His own worst enemy | 12 June 2004

Jonathan Coe is a novelist — a very good novelist. He is not a biographer; indeed he dislikes biography, as he frequently tells us. Given that, he’s done a damn good job. Poor B. S. Johnson leaps off these pages: pathologically morbid and clinically depressed, wildly superstitious and self-dramatising. requiring perfect love and devotion from everyone — women, publishers, agents, even critics — and becoming suicidal and violently vengeful when they can’t provide them; ‘a large, blond, maudlin man’, as a friend said; ‘unassuageable,’ said another, tormented and absurd.

And that, as Coe would point out, is without mentioning the books, in which Johnson equally pursued the impossible, and blamed everyone else when they failed. He disliked the novel, and used his own novels to attack it — disdaining dialogue, character and plot, famously issuing one of his books in unbound sections in a box, and another with a hole cut through two pages so that readers could see through to a third.