Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
by Jonathan Coe
Picador £20, pp476

The trouble with literary biographies is that - as someone far cleverer than me once put it - even after a writer has been 'traced down to the last munched bath bun', you are still left with the whole mystery of 'the madness of art'. In the main, writer's lives are dull, quotidian, static. Sometimes, they may fire off an angry letter to a publisher or an unkind critic.

Occasionally, they engage in painful love affairs. Mostly, though, they sit at a desk and they write - for as many hours at a time as they can manage. This is an unavoidable fact, and it is true even of the most mythologised and glamorous of the species: the ones whose lives, measured out in sepia photographs and gossipy, expansive diaries, are likely to make for the most mandatory reading.

As a subject for a new life, then, B.S. Johnson does not appear to be promising. He married and had two children; he wrote seven peculiar novels; he killed himself. Worse, as his biographer admits, these days hardly anyone has heard of him. So here's a funny thing. After I had finished reading Like A Fiery Elephant (the work of three days), I was so paralysed with admiration I wondered whether I would actually be able to write a review. I even considered, by way of a somewhat feeble tribute, submitting a blank page - a sheet of brilliant white that would perfectly encapsulate my inarticulate reverence (Johnson, I should explain, once used pages shaded from grey to black to communicate the experience of a character's heart attack, a device he adapted from his beloved Tristram Shandy).

B.S. Johnson, who was born in 1933, was a chubby, angry, working-class Londoner (hence the 'fiery elephant' of the title) whose childhood was defined by his wartime evacuation and his failure to pass the 11-plus. After school, he worked in accountancy until he learnt Latin at evening classes, which eventually enabled him to win a place at King's College, London, where he read English. He then worked variously as a poet, film-maker and playwright.

It is for his novels, however, that he is best known. A friend of Johnson's once described him as being 'racked with self-certainties' - he was one of those unnerving people whose massive ego is sheathed in the thinnest of skins - and you feel this, always, in his work, which has real verve and commitment but also, I think, a hint of the defensive.

A worshipper of Joyce, Johnson was an inflexible, old-style modernist for whom form and innovation were all (to this end, he cut holes in the pages of one novel, so readers could see the future, and presented the chapters of another, unbound, in a box, to be read at random).

More restrictingly, he cared nothing for the imagination. A person could write only from experience. 'Telling stories is telling lies,' as he put it in his second novel, Albert Angelo.

Johnson had a few unhappy love affairs - he was desperate to be in love, but seems often to have chosen women who were unavailable or uninterested - until, in 1963, he met Virginia Kimpton, his future wife. She came from a smarter background than him, and appealed to his aspirations towards social mobility. Their union, until the final dark weeks before Johnson took his own life, seems to have been a placid one, a safe place in which he could work. Even so, he was hardly content. Reviewers of Albert Angelo, the fragmentary 'story' of a depressed supply teacher, compared him to Joyce and Beckett and declared him one of 'the best writers we've got'.

But he never quite recovered from this heady approval rating, and was always quoting these remarks back at those he regarded as insufficiently committed to his project (he would begin a new book deal thoroughly enamoured of an agent or editor, and end it by sacking them; he was unable to understand why they could not shift more of his books, and did not care to hear their piffling commercial arguments).

The end was a sad one, and it came in the privacy of his own bathroom. Increasingly paranoid, beset by money worries and temporarily separated from his family, Johnson ran a warm bath, and did it the Roman way, like Petronius. He was 40 years old.

So far, so good. But how to explain, especially to those (the majority, I assume) who have no interest in or knowledge of BSJ, why this massive volume is so wonderful, so compelling, so finger-tinglingly exciting. There is almost too much to say. Coe, whose book is authorised (he spent years living with the 160 fragments - Johnson's papers - that he quotes so deftly in his final 'dossier'), is rightly suspicious of literary biography. He thinks it dangerous and impure. The work should speak for itself.

Then again, Johnson only wrote about himself; his novels were a form of exorcism - which, considering his end, leads Coe to ask questions about the purpose of fiction, the limits of its consolation. Embracing this paradox, wrapping it up carefully in the warmth of his regard for Johnson, he inevitably pushes against the form (that word again) of biography. It's a kind of literary contagion; to write about an innovator successfully, he must innovate. The old ways - simple chronology, statements of fact - are no use here.

Coe writes enticingly, with the quiet fever of the bookish detective, but he treads softly. Not for him the hammy unveiling of a juicy revelation (there is one to be had, though the author, uncomfortable and ambivalent, may not thank me for putting it that way); not for him the putting together of two and two to make five. Instead, he uses all manner of means - tricks straight out of Johnson's top drawer - to ensure that we see his book for what it is: as merely one way of telling an impossible story.

There are wry footnotes and an intrusive narrator; there are disarming moments when the author declares himself too bored, or too confused, to tell us more. There is even, marshalled at the end of the book, a kind of crowd scene - a cacophony of voices, each one distilling its own essence of BSJ, with no interference from the man with the Dictaphone. The result is more than insightful. It tells you everything about the quicksand on which the biographer wobbles.

But above all, it is Coe's determination to do right by Johnson that makes Like A Fiery Elephant so special. It is a book about a man who really cares about novels, by a man who really cares about novels. If you care too, you will rush out and buy it.

· B.S. Johnson reviews Steptoe and Son for Scene Magazine (1963) www.grapefruit-web.co.uk/clients/bsjohnson/articles/art_bsj3.htm