B.S. Johnson (1933-1973)

A review of Jonathan Coe's biography of B. S. Johnson, 'Like a Fiery Elephant', published in RARE BOOK REVIEW in September 2004.

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Like a Fiery Elephant is, essentially, a tragedy, telling the story of one of twentieth-century Britain’s most paradoxical literary figures. B.S. Johnson killed himself in 1973, aged 40, after an extraordinarily productive decade in which he produced some of post-war Britain’s most idiosyncratic novels, as well as several films, poetry, radio and stage plays, and numerous football reports for The Observer.

Johnson was the most prominent in an avant-garde scene that included Eva Figes, Ann Quin and Anthony Burgess, among those Johnson praised for ‘writing as though it mattered’. However, despite claiming to continue the formal revolution inaugurated by his heroes, Joyce and Beckett – The Unfortunates, for example, consisted of twenty-seven unbound chapters to be read in any order, representing life’s ‘randomness’– Johnson was aesthetically conservative, a dogmatist who refused to change, or even evolve, his ideas.

This was his fundamental flaw. Johnson was always obsessed with portraying what he saw as ‘truth’: Derrida and Barthes initiated the move away from this authorial autonomy just as Johnson’s career began. Contemporaneously, the English literary scene came to be dominated by Kingsley Amis and company, ‘realistic’ writers Johnson despised for refusing to take up the baton of formal innovation.

Always self-aggrandising, Johnson infused his novels with his personal experiences and kept meticulous records of his activities, making him a biographer’s gift. Indeed, Jonathan Coe – himself a novelist concerned with form – reflects that ‘Johnson always had his eye on posterity, and I reckon he was certain that someone like me would … write this book one day.’

Coe’s portrait of Johnson is rich, full of extracts from diaries and novels, illustrating Johnson’s passions and failings. Coe provides a full transcript of a conversation between Johnson and several associates: the increasing absurdity of Johnson’s position on language and truth, and his refusal to shift, exemplifies Johnson’s desperate adherence to discredited creative ideas. Indeed, Johnson’s working-class world been eroded by post-modernist counter-culture, undermining Johnson’s belief that his novels were not fiction, but reality.

Nonetheless, Coe is sympathetic towards Johnson, intelligently reassessing his legacy – Albert Angelo, Trawl and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry are placed among the most accomplished works in a fertile scene that produced Burgess’ Clockwork Orange, Quin’s Berg and Rayner Heppenstall’s Connecting Door. Coe engages with the spirit of Johnson’s work with considerable insight and humour. Analysing a day on which Johnson spent six hours writing Trawl, Coe highlights the impossibility of writing about Johnson’s creative process, even though that process is the reason for writing this biography, regretting that ‘It shows the whole process I am engaged upon for the potentially dishonest enterprise it is (Dishonest, Bryan, in a way that novels never are!)’.

Like a Fiery Elephant is ceaselessly uplifting, despite dealing with such a tormented, dislocated individual. Written with immense verve, Johnson shines in Coe’s hands: along with the recent film of Christie Malry, Coe’s enigmatic work has been crucial to a revival of Johnson within critical circles. And a neglected novelist can ask no more from his biographer than that.