Short and sharp

Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, contains one particularly careless sentence: the one where I described Johnson as ‘Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s’. It was a silly thing to write, partly because it wasn’t true, but also because it was easily the most quotable line in the book and so every journalist and reviewer was bound to pick it up and repeat it. And so it proved.

But Johnson was not Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde. The 1960s saw a significant flowering of what we might (for shorthand) call experimental writing in this country. They saw the emergence of writers such as Nicholas Mosley, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy and Robert Nye, while around Johnson himself clustered a small group of like-minded novelists, bound together by prickly friendship and, if not a shared aesthetic exactly, then at least a shared opposition to what they saw as the prevailing aesthetic (neo-Victorian realism).