Over the ages, biographers have faced truculent and unhelpful subjects, from J.D. Salinger to Susan Sontag. But experimental British novelist B.S. Johnson surely resides in a category unto himself.
How does a biographer in good conscience make narrative sausage from the life of a man who believed that “Life does not tell stories. … (It) is fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied. … Telling stories really is telling lies.”
One answer to this question is “Like a Fiery Elephant,” Jonathan Coe’s profoundly empathetic “life” of Johnson, which won England’s Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005, and was recently named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography (the winners will be announced March 3).
More than a decade in the making, “Like a Fiery Elephant” aptly embodies Johnson’s reservations about straightforward narrative. There are no pretensions toward objectivity or inclusiveness; in all cases, mere transparency remains the métier.
As a result, the book leaps around Johnson’s life from one event to the next, evoking the erratic path of a chubby working-class kid who charged into the center of literary culture “like a fiery elephant.” The middle section is “a life in 160 fragments”; another simply presents 44 perspectives on Johnson in oral-history format. Coe himself becomes a kind of character, obsessing over the need to get Johnson right and also to be fair to his readers – many of whom, truth be told, are unlikely to have heard of Johnson.
The result of this approach could have become a self-referential mishmash, but in Coe’s hands it becomes a keen prism into the life and work of a difficult and skeptical man. Not the least because Coe never tries – as Johnson did – to justify grand theories about literature. He merely presents them as faithfully as possible in the context of his subject’s life.
Johnson believed that literature was “a relay race, the baton of innovation passing from one generation to another.” To him, the last two men on the track were James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and Johnson was determined to run the next leg (though he claimed, “I seem to have avoided the contrivance to which Joyce was sometimes reduced”).
All this bluster makes Johnson sound like a bit of a prig: He was. But Coe wisely keeps going back to the novels, from “Traveling People” (1963), written when Johnson was just out of university, to “The Unfortunates” (1967), the notorious novel that is presented in a small box in 27 sections. Readers are meant to assemble them and read them in whatever order they see fit, suggesting the randomness of experience.
That heavy ball you just heard drop is the lead weight of literary pretension hitting the floor. Time and again, Coe manages to pick it back up and stow it away long enough for us to listen to the quieter fears and doubts that made Johnson human – and that led to his suicide at age 40 in 1973.
Born the son of an ex-barmaid and a working-class man in Hammersmith, west London, in 1933, Johnson grew into an intellectual bully who had all the weaknesses of a tormenter. He was impatient and arrogant, but fearful of failure. He also agonized over his powerlessness.
It didn’t help that Johnson was so often reduced to hack work during his lifetime. He worked as a sports journalist, covering soccer and football; he cranked out TV scripts and plays and squired book reviews into print. Like Jack Kerouac, he kept graphs of his word-count production.
In this ledger and others, the world was accruing a debt of gratitude to Johnson – much as it does to a character in Johnson’s best-known novel, “Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.” Beneath the rage of his letters to agents and editors – one of which begins, “You ignorant unliterary Americans make me puke” – there is a seething urge for people to respect the integrity of his sacrifices to his muse.
Throughout “Like a Fiery Elephant,” Coe remains painstakingly aware of the need to reward Johnson posthumously. But he never lets it tyrannize him into hero worship. In a final “coda,” Coe allows that by promising himself the sky, Johnson limited the horizon of what he could produce as a novelist. Generously, Coe has accepted this finite bounty – recognizing in it the truth behind all artistic production, the one Johnson knew all too well. All art is flawed because it all begins with “I.”
John Freeman lives in New York.
Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
By Jonathan Coe
Continuum, 486 pages, $29.95
