Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson

This biographer wrote about a man whom 99% of readers have never read his books. And he does it well. Johnson wanted to push into the future and not repeat the linear exposition of novels that remain popular today. Johnson was a literary artist, not a bestselling author. Coe recognizes this and should be acclaimed for the honest and careful style he uses as a biographer to explain Johnson and his work. Johnson influences many writers today who seek the leading edge.

Coe, a successful novelist in his own right, sets out on a seemingly quixotic quest: to craft a biography of the obscure and ultimately tragic life of writer BS Johnson. The biography itself is a work of art; Coe provides useful insight into Johnson's major works. Additionally, Coe has a sleuth's instinct, digging up all kinds of information on one of Britain's least understood avant garde writers.

Probably a greater book than Johnson was a writer--but Coe's quirkygenius turns a fairly obscure, abrasive avant-garde suicide into a trulyfascinating subject for a book. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near Johnson,but, like the similarly disturbed Ian Curtis, he was not a boring guy. At thispoint, my interest has been piqued for Coe's other books.

The author really went into depth by taking a personal and thoroughly approach towards Johnson's oeuvre and life.

31 Aug 2009B S Johnson, like me, knew he'd be a great writer without having written a word. When as a young man he read in Robert Graves' "The White Goddess", of a real presence, that would guide a poet to play among the stars, he wanted to possess her. If we are to credit this biography, Bryan Johnson was obliged with a visitation from her; naked as "Sheela na tig" with her ankles round her neck in the Welsh lights of his car one night. The Internet provides many images of this erotic deity. Was this Eliot's "heaving groaner rounded homeward"? Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?Poets now, in the posterity that he addressed in his work, may experience audio recordings of Robert Graves, given out from Parnassus to the players below. When they hear his words "Criccieth" or "sooterkin", it is as if he has rolled up his tongue to form a tube for the words where a tiny metallic sugar ball rolls in his saliva. It dissolves as the cassette tape unwinds. Graves is dead, but alive-alive-oh, in this bequest, we can sense his particular love, the sound of his own voice. If his muse, that cool "White Goddess" that Graves insisted was the only inspiration behind true poetry, had provided that silver ball for the reading, and overseen the writing, we the undead poets will perhaps benefit from less of her ministrations for a while. The involute vanity that rolls that small ball bearing on the silver spoon of his tongue is only highlighted with assistance from the moon or the stars. Johnson and Robert Graves were already mummy's boys.Blessed like this, Bryan was not going to get very far. His other art house hero was Samuel Beckett who, having befriended him, described Johnson to his publishers, as a "gifted writer". Poor Johnson, on the hard times he had reverse engineered, suggested that this treasured quote might be used by his publishers; yet managed to bring down upon himself only Olympian indignation from that wizened Nobel laureate. With friends like laureates who needs enemies? What are we waiting for now? Godot? Before we can confine the monochrome experiments of both men to oblivion.How is it that the intellectual vanity of such tyrants (Johnson orchestrating his suicide was certainly one) can supply material for monumental biographies, more interesting and far more substantial than the works? It is because we long to eavesdrop on that cosy fifties parochial publishing world, where the siren calls of grey BBC producers played both World Council and Secret Service onto the rubber rocks. There, but for the grace of The White Goddess, go I.Johnson's idea was to obtrude himself as often as possible into his pages of fiction. We can all stop to describe, or to degauss, our computer screens to give detail and gravitas to our work. I am never able to resist the temptation. If Johnson had died today he would have filmed his performance; from the filling of the warm bath, to leaving brandy for friend Barry with the note "Finish This" as a final frame for You-tube. We can only imagine how it looked. How deep did he cut those wrists? How long did it take him to die? Should we follow suit? or should we write?I laughed with my mother when she confided the words where my father was described on her marriage certificate as "master plumber". I always assumed that, qualified for marriage as he was for plumbing, he chose these words in front of the registrar to puff his lowly profession to something more suitable for the permanence of engrossing upon a document. Simon Coe tells us that his subject was descended on his mother's side from a "master greengrocer".I wonder if Johnson and I both came from a working class scion so lowly that it aspired no higher than the position of "master"? Did our ancestors, both so young and inexperienced at that threshold, really gild the lily? We can pick off that vermeil, but with this skill, have they passed on to us the capacity to lie? or have we inherited our yearning to embellish the truth? Perhaps it was just the easy benevolence of civil servants who, looking themselves for grace on important occasions, themselves added that word "master" and favoured both couples with another empty reason to be proud on such a portentous day. When in Martins Bank, I opened my first account under the summer limes on the Wells Hill in Tunbridge Wells, and the clerk asked me where I worked, I said "City Guides Ltd", he gushed "Oh, you're in advertising!" It sounded so much more glamorous.I read the book because the football author, Duncan Hamilton, wrote about Brian Clough; and using the same method, spoke reverentially of "The Unfortunates", Johnson's book published in the famous loose pages which Secker & Warburg, without notice to him, pulped; such pacts with publishers part of the process that inexorably broke his heart.The very word "fiction" means telling lies. There's nothing wrong with it. Johnson ingratiated himself with The Smithsons who were paid for designing the most egregious example of what is now known as "brutalist architecture". It was Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, where let me tell you, they had a "City Guide". He said to them "My position in the avant garde resembles yours in architecture." How true.Johnson in a note to himself described a trilogy destined never to be written: the parts "They must shimmer in relation to each other." A beautiful conception; but it was dreamed by a gross dilettante who without irony wrote to a friend "When I occasionally look at my books in public libraries." Occasionally? If that was me I'd have taken my books out all over the country on a regular basis, as I will one day, glad to lay out what is overdue as part of my investment in my own priceless work.

