By
Kathryn A. Kopple
What are we to
make of a novelist who rejects his chosen art form, his inherited traditions,
and – with even greater contempt – rejects those who like to read novels? What are we to make of this novelist, the
one who claims to hate the very idea of the novel? Do we banish him? Or make him our hero? More precisely, our anti-hero. Because readers do need reminding that novel
writing is a literary art. Is it by
chance that Emma Bovary is an ardent but untutored fan of Sir Walter Scott? Or a coincidence that Hemingway, in The
Sun Also Rises, savages Robert Cohn, who happens to be a popular
novelist? And need we be reminded of the
pernicious effect that books of chivalry had on the errant Don Quixote? Ironically, Cervantes thought he'd make some
money off his comedy. Little did he know
that he started a rebellion.
Which brings us around to Jonathon
Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant (Continuum, 2005), one of the most the most courageous biographies written about Johnson. Coe is not one of our anti-novelists but his
subject, B.S. Johnson, was. And it was Johnson's
struggle against the novel that makes Jonathon Coe's biography worth
reading. Or rather, I should say two
books worth reading, for Coe's biography is a double book: a highly self-conscious experiment in which
the life of the novelist is reflected in the work of the biographer, who is
also a novelist, and who frets about what it means to write a biography while
giving us the facts, many of them damn depressing, about the larger than life,
though largely unknown, B.S. Johnson.
Here is Coe, in the introduction to Like a Fiery Elephant,
outlining the work ahead of him (and us):
My strategy will be this.
Many people picking up this book will not (regrettably) have read
anything by B.S. Johnson before. Revered
though he is by a few, he is unknown nowadays to most British readers under
forty. So I shall begin by explaining,
in a little more detail, what it was that he wrote and that I think he
achieved. After that, pace Milan
Kundera, I shall have to bring myself to knock down the walls of his house and
we shall take a wander through the rubble, perhaps shaking our heads in awe and
wonderment at the melancholy grandeur of the ruins we find there… And last of
all, a short coda. In which I shall
attempt to put forward my own highly personal – and, yes, speculative –
thoughts about the forces that may have been driving him in his last days and
hours: a 'transcursion into his mind' –
to use Johnson's language – or even (the phrase is from his fifth novel, House
Mother Normal) 'a diagram of certain aspects of the inside of his skull',
as he gets ready to compose his final message to the world; to write his very
last word.
What was Coe thinking? This
is not what we expect when we pick up the story of a life that we hope will be
a lot more exciting than our own. But
Coe has not written that kind of biography, any more than B.S. Johnson wrote
that kind of novel. Not that we will
have to work as hard as one might imagine, for Coe is a self-confessed
traditionalist; he will not risk alienating his readers. Instead, he does everything in his
considerable powers to charm, entertain, and persuade in the hopes that readers
will stick with his long and unwieldy tract to "the very last
word." Because Jonathon Coe believes
that novels really do matter, that our lives would be irrevocably diminished
without them. And that may very well be
something that he learned from the torturous search for art in the novel making
of B.S. Johnson.
Bryan Stanley
William Johnson was born in Hammersmith, England to a working-class family in
1933. His early life was defined by the
trauma of wartime evacuation, a prolonged separation from his family, and his
struggles to gain entrance to the university.
During his teens, he worked as an accountant in various low-level
positions, an experience that provided him with the experience and skills for
his sixth novel, Christie Malry's Own Double Entry: a send-up of capitalism done in high
modernist style. Johnson found
inspiration for the book in the life of Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli, a Tuscan monk
and friend of Leonardo Di Vinci, who in a paper penned in 1494 laid down the
science of double entry bookkeeping.
Paying homage to this exceptional accountant, Christie Malry's Own
Double Entry proceeds according to the kind of logical madness that one
would expect from an author who defended against great odds his belief that it
is not the author's job to tell a story.
Instead of a story, Johnson offers us the shifting viewpoint that we
associate with James Joyce; instead of plot, he gives us experiments with time,
death and decay - showing how these forces affect the structure of the novel;
in place of conflict, Johnson focuses on personal trauma, memory, and loss; and
where we expect resolution, Johnson offers no consolation for the fact that life
is not a story and it does not always end happily.
Nor did
Johnson's. Depressed, manic, alcoholic,
and finally suicidal, Johnson was a man beset by many demons. He made friends but he made even more
enemies, and there were times in his life when he seemed determined to destroy
his own career out of sheer spitefulness.
Coe makes excellent drama of the numerous letters Johnson wrote
lambasting his agents and publishers for failing to understand the extent of
his achievement. He approached his work
with grim seriousness, all the more so because his books cost so much to
produce. He liked to cut up his novels,
put them in boxes, slice holes through them, and, when he tired of that,
abandon them entirely. When publishers
balked at this, he flew into a rage. A
letter to Thomas Wallace of Holt, Rinehart and Winston begins, "You
ignorant unliterary Americans make me puke," and it goes on to state that
"Your letter makes it clear to me why it is that America has never
produced a great writer: and you won't
recognize him even when he comes." With this sort of
behavior, it is a wonder that he was published at all.
He was the recipient of some notable prizes, earning the respect of prominent writers, among them Samuel
Beckett. Cut-ups may not appeal to everyone
but Johnson could write beautifully. If he lacked the sedate elegance of most
modernists, it wasn't because he was full of himself or too delusional to know
better. Coe thinks so, but then he
admits he doesn't understand his subject completely. Johnson didn't want to be loved. He wanted
respect. His tribute to the late Sylvia
Plath comes from long neglect and misunderstanding:
"Many misleading and unnecessary claims have been made for her work… which have made true assessment impossible for years yet; but the
important thing is that she should be read."
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