Book: Like a Fiery Elephant
Author: Jonathan Coe
Price: (Picador, ?20)
As Britain’s most committed avant-garde novelist of the 1960s and early 1970s, BS Johnson bears a strong resemblance to Wyndham Lewis, who occupied the same position in the 1920s and early 1930s. Both were modernists who were left stranded by modernism. The novels that most coherently manifested BS Johnson’s formal beliefs – The Unfortunates, Trawl and House Mother Normal – made as little popular impact as Lewis’s The Childermass and The Apes of God had 40 years before. The big difference between them was that Lewis wrote two of his best books, Rotting Hill and Self Condemned, late in life and made it to old age, whereas Bryan Stanley Johnson died by his own hand in November 1973, at the age of 40.
Modernism is above all a passionate vector, always for or against. Lewis, along with his friends Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, detested the Victorians for their idealism and selective romanticism. Their modernism wanted new forms that would force words, under pressure, to acquire a hardness that conveyed their era and revealed new potentialities. Yet that early modernism was an errant movement, a rebellion of the sort that rebels against everything, including itself. Booby-trapped by a weakness for highly formalised art, it failed to live up to its promise – of an authentic, assertively Anglo-Saxon genius.
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