Death by naturalism

How close can fiction come to describing reality? The British author BS Johnson embarked on a quest for absolute literary naturalism which ended in his suicide.

A cultural organisation recently asked me to take part in a debate on the question: "Is a true literary naturalism possible or even desirable?" The debate took place in France, where they like abstract ideas as much as the British dislike them. And sure enough, true to my national character, I found myself unable to get a handle on the topic unless I resorted to specific examples.

I discovered that I could only make sense of the question by telling a story to illustrate it; thereby confirming-no doubt to the audience's quiet satisfaction-that the British remain a nation of narrators rather than thinkers.

Never mind. It is because we're good at narration that, whenever you go abroad, people tell you how healthy the novel seems to be in Britain, compared to other European countries. Perhaps this has itself got something to do with naturalism, with our instinct for the texture of ordinary life. Yet if this instinct becomes too dominant, it can lead to a refusal to trust the imagination; and it was an extreme example of this which inspired the story I told in France.

It is a true story. At least, the person who is its subject once lived, and there will be facts in it which can be verified. It is a story about a British author called BS Johnson, who wrote novels in the 1960s and 1970s and was a very unhappy person. At the time, his novels were not widely translated and that was one of the reasons he was unhappy. Another reason for his unhappiness was that he believed that a true literary naturalism was both possible and desirable. Partly as a result of holding this belief, he went mad and killed himself when he was 40 years old.

I know quite a lot about BS Johnson because I have almost finished writing a book about him. He and I are very different people, born into different times, and we are also very different writers. But one of the things we have in common is the similarity between our first novels. His was called "Travelling People" and was published in 1963; mine was called "The Sunset Bell" and has never been published. Both were about university graduates who had been disappointed in love. Both, surprisingly enough, were written by university graduates who had been disappointed in love. In other words, we had both fallen into the classic trap of the first-time novelist: unable to see beyond the boundaries of our own tiny emotional universe, we had wanted to write only about ourselves but, aware that novels were supposed to do something more than that, we had attempted to disguise our insignificant narratives as universal paradigms of the human condition, projecting our own triumphs and disasters onto a hero who was, of course, no more than a thinly disguised version of ourselves.

There is nothing special about this. It is how most novelists begin. Then you tend to grow a little bit more, experience a little bit more, and begin to realise that although in one sense you are an epicentre of human experience, in another, larger sense, this is not the case at all. You have two responsibilities as a writer: to the micro-world within you and the macro-world outside you. The writer who sits at his desk, looking out of his study window, sees two things: his face reflected in the window, staring back at him and through that, he sