Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (136 page)

From his forecourt, Harry is helping flood US freeways and city centres with Japanese tin cans – cars which don’t express anything, he thinks, unlike their noble Detroit predecessors. America, during the depressed Jimmy Carter years, is decaying, ‘running out of gas … the Great American Ride is ending’. Rabbit is now face to face with the Great American Paradox, that as we approach that happiness which is promised in the first line of the Declaration of Independence, ‘we get emptier’. Back to Kierkegaard – except that Harry reads nothing but the latest issue of
Consumer Report
.

Rabbit is Rich
won all three of America’s major literary prizes ‘as well as a place in the Washington critic Jonathan Yardley’s list of the ten worst books of the year’, the author sardonically recalls. The final instalment,
Rabbit at Rest
(1990) commemorates the Reagan decade. Rabbit likes the Great Communicator’s ‘foggy voice’ and ‘magic touch’. Harry himself had the magic touch once, on the basketball court. America is now in a condition of ‘happy anaesthesia’. Harry and Janice spend the cold months in their Florida condo. ‘Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went,’ Harry concludes. But there is no happy ending. Nelson, addicted to cocaine, ruins the car sales business. Harry, addicted to sex, makes love to Nelson’s wife Pru, and goes on the run again. In a Florida ghetto he has one last pick-up ball game with some mystified black kids, suffers a heart attack and dies in hospital – lasting long enough to confide to Nelson, ‘All I can tell is, it isn’t so bad.’ What is ‘it’? Life? Death?

Updike produced a larger mass of fiction (too much, some think) than any other highly respected novelist of his time. His most popular work, thanks largely to its witty film adaptation, was his metaphysical comedy,
The Witches of Eastwick
(1984). The Devil still roamed New England, as he had 200 years earlier. But in an age of feminism, witches no longer needed to fear the fate of their Salem sisters. It is men who should fear – even Satan. Updike’s last work was an Eastwick sequel and he may have foreseen a series. Among other interesting, but less memorable ventures were:
The Coup
(1978), the imaginary memoir of a corrupt, Islamic, African dictator; a quasi science fiction story,
Toward the End of Time
(1997), fantasising a future war between the US and China, which may yet prove prophetic; a reverse shot
treatment of Hamlet,
Gertrude and Claudius
(2000);
Terrorist
(2006), a post 9/11 story of a convert to Islam who intends another spectacular outrage in Manhattan. Everything with Updike’s name on the cover sold healthily but, as his achievement has been winnowed out,
Couples
and the Angstrom tetralogy are judged the novels that will last. He died, aged seventy-nine, of lung cancer, the great plague of his forever puffing generation, writing almost to the last and convinced, one is told, that he was about to meet his maker.

Oh, fuck all this lying!

B. S. Johnson was described, and loved to be described, as ‘Britain’s one-man avantgarde’. As in war, out in front is a dangerous place to be. His Quixotic quest to ‘reinvent’ the English novel was, at best, a gallant failure; at worst, a personal tragedy – but never less than interesting. Bryan Johnson was born, copper-bottomed working class, in Hammersmith. The working class was, in its millions, out of work at the time and his father held on desperately to his job as stock-keeper at the SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) bookshop. Their uplifting tracts were fiction of a kind. Mrs Johnson had, before marriage, been in service. His childhood was deformed (but, arguably, his skin saved) by wartime evacuation from the London Blitz: at the age of six he was uprooted to Surrey, then High Wycombe. Oddly, he was kept away from the London home for the duration – well after there was no danger from the Luftwaffe. His father served his country in the Catering Corps.

Once returned to the ‘Smoke’, Johnson formed an intense relationship with his mother – his umbilical cord was never severed. He lived at home until he was twenty-eight and was taking his washing home well into his thirties. His mother’s sadly early death precipitated his own, which was tragically early. Johnson failed his eleven-plus in 1944 and was consigned to what was called a ‘tech’ – one notch above the sump-level ‘Secondary Modern’. At school he made the first of his suicide attempts and cultivated adolescent passions for football, jazz and, oddly, Christopher Marlowe. Physically awkward and fat (like the hero of
The Third Man
), his
schoolfellows wittily nicknamed him ‘Orson Cart’. On leaving school at sixteen, Johnson took up various clerical and low-level accountancy jobs. Double-entry ledgers, with their eye-for-an-eye reckoning, would stick in his mind. Perforated eardrums (as a result of childhood illness) spared him national service. At night, and in his spare time, he taught himself Latin – with a view to getting into London University, one of the few institutions that encouraged late developers.

He was duly accepted at Birkbeck and in 1953 transferred up to King’s College London to read English. As an undergraduate he worked harder on the student magazine,
Lucifer
, than on his classroom studies and left with a 2:2. It was in those days a creditable degree, but – with hindsight and all the evidence available – his was a finer mind than that result indicates. It added to his already sizeable inferiority complex: ‘according to their rules,’ he said, ‘I was a lower-second-class of person.’ He never accepted ‘their’ rules. All his life, he said, he was ‘underestimated’ – not least by literary critics. Johnson had some wretchedly unhappy love affairs at university and what satisfaction he had came from nightly masturbation, ‘keeping’, as he said, ‘the appropriate muscles in fine fettle’. Armed with his mediocre degree, he took up the freebooting life of a London supply teacher in 1960, filling vacancies in mainly ‘secondary-mods’. One of his pupils wrote of Johnson in an essay: ‘he walks like a firy elephant’. Johnson took it (and repeated it in
Albert Angelo
) as the apocalyptic ‘fiery elephant’. It was, his biographer Jonathan Coe surmises, more likely the schoolyard insult ‘fairy elephant’.

