it just seems like a more routine pleasure, compared to what he does in Mystic River. There, Lehane peers into the deep, dark hole that the murder of a young girl leaves in various lives, and tries to make sense of everything revealed therein; everything seems organic, nothing—or almost nothing, anyway—feels contrived. I’m happy to have friends who recommend Alan Hollinghurst, really I am. They’re all nice, bright people. I just wish I had friends who could recommend books like Mystic River, too. Are you that person? Do you have any vacancies for a pal? If you can’t be bothered with a full-on friendship, with all the tearful, drunken late-night phone calls and bitter accusations and occasional acts of violence thus entailed (the violence is always immediately followed by an apology, I hasten to add), then maybe you could just tell me the titles of the books.
At the time of writing, Like a Fiery Elephant, Jonathan Coe’s brilliant biography of B. S. Johnson, doesn’t have a U.S. publisher, which seems absurd. Your guys seem to have been frightened off by Johnson’s obscurity, but we’ve never heard of him, either; the book works partly because its author anticipates our ignorance. It also works because Jonathan Coe, probably the best English novelist of his generation (my generation, as bad luck would have it), has been imaginative and interrogative about the form and shape of the book, and because it’s a book about writing, perhaps more than anything else. Johnson may have been a 1960s experimentalist who hung out with Beckett and cut holes in his books, but he was as egocentric and arrogant and bitter and money-obsessed as the rest of us. Johnson was a depressive who eventually killed himself; his suicide note read:
This is my last
word.
But he was a great comic character, too, almost Dickensian in his appetites and his propensity for pomposity. Whenever he wrote to complain to publishers, or agents, or even printers—and he complained a lot, not least because he got through a large number of publishers, agents, and printers—he was never backwards in coming forwards, as we say here, and he included the same self-promoting line again and again. “In reviewing my novel Albert Angelo, the Sunday Times described me as ‘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,” he wrote to Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, demanding to know why he wasn’t interested in paperback rights. “The Sunday Times called me ‘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 James Joyce and Samuel Beckett,” he wrote to his foreign rights agent, demanding to know why there had been no Italian publication of his first novel. “You ignorant unliterary Americans make me puke,” he wrote to Thomas Wallace of Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, Inc. after Wallace had turned him down. (Maybe Coe should write a version of the same letter, if you ignorant unliterary Americans still refuse to publish his book.) “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 then, finally and gloriously:
…The Sunday Times called me ‘one of the best writers we’ve got,’ and the Irish Times called the book a masterpiece, and compared me with Joyce and Beckett.
However, it seems that I am to be denied the opportunity of a most profound and enormous experience: of being present with my wife Virginia when our first child is born at your hospital on or about July 24th…
This last letter was to the Chief Obstetrician of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, after Johnson had discovered that it was not the hospital’s policy to allow fathers to attend a birth. It’s the “However” kicking off the second paragraph that’s such a brilliant touch, drawing attention as it does to the absurdity of the contradiction. “I can understand you keeping out the riff-raff, your Flemings and your Amises and the rest of the what-happened-next brigade,” it implies. “But surely you’ll make an exception for a genius?” In the end, it’s just another variation on “Don’t you know who I am?”—which in Johnson’s case was an even more unfortunate question than it normally is. Nobody knew then, and nobody knows now.
Johnson had nothing but contempt for the enduring influence of Dickens and the Victorian novel; strange, then, that in the end he should remind one of nobody so much as the utilitarian school inspector in the opening scene of Hard Times. Here’s the school inspector: “I’ll explain to you… why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact?… Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste is only another name for Fact.” And here’s Johnson: “Life 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.” Like communists and fascists, Johnson and the dismal inspector wander off in opposite directions, only to discover that the world is round. I’m glad that they both lost the cultural Cold War: there’s room for them all in our world, but there’s no room for Mystic River in theirs. And what kind of world would that be?
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