Don’t go pretending you’ve read B. S. Johnson. It won’t wash. Because nobody has. If you insist that you are a fan then I can tell you, like a guess-your-weight psychic at the county fair, that you are between 50 and 67, wish you hadn’t wasted so much of your youth reading, and often lie in magazine lifestyle quizzes. Either that or you were married to him. But, frankly, I don’t believe you’ve even heard of B. S. Johnson. You’re thinking: “Is he related to Boris, perhaps?”
For a start, most of his books have been out of print for years. One novel, the only one that you may have heard of, The Unfortunates, the one in which all the chapters are bound separately and served in a box to be read in whatever order you choose (because life and memory are fragmentary), was reprinted by Picador a few years ago. But you probably read only the review in The Times. And that was written by me. And I didn’t bother to read the book either. Just three of the chapters. But then, as far as the late and cripplingly experimental BSJ was concerned, that would have been as valid a reading of his novel as any.
Fortunately, we’re not here to talk about Brian Stanley Johnson. We’re here to talk about Jonathan Coe, author of such excellent conventional novels as What A Carve Up! and The Rotter’s Club, whose new book, Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, is quite the most exciting, impassioned and generous literary biography I think I have ever read. The title alone is lovely enough to win prizes.
Coe has given years of his life and acres of his soul to exhuming the corpse of a writer he does not even admire that much. In doing so he seems to have been motivated by intentions so pure, so literary, so close to the core of what it is to be a writer, that they are (as they should be) unknowable.
From the outset Coe muses about the point of literary biography and confesses that he is not much of a one for experimental writers such as Johnson. Then he tells us of the years he spent among BSJ’s mountains of papers, and among his family and friends and enemies and is soon explaining how he will “knock down the walls of (BSJ’s) house and we shall take a wander through the rubble”.
Giving us no time to ask why, Coe plunges into “A Life in Seven Novels”, presenting each book in précis (with some of the critical fallout) because he knows we have not read them. Unlike the biographer of a Dickens or an Orwell, Coe has not only to excavate his subject’s interior life but to convince us that cultural artefacts exist which make this interior life worth excavating.
Then comes “A Life in 160 Fragments”, small chapters chronologically ordered but localised also around scraps from the papers that Coe has spent years sifting, like a hobo panning for gold in the muddiest of creeks. And then there’s “A Life in 44 Voices”: 30 pages of vaguely themed outtakes from Coe’s years of interviewing. Finally, we find “Coda: Fragment 46” which is a sort of gay ghost story that tilts at the windmills of conclusion.
Not a conventional biography, then. Rather, one that signals from the outset the liberties it intends to take with the form. Coe thus gets us wondering whether this is being done merely for effect or because it is the best way of writing about an author who refused to organise his own novels (an author who wrote: “Life is chaotic, fluid, random . . . Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies”) or because he was just too lazy to organise the mass of data into a “proper” biography. He makes us ask exactly the questions that one must ask of Johnson and, if you like, of the whole Modernist project in art and literature.
And, as with the work of Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Braque, et al, one can answer of Like A Fiery Elephant, as one most assuredly cannot of Johnson’s work, that it doesn’t matter because the result is a masterpiece and after it nothing will be the same again.
BSJ, on the other hand, changed nothing. In brief: he was a fat alcoholic born in 1933 who was an admirer of Beckett, Joyce, Sterne and Flann O’Brien (but poorly read otherwise), had a bad love affair before getting married, made a big thing of being working class back when things like that were important, was angry and proud and (as a contemporary put it) “wracked by self-certainties”, wrote seven experimental novels (holes in the pages so you can see what happens later on, black pages, multiple narrators, etc) which few people bought or liked (for which he blamed agents, publishers and booksellers), cut his wrists in the bath at 40 and left no literary legacy at all.
Indeed, Johnson’s primary function in publishing history is to have given Coe the spark for a biography so ingenious that when Coe’s mother goes into labour on the outskirts of Birmingham in a footnote at the bottom of page 104, it seems only right and natural.
BSJ was not a bad prose writer. He had that clarity and sense of the writerly occasion that one associates with a well-taught creative writing graduate, but he vested his vast self-belief in structural shenanigans so formally Modernist that they must have looked old-fashioned even when they first appeared. Worse than old-fashioned, they were irrelevant, because Johnson was so unaware of the wider European context.
Though nodding to Marc Saporta, Coe makes no mention at all of the Oulipo group of Parisian experimental writers, of Georges Perec or Italo Calvino, Robbe-Grillet or Raymond Queneau — whose 1961 work Cent mille milliards de poèmes comprised ten sonnets on card with each line horizontally perforated so that the reader could randomly assemble a hundred billion sonnets. This must, I assume, reflect BSJ’s ignorance of them, rather than Coe’s. Yet these were the men who, after Beckett, kept the Joycean project alive, and forged a link with the experimenters of today.
Coe will persuade you to go back to the primary texts, and that is his messianic calling. But you can’t; not just yet. And the reason why not is lovely.
The publication of Albert Angelo, the novel with the holes in, was delayed because of difficulties with the cutting, for which BSJ blamed everyone but himself. So how delightful that when I phoned Picador to ask why they hadn’t sent me the long-promised omnibus of his work, which I had hoped to review alongside the biography, I was told: “It’s delayed because the printers are having trouble with the holes in Albert Angelo.”
It is the sort of perfect resolution to a story that BSJ insisted life never provides. All his life he made it difficult for agents, publishers, printers and booksellers to establish his reputation. He fought with them, ranted, raved. Always cantankerous, always chippy, he believed that production (and readerly) problems with his texts were the work of prejudice and ignorance. And yet even now, with Coe and Picador and the literary establishment’s good intentions behind him, he is still shafting himself from beyond the grave. I wonder whom he’s blaming now.
Read on
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Picador)
