Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson
by Jonathan Coe
476pp, Picador, £20

Jonathan Coe has produced a lively, important and very thorough biography of a man who once loomed large on London's literary horizon - a writer who inspired some, irritated many and who, above all, provoked debate and controversy at a time when complacent mediocrity seemed to rule the English publishing world, apparently impervious to exciting developments going on across the Channel. And personally, I am grateful to Coe for bringing back, so vividly, a period of my life that often seems very remote. So much has changed in the past three decades, and the death of BS Johnson in 1973 felt like the end of something. It still does.

Johnson and I were contemporaries, and although very different in terms of background - he was the son of a working-class London family, while I was the daughter of middle-class parents who had fled from Hitler's Berlin - we shared a common vision about where the novel should be going, or rather, where it should cease to go. By the time Bryan died I had already started to move on, and it was, as Coe rightly points out, Bryan's failure to evolve that was at the heart of his problem as a writer. Nevertheless, his theoretical starting point still seems valid. The very fact that this biography has been written, with such obvious enthusiasm and thoroughness, by a writer of a later generation, a mere boy when Johnson took his own life, suggests that he still has something interesting to convey today.

Britain has changed; the novels being written now are very different, much freer; but freedom also has its dangers. In the era of postmodernism - which Johnson would have loathed - perhaps his emphasis on truth-telling, on saying something that matters, can provide a welcome corrective in today's atmosphere of "anything goes". Nowadays all readers know that "telling stories is telling lies", but they no longer care about it and nor, it seems, do the writers. Bryan's mantra may have been puritanical and simplistic, but at least it forced the writer to think about what they were doing and why.

Coe's approach to Johnson is just right: endlessly patient with a mass of material, affectionate, humorous, making no attempt to idealise his subject, whose flaws of character were all too obvious to everyone who knew him. Since Bryan died so young, most of those who knew him are still alive and made themselves available for interview. And Bryan knew loads of people; he was hardly the writer as recluse. On the contrary, he was a networker before the word existed, his telephone never stopped ringing, and he was constantly involved in a variety of media projects. Once seen, never forgotten, this large man notorious for his belligerence, with an undoubted talent for attracting publicity. Those who knew him well also knew him to be kind and loyal - an "ally", as Alan Burns calls him.

Apart from friends, Coe's greatest source of information in telling Johnson's story - which, towards the end, unexpectedly turns into a detective story - is the comprehensive archive that he kept. He seems to have preserved every draft, complete or not, bits of juvenilia, jottings, letters sent and received. He even drew graphs of his daily literary output, and anything else that might interest posterity. And, judging by the angry letters he sent out to unhelpful publishers and many others, he had no doubt that he was "in the same class as Joyce and Beckett", simply on the say-so of one reviewer. It took Beckett himself, someone Bryan called the most "humble" of men, to point out that such quotes were counter-productive when applying for a favour. Of course all this bluster, whether personal or professional, hid profound doubts and insecurities, though few of us realised just how vulnerable he was, until it was too late.

Bryan believed, as I did, that just as photography had changed painting for ever, so the advent of cinema made it necessary for the novel to move away from realistic narrative with a god-like, apparently all-seeing narrator. Bryan's solution to the problem was to attempt to stick to "facts", aspects of his own autobiography, which he then played around with to create some kind of narrative. As time went on, this was very prescriptive and self-limiting, as many friends seem to have warned him.

Having turned his back on the creative imagination as a way forward, he was really forced into concentrating on form rather than content, which often seemed decidedly thin. The results were often gimmicky, but certainly got a response in terms of publicity. Everyone knew about "the book in the box" ( The Unfortunates ), which actually reads just as well if the loose pages are bound, and "the book with a hole in it" ( Alberto Angelo ), which got him on primetime television, an unheard of achievement for a young author in the 1960s. Publishers disliked these tricks because of the expense, and critics often got annoyed because the content did not seem to warrant what they saw as a form of pretension.

Looking back on the short totality of his life, it was as if he was doomed to spend it juggling a limited amount of pieces into varying patterns. He seems to have mistaken Beckett's minimalism for a form of autobiography instead of seeing it as a new kind of narrative, and often his "voice" too obviously echoes Beckett. I never heard him speak about Kafka - to my mind, far more radical than Joyce and certainly far more pertinent to the 20th century. For all his nods to the nouveau roman and Brecht, Bryan was really very insular. And of course the whole notion of "truth" in writing is vexed: it is actually far easier to be truthful in fiction than in anything that claims to be autobiography, with its inevitable evasions and omissions. Coe has unearthed convincing evidence which suggests that the hole in Alberto Angelo represents the biggest evasion of all, a homoerotic relationship in his youth, with the suggestion of suppressed homosexuality.

After reading Trawl, Gordon Williams wrote him a letter in which he first pointed out that the book departed from its author's own first principles, and then went on: "Experiment that means anything comes from inside. Attempts to formalise it into didactic public addresses must necessarily look either like bandwagon jumping ... or slightly desperate efforts to convince oneself that one is doing the right thing."

I think that Bryan's efforts did get increasingly desperate, either because he refused to change direction out of principle or because he was simply unable to free up his own imagination. One of the things that enables a writer to continue is the fact that his or her view of the world changes with age, and this in turn provides new insights and fresh material. But Bryan could only see ageing in negative terms. His writing shows a horror of bodily decay, and I can still hear him saying: "Everything will get worse", alluding to the physical decay that lay ahead. The birth of two children, also part of the life cycle, did not provide him with more positive material either. Clearly he was a depressive, someone who had thought about suicide at various stages of his life. Self-hatred and self-doubt played their part, and the bon vivant described by so many friends, mostly men, conceals something darker - why, for instance, did he eat and drink to excess when he loathed his own obesity?

The fact is that, despite his avant-garde philosophy when it came to literature, Bryan's attitudes to life were surprisingly old-fashioned in many respects. As I was on his list of "approved" writers (published in Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?), he had never treated me with anything other than respect and courtesy. So I was quite unprepared for his public attack on me in the summer of 1969 when, with Patriarchal Attitudes about to come out, I spoke at a writers' conference on the future of women. Bryan leapt to his feet and declared that the sex war finished when women got the vote, and that all that was needed now was love. Coe reveals that the most important book in Bryan's life was Robert Graves's The White Goddess , with its very odd and antiquated vision of woman as Muse, safely incapacitated by her pedestal. After this I was prepared for just about anything, including the fact that he was extremely superstitious, with every book having to be started on Boxing Day, and so on. (It was also why he picked up paper clips in the street, something that puzzled all his friends.) The public BS Johnson, modernist, realist, clearly had aspects he chose not to reveal, beliefs that betray irrationality and fear.

By 1973 Bryan's marriage had reached crisis point - hardly surprising given his refusal to recognise the autonomy of women. But his view of the world was backward-looking in other respects. When he was writing in the 60s and early 70s the world he loved to depict had already vanished - the grimy, austere London of the 50s, with a working-class culture of dog tracks, smoky pubs and Saturday football, a white, male culture where women stayed at home. What was actually happening during this period - pop culture, swinging London and immigration - does not impinge on his writing at all. Time brings death, but it also brings constant change in the world around us, takes us further and further from our beginnings. Was it this he could not bear?

· Eva Figes's most recent book is Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration (Bloomsbury).