B.S. Johnson and the Closed Circle

Due to a lag in the sale of transatlantic rights, Jonathan Coe's major new novel, "The Closed Circle" (Alfred A. Knopf, 367 pages, $25), was published in America only one week after Jonathan Coe's major new nonfiction work, "Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson" (Continuum, 488 pages, $29.95). The title that lagged was, of course, the biography of B.S. Johnson, a writer obscure in his home country and virtually unknown here. Yet the coincidence in publication dates is inspiring.

Novelists like Mr. Coe and Johnson are like apples and oranges. They seem to exist on different planets. Readers of Johnson might turn up their noses at readers of Mr. Coe, while readers of Mr. Coe might simply pity readers of Johnson.

Johnson was doggedly avantgarde. He felt that writers of his generation - he wrote in the 1960s - could no more ignore Joyce than physicists could ignore Einstein. He worshiped and befriended Beckett. Coming from a working-class background, he was a literary elitist. His name is no pseudonym - he was far too serious for that.

Addressing an editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston who had rejected him, Johnson wrote:

You ignorant unliterary Americans make me puke. ... For your information, ALBERT ANGELO was reviewed by the Sunday Times here as by 'one of the best writers we've got,' and the Irish Times called the book a masterpiece and put me in the same class as Joyce and Beckett. And TRAVELLING PEOPLE, my first novel, won a Gregory Award: the judges for which were Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Bonamy Dobree and TS Eliot: what did you say your name was, mate?

It is hard to believe that the author of this vitriol could also be the author of decent books, but Johnson's work is clever and entertaining, if not wise. Johnson himself was a huge, ill-tempered man - the "fiery elephant" of this biography's title. He had a very naive sense of public kudos - what Mr. Coe calls "the personal, often whimsical, outcome of a few people swapping opinions in a room." That Mr. Coe has spent seven years working on a biography of this man is a testament to Mr. Coe's humane tolerance. His own novels rely on a liberal interest in his fellow humans - they would not have been liked by Johnson, who deplored the tradition of the "the nineteenth-century narrative novel."

Mr. Coe's new novel is the sequel to "The Rotters' Club," which told the interconnected stories of several young students in the Midlands in the 1970s. "The Closed Circle" finds these boys and girls grown up. In a narrative dedicated to current events - September 11, 2001, makes its inevitable appearance - Mr. Coe mounts a multipronged attack on New Labor. Doug Anderton, once an unpromising school newspaper editor and now a famous pundit, makes Mr. Coe's point: "I mean the entire system nowadays is only geared to accommodating a tiny minority of political opinion. The left's moved way over to the right, the right's moved a tiny bit to the left, the circle's been closed and everyone else can go f-k themselves."

But Mr. Coe's novel is too broadly committed. A great deal of fine writing has been marshaled around a few political salients. The construction of such a novel - with half a dozen narrators - requires great planning, and Mr. Coe can't resist a few mousetrap moments. For example, in "The Rotters' Club," Paul Trotter saves Rolf Baumann from death by drowning. Now, Paul Trotter is an embattled MP faced with a disastrous plant closing in his hometown. At the last minute, he discovers that Rolf sits on the board of the company in question, and a long-standing favor is called in.

That Mr. Coe's own novels are formulaic is not fatal, but it does undermine the political ambition of the "The Closed Circle." Mr. Coe is most valuable as a comedic formalist, a novelist of manners - readers interested in a deep sounding of English politics would do better to read Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty." Indeed, Mr. Hollinghurst's Thatcher years are strikingly similar to Mr. Coe's Blair years, particularly as both novelists treat political reality as a kind of cold water to throw on their persistently immature characters.

Yet Mr. Coe's instinct for pulling rabbits out of hats is vindicated in his life of Johnson. In his biography, Mr. Coe frequently expresses a desire to discover a secret pattern or mystery that will make Johnson seem more human. "I'd been hoping for some magic formula that would unlock the mystery of Johnson's mystical encounter." In the end, Johnson, a high modernist who believed in brutal honesty, is discovered to have had a secret - and profoundly important - interest in the occult.

Mr. Coe's convincing discovery, in carefully parsed letters and diaries, of Johnson's supernatural side represents a deep duplicity in Johnson's life. He never wrote about this part of his life, in contradiction to his standard of truth-telling. To appreciate the strangeness of his interest in what he called, after Robert Graves, "the white goddess," it is important to understand how resolutely factual Johnson's novels are.

Johnson believed that visions drove his creative life, but he preached that serious writers must be truthful, and therefore should not tell stories: "Life does 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." Mr. Coe's neat plots would have been anathema to Johnson.

Dreary as Johnson's proscriptions are, the resultant fiction is - amusingly, consequently - absurd. When he does allow himself to make up a character, he insists that they acknowledge their provenance: "'Parsons looks like being indisposed for the rest of this novel,' went on Headlam. 'In fact, I think he's just caught something fatal.'" In this passage from "Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry" (New Directions, 180 pages, $15.95), Johnson's darkly hilarious last novel, it is as if Headlam is receiving telepathic messages from the author. The book is still in print in the United States, as is the more studied "Albert Angelo" (New Directions, 180 pages, $14.95).

Mr. Coe finally redeems Johnson for us by apologizing for his insecurities. For example, "Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry" is the story of a paranoid anti-hero who utilizes Luca Pacioli's system of double-entry accounting to reconcile himself to the slings and arrows of modern life. For each debit, he avenges himself with some petty vandalism. "Wagner's tongue-lashing" is recorded as a debit, against which is balanced "Aldwych Theatre bomb hoax." This thinking is a self-parody by Johnson of his own mind, which was stubborn, romantic, and paranoid.

Mr. Coe is sometimes exasperated by Johnson, but in the end he prizes these contradictions. "Self-doubt and vulnerability: these were the things, I've come to realize, that made B.S. Johnson the artist he was." Insecurities about class and education led Johnson to pieties about the avant-garde, and then further insecurities made Johnson's writing human in spite of his pieties. In this sprawling biography, Mr. Coe frankly and explicitly reconciles the stark differences of his and Johnson's sensibilities.

Every time a serious reader looks into the work of a man like Johnson, a great effort of sympathy takes place. This experience, though essential to literary life, is too seldom recorded in print. Mr. Coe's performance is exemplary.