At this period in his life, he was regularly spending his summers at the Lleyn peninsula in north Wales. He would hitch-hike west (Kerouac had made it sexy).
Travelling People
(1963), his first published novel, opens with the hero-narrator-observer thumbing it to Dublin (a Joycean pilgrimage), being offered a summer job by his ‘lift’ in a high-class country club, the Stromboli. Henry Henry is a version of B. S. Johnson (with the telling difference that he passed the eleven-plus, did his national service, got a good degree, and has less trouble pulling birds) and Henry accepts the offer. The club is owned by Maurie Bunde (not one of Johnson’s happier jokes). The plot is minimal, involving the kinds of below-stairs friction which Arnold Wesker did better in
The Kitchen
, and a love story with a bitter aftertaste. Maurie has a fatal heart attack while having it off with his employee, Kim. She gratefully falls into the arms of Henry, who has covered for her leaving her dying lover’s bed. The novel is written in Sterneian-jokey style. At times, as when Henry is on a London escalator and the advertisements slant across the page, the resemblance is to concrete poetry. Maurie’s warning attack of angina is represented by a grey half-page; his final attack by a blocked-out black page. ‘A page’, proclaimed Johnson, ‘is an area on which I may place any signs I consider to communicate most clearly what I have
to convey.’ Semiotics had come to English fiction. I read
Travelling People
when it first came out (indeed, it was the subject of the first review I ever published). It was an explosive arrival on the scene.

The flavour of Johnson’s fiction is Russian formalism in a McAlpine donkey jacket. What comes through more entertainingly than the experimentalism is his comic gift – more Tony Hancock (whom he physically resembled) than Joyce; for example, this capsule reminiscence of Henry’s boyhood:

In return for Maurie’s confidences and stories I told him about how they drummed me out of the Boy Scouts for playing a jukebox in a café when I was fourteen; a Fats Waller record it was, too; but this was only the culmination of a long campaign waged against me by the Scoutmaster from the day I proved that I could tie a knot so exactly like a bowline, but yet not, that he, disastrously, entrusted his weight to it.

Travelling People
came out in 1963 to gratifying acclaim and a three-book contract from his new publisher, Secker and Warburg. In the same year he met his future wife, Virginia. She was a cut above him socially, unliterary, and brought domestic stability into his life. They married in 1964 and the first of their two children was born in 1965.

The year 1964 was his
annus mirabilis
with four books published, including the sensational
Albert Angelo
– a portrait of the artist as a supply teacher – with its famous hole in the page so you could see what happened next without turning it. Critics were taking notice of him, as, to his gratification, was Samuel Beckett. He won prizes, received writing awards, and got commissions for TV and radio work. What he did not get was sales. He continued doing new things.
Trawl
(1967) is a Proustian introspection, composed, unglamorously, not on the Loire or Spenser’s ‘sweet Thames’ but on a twenty-three-day trip – voyage is the wrong word – on a fishing vessel in heavy seas. Proust meets ‘Deadliest Catch’.
Dredger
might have been the more appropriate title. Johnson’s most adventurous novel was a ‘cut-up’,
The Unfortunates
(1969), delivered to the reader in a box containing twenty-seven unbound sections. The mobile frame of the narrative centres on a trip to Nottingham, to report a football match for the
Observer
(one of Johnson’s sideline activities). It was in that city, he recalls, that his friend (the dedicatee of
Travelling People
) died of cancer. In the last section Johnson offers one of his many explanations of the point of his experimentation:

The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies.

Truth inheres in the particular. How better to catch it than with a novel in particles. That solves one problem, but leaves another unsolved: how to get people to read (or even assemble) the particles. The best of Johnson’s six published novels is
Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry
(1973). Less aggressively novel in its technique, it follows the career of an accounts clerk (such as Johnson himself had been in 1952) who balances moral offence with punishment among his friends and acquaintance. He dies, suddenly, of cancer.

Johnson’s professional life was one of continuous rupture with agents and publishers, typically because they did not make him as successful as he ought to have been. He kept bread on the table with fellowships, Arts Council bursaries and British Council tours. His mother’s death in 1971 affected him deeply. He was drinking heavily and his marriage was breaking down. Aged forty, he sliced his wrists in a warm bath, leaving a bottle of brandy for his friends to drink and a suicide note:

This is my last

word

The most powerful and dangerous white supremacist in America.

It’s rare to feel unalloyed pleasure at reading the obituary of a bestselling novelist. None the less, every novel-reader of goodwill would have rejoiced to read in July 2002 that ‘Willy Pierce’ (‘Dr William Luther Pierce’ to his co-fascists) had gone – somewhat prematurely, one further rejoiced to note – to his reward. Ding-dong, the witch was dead. Pierce was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His father was an insurance salesman; his mother a secretary and sometime journalist. In later life Pierce liked to claim descent from ‘the aristocracy of the old South’ and affected a ‘Southern patrician’ pose. His father was killed in a traffic accident when his son – one of two children – was eight. It being his line of work, he was well insured – not that Willy couldn’t make his own way. He was very bright – with a noted scientific bent from his earliest days. He was educated at a Texas military academy (hoping at some point to go into the air force), and graduated from Rice University in 1955,
supported on full academic scholarship all the way through. He spent a year or so at the elite California Institute of Technology as a postgraduate, studying physics and helping with NASA’s embryonic space programme. At this point he made his first of five marriages, with a fellow student, and fell in with and then fell out with the rabid John Birch Society, whose HQ was just down the road from his lab. He evidently read with attention the Birchites’ favourite novel-cum-tract,
The Franklin Papers
, but eventually found them not racist enough for his taste – too soft on Jews.