September 17, 2004
By Dawn Kennedy
Like a Fiery Elephant - The story of B S Johnson
Jonathan Coe
Picador
Review: Dawn Kennedy
Hardly anyone bothered to read B S Johnson when he was alive. Why should they wade through this huge biography now that he is dead?
Johnson took his own life at the age of 40, leaving behind a wife and two young children.
This biography will appeal to those fascinated by sad, self-pitying, suicidal types and those indiscriminately drawn to avant-garde movements. You know the type - they attend silent operas and action-free dramas.
B S Johnson was in his heyday in the1960s but then so were a lot of other people. He wrote novels that took an angry stance against the narrative and despised plot because life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriad ends untied, untidily.
Writers can extract from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories is telling lies. Johnson, committed to tell the truth, penned realms of inner monologue.
Samuel (not B S) Johnson similarily derided "that primitive, vulgar and idle curiosity of the reader to know what happens next" but as Coe notes, it "remains the centrifugal force which draws readers back to the novel and therefore keeps it alive". Johnson died, the novel lives.
Johnson's philosophy proved ultimately futile.
However, his attempt to transcend rigid boundaries raised interesting aesthetic issues and certainly earned him a place as an important figure in contemporary British writing
.
This biography is wide in scope and sheds light on the whole endeavour of novel and biography writing. For eight years, Coe found himself involved in a paradox. He believes biography writing is futile and agrees with Milan Kundera that "the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build his novel". A novelist's biographers thus undo what a novelist has done.
Coe finds himself in the same position as Johnson: writing in a form he is fundamentally at odds with. just as Johnson felt it was important to intrude the writing process into his novels, so Coe intrudes the biographical process into his biography. He constantly reflects on the process he is engaged in and agrees with the voice on his shoulder saying, "silly isn't it".
Opposites attract but later repel. Tracking the process of the biographer's emotionally charged relation to his subject is fascinating. Oxford-educated Coe had a unilateral contempt for anyone who attempted the writing of literature in the last 70 or 80 years until Johnson, providing the shock of the new, changed his opinion. Coe later comes to despise Johnson.
His initial admiration for his rebellious tampering with the novel ends and Coe returns to the stability of the tradition to which aesthetically he is wedded.
The book is an excellent study in biography writing. It is superbly written and reveals as much about the writer as his subject.
What really bothered me was that I read more than 400 pages but never managed to understand the title. What do you suppose a fiery elephant is like?
  
 
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