The final paragraph of my BS Johnson biography, Like A Fiery Elephant, begins: "These are the last words I intend to write about BS Johnson." I've spent most of the past few months eating them. Not that I'm complaining. It's wonderful when a book reaches a wider audience and sends out more ripples than you ever imagined it would. When I signed up, back in 1995, for the task of writing a biography of an experimental novelist who had only reached a small (though devoted) audience in his lifetime, and had been pretty much forgotten ever since, all I had to motivate me was a modest advance and a burning admiration for his work. The response of most people whenever I discussed the project was to give me pitying looks. Even when the book was published, one of the most favourable reviews ended with the prediction that "it will probably be read by about two or three hundred people".
The fact that Johnson's appeal is turning out to be far more enduring and far more widespread than expected raises some interesting questions. First of all, it is simply testament to his own gifts. He was certainly one of the best British prose stylists of the 1960s and on that subject I can do no better than quote the poet and novelist Adrian Mitchell's words from 1964: "Mr Johnson is a fine poet and he writes the prose of a fine poet. Every word is weighed for its rhythmic effect as well as for its sense and sound."
It's good to remember, incidentally, that Johnson began his working life as a poet, one whose preferred mode was the confessional, and who would only allow himself one subject: "nothing else but what happens to me". It may have been a common enough view in poetic circles at the time, but Johnson was perhaps the only person to carry this aesthetic over into the novel. Like many novelists (myself included), he started off by writing about thinly fictionalised versions of himself. In the early 1960s, as an impoverished poet forced to earn his living by supply teaching, he proceeded to write a novel, Albert Angelo, about an impoverished architect forced to earn his living by supply teaching. But he grew increasingly dissatisfied with this deception, and the book concludes with a howl of authorial self-disgust: "Oh, fuck all this LYING!"
From then on, Johnson refused to "make things up" in his novels. His disgruntled publisher wanted to market them as autobiography and facetiously asked him, "Aren't you rather young to be writing your memoirs?" But Johnson was adamant: "The two terms 'novel' and 'fiction' are not synonymous," he wrote in 1966. "The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form; within that form, one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel."
It's hardly surprising that these words came back to me on Tuesday night, when the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded and in her opening speech Janice Hadlow, the controller of BBC4, declared that "fact is the new fiction". At the very least, I believed that BS Johnson would have felt vindicated. But it also helped me to realise why these 40-year-old novels of his, written on a modernist principle of formal innovation which many critics complained was out of date even at the time, suddenly feel so fresh and contemporary.
Behind Hadlow's soundbite was, I think, an accurate recognition that fiction had better watch its back at the moment. There appears to be a growing - one might even call it BS Johnsonian - lack of public faith in the ability of "stories" to tell us anything meaningful about our lives. This may be because novelists are not doing their job properly; more likely, it's because non-fiction writers are doing their job so well. One of the striking features of the judges' televised discussion in the run-up to the prize announcement was the extent to which they discussed all six of the shortlisted books in emotional terms: essays on cities, works of history and biography were repeatedly praised for moving the reader to laughter or tears - just the kind of response that fiction is traditionally expected to provoke.
Johnson himself, for that matter, was a highly emotional writer. I first discovered him as a postgraduate student back in the mid-1980s, at a time when I was dutifully gritting my teeth and forcing my way through the novels of people such as Robbe-Grillet and Ann Quin. It was a shock - and a joy - to find that there existed a writer who shared their radical aesthetic but could also write page-turners, books which seemed unprecedentedly candid and self-revealing. I would troop around the Warwick University campus evangelising for this strange writer who cut holes in the pages of his novels and insisted that his publishers package them as unbound pages in a box, until I remember a friend saying to me, one day: "I think you'll grow out of BS Johnson."
She was right in the sense that nowadays I'm no longer so impressed by these quirky, attention-grabbing aspects of his work. But wrong in the sense that the urgency of his themes, and the passionate honesty with which he explored them, continues to inspire me.
And not just me, I should add. I began writing the biography feeling like a lone voice in the wilderness; but one of my most gratifying discoveries was that many other writers - of my generation and younger - were already well aware of Johnson, and just as enamoured as I was. Will Self, John Lanchester, Scarlett Thomas, Richard Beard and Alain de Botton have all written or spoken of their admiration for him. Hari Kunzru gave Zadie Smith a first edition of The Unfortunates (his legendary book-in-a-box) as her wedding present. How many other British novelists from the 1960s continue to excite their literary heirs as BS Johnson does?
So perhaps these will - finally - be the last words I write about him. It's time for readers, now, to begin the adventure of rediscovering this most challenging, unusual and exasperating of writers and men. After all, in Johnson's own (far from modest) opinion of himself, he will only be receiving his due. On the day before he committed suicide, in November 1973, he remarked to his agent, Diana Tyler: "I shall be much more famous after I'm dead." I for one rejoice to think that this melancholy prophecy seems to be coming true at last.
An extract from Albert Angelo (1964)
They had had to walk on the third day, but by then they had arrived: to Fishguard it had been easy, a lucky straight hitch, and then the boat to Cork with a night's loving and sleeping in a cabin that was like their first home, transitory as it was; then walking through the coldmorning city, and three lifts to Tralee by way of Macroom and Killarney; and finally, on that third day, the walking north after a bus to Dingle.
They had had rain about three o'clock when they were walking along an unmetalled road parallel to the sea. There had been mountains like hooded Fathers rising to their south, and a sea like tarnished hammered pewter in Brandon Bay to their north ... Lead-underbellied clouds had come from the north-west, had cut off up to the haunches the purple mountains and had foreshortened the horizon. They had brought umbrellas, firstly as a gimmick for lifts, but then they had been glad to use them seriously.
They had decided that it would be as well to pitch their tent at the first place suitable, because of the set-in rain, rather than go on farther eastwards as they had at first intended. They had come down a path towards a lough and had turned inland along it: everywhere the land had been sodden and marshy, with peat digs here and there. They had walked about a mile alongside the lough without finding a large enough area of firm grass, drinking water from the bitter lough to ease unusual thirsts, before they had decided to turn back towards the sea. A stream had led out of the lough, down through striated rocks, and amongst these rocks they had found a small area of thick, close grass, green as spring, as unexpected as if it had been a hotel, and more welcome, where they had set their camp. When they were warm and comfortable they had realised that their love had come through its most severe trying yet: that miserable walk in the heavy rain with no knowledge of where they would that night sleep.
... They had spent six days at this place, which had no name on their maps: but they had called it Balgy, for no reason other than that it had come to them, Balgy. They had built a kitchen area protected by rocks, and dug a pit in which to bury their detritus, and had defined an area where they could comfortably and civilisedly defecate, and had found a thicket where they could collect wood for a fire.
Gneiss had been exposed in two great slabs at acute angles, the fault cut wider by the stream, the sides showing glacial striation. They had sketched the mountains, and had talked, had cooked and eaten enormous meals, and had never been as close. They had designed and drawn a house to be built for them over this stream, founded on the gneiss, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright but more beautiful than his Falling Water, they had thought, and they had called it Above the Fault .
On the ninth day they had left their Balgy, regretfully, and had walked eastwards to Tralee, twenty miles in that one day, on that warm day, and with heavy packs: and this journey and its physical exhaustion had drawn them the closest they were ever to be, for its length. Well before they had reached London they had both known that they had passed the pitch of their loving.
· Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson is published by Picador, £9.99 on July 1.
· An omnibus comprising three of BS Johnson's novels - Albert Angelo, Trawl and House Mother Normal - as well as The Unfortunates (the 'book in a box') and Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is published by Picador, £14.99.
