Sunday newspaper, when he is flooded by memories of a friend who died there from cancer. Typically, Johnson believed his random recollections of that time conflicted with the physical constraints of a bound book. So he resolved the problem by writing The Unfortunates in 27 loose-bound sections and packing them in a box. The sections could be read in any order and they provide a striking transcript of Johnson’s meandering thoughts and the cancer’s senseless devouring.

In the name of literary “truth”, Johnson chose to put the most humdrum details from his life into his novels. Trawl (1966), his masterpiece, included memories of Edgware Road sexual encounters and even the cremation of his Latin teacher in south London. The novel offered a gutsy, alcohol- soaked collage of autobiographical rejectamenta (although it routinely apeared in the Angling section of Foyles). Johnson’s obsessive re-creation of his past could neverthless verge on the narcissistic: do we need to know all this?

Adventurously, Coe has chosen to reproduce Johnson’s life through a collage of tape-recorded conversations, letters and drafts for unfinished novels. The book thus has the feel of a filing cabinet, yet it draws the reader in irresistibly, as Coe writes with brio and relevance. In 1973, after publication of Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, his sixth (and bleakest) novel, Johnson began to drink more heavily. Dipsomaniac self-delusion led him to believe he was the James Joyce de nos jours, but liquor now had him well and truly licked. Coe speculates that alcohol had become Johnson’s salve for some inner hurt or unappeased grief. Was he a secret homosexual, perhaps? We cannot know. All suicides tend to generate false leads, and Johnson’s was no exception.

On the evidence of this work alone, it would be a grievous mistake to consign Johnson to oblivion: he wrote some of the finest and funniest British novels of the past century. The Hammersmith Beckett is ripe for reappraisal. And Coe is to be congratulated on this moving and superbly researched work.

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