The Washington Post reviewer betrays his own mindset when he allows that Johnson's ALBERT ANGELO to be "an impressive novel, though redolent of 60s experimentalism," in which the word "though" stands out like a red flag. What does he mean, "though"? Read the sentence without "though" and it would represent my point of view. Oh well to each his own. But I say, what's wrong with 60s experimentalism? You'd think it was a taint of some kind.The truth is that Bryan Johnson, ill read and ill served by his publishers (though he couldn't have been easy to handle) is a far more interesting author than Jonathan Coe, no matter how many awards the latter has received. The whole project had a quixotic tilt for Coe, who seems to have regarded himself very reflexively, for of course he is constantly having to defend his own bourgeois conception of the novel against the avant-garde of Johnson and, say Beckett, and constantly he is shading his generally well thought out exegeses on Johnson's books (a few of which I have not read) by citing their inhuman, formalist coldness, a quality he abhors, a quality that he believes contributes to the "deadness" of experimental writing.So it's a funny book in many ways, and yet I am grateful to Coe for writing it, for it establishes a context, no matter how skewed, by which he might form a coherent view of BS Johnson's life and times. And surely we owe him a huge debt of gratitude if only for spending eight years interviewing many souls (and many who have since passed on) who knew Johnson and who otherwise would have let their knowledge go quietly into the grave of experimentalism in England. It is a rich turf, nearly unknown, terra incognita and nearly untouched by biographers.All in all, a splendid book, a book you can lose yourself in, and perfect for long winter nights

[typos corrected!- Please delete the erroneous version and replace with this one, deleting this message! VT]In this book a novelist investigates the complicated and sometimes contradictory inner lives and work of the controversial writer, poet, film maker, playwright and critic B.S.Johnson. Johnson is famous for his rejection of fiction: 'telling stories is lies', yet this didn't stop him from producing at least three major novels. Johnson championed a kind of experimental modernism - radical effects like holes in books, pages shading to black, books made of unbound sections, multiple narrative voices etc. yet in many ways remained a conservative figure. This is a fascinating portrait of a writer in conflict with the times in which he lives, and despite the tragic circumstances of Johnson's life - he died by his own hand in 1973 - this book manages to be uplifting. A very rewarding book, essential reading for anyone interested in modern literature and in the biographer's art.

Most literary biographies are incredibly confident things, where the writer tells us everything about his subject that he knows, and fills in the gaps with supposition. Jonathan Coe doesn't; he's not even sure he likes BS Johnson, a man who comes over as arrogant, bad-tempered and insecure on every page. But Coe is sure that Johnson was a brilliant writer, one who put ideas and form before sales and dullness, and he creates a brilliant biography that's almost a conversation with himself, the reader and Johnson. If you have any love for books, and if you're not the reviewing child of a more talented adult, this is an essential purchase, both for fans of Johnson and Coe. Biog of the decade.

Bought as a Christmas present for my husband who is an avid reader. I havenot read the book myself but he was very happy with it.

A fascinating insight to an author and his life, wriitten by an obvious admirer, himself a gifted writer.

Time shows he was less important to literary progress than he tried to be, and not that interesting a man in retrospect except to fans like the author of this turgid book.