Michael Dirda

Travelling People (1963) was Johnson's first novel (each of its chapters composed in a different form -- letters, film script, etc.) and was followed by Albert Angelo (1964), the favorite of many of his fans. Apart from Christie Malry , it's the only book of Johnson's I've read and is an impressive work, though redolent of '60s experimentation. The portrait of a moody, introspective schoolteacher, Albert Angelo attracted particular notoriety for two rectangular slots neatly cut into Pages 149-152 so that the reader can peer into the future. In fact, this clever device doesn't seem that germane to the novel's purpose. All the same, this is an ambitious work of many styles, opening with play-like dialogue, shifting into double-columned pages reflecting what Albert is saying to his students and what he is actually thinking to himself, then modulating into a long internal monologue that focuses on the teacher's obsessive love for a woman who eventually leaves him. "Self delusion is the worst crime," Albert observes, just before his "onlie begetter," Johnson himself, unexpectedly steps into the novel to disparage all that we've just read:

"I'm trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth about my truth to reality about sitting here writing looking out across Claremont Square trying to say something about the writing and nothing being an answer to the loneliness for the lack of loving."

There is a pleasing ambiguity in that last phrase, "nothing being an answer to the loneliness." All his life Johnson was obsessed with death. He periodically contemplated suicide and always dreaded the indignities and debilities of old age. In House Mother Normal (1971), the chapters are narrated by a succession of different, increasingly infirm and deranged nursing home patients. His last book, See the Old Lady Decently (1975), describes in clinical detail his mother's death from cancer.

Johnson's principal refuges from all the sheer bloody awfulness of the human condition were always art and love, with occasional support provided by humor and rage. He was lucky enough to be acclaimed for his early fiction and comforted by the devotion of a beautiful woman whom he adored. Alas, he was unlucky too, for when the editors and critics turned on his books and his ravishing wife began to grow restive, he found himself without the strength or resilience to cope, and so -- late one night, alone in his house -- he sat down in his bathtub and cut his wrists.

During the next 30 years, Johnson's work would pass into the limbo that succeeds any writer's death. Still, it's never been utterly forgotten, and this compulsively readable biography may give it a second chance. B.S. Johnson deserves a permanent, if modest, niche in the library of anyone who cares about 20th-century fiction. In an active career of little more than 10 years, he fought admirably for the freshly imagined against the dead weight of Victorian realism.

"Life," he insisted, "does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies." Instead, writers should seek to convey the truthfulness of their life and experience of the world. They must write "as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter." In this sense, all of Johnson's highly autobiographical work matters -- from his plays ("You're Human Like the Rest of Them," 1964) to his irresistibly titled collection of short pieces, Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973). Like God in a pantheistic universe, Johnson is everywhere in his diverse oeuvre.

Like a Fiery Elephant provides the best available introduction and guide to that oeuvre -- aside, of course, from the books themselves, which can be hard to find. Building on an abundance of quoted passages from Johnson's writing and papers, Coe reveals the multifaceted artist in all his intensity and periodic bellicosity, frankly envies his anchoritic work habits (long hours at his desk, graphs of his daily wordage) and sadly notes his steady overeating and drinking. Perhaps best of all, Coe lays out the threads of Johnson's life, shows how they might be convincingly knotted together and then chooses to leave them largely "untied, untidily."

B.S. Johnson brought to all his endeavors, in whatever medium, a personal zeal and forcefulness that sometimes crossed over into the boorish, and yet it's plain that he wasn't a writer because it was fun or would bring in buckets of cash, or somehow turn him into a celebrity. Worthwhile imaginative prose, he felt, needed to push hard against the limits, to extend and challenge the achievements of Joyce -- above all, to scorn the facile, commercial and false. Certainly Johnson lived by that ambitious and all too often thankless credo. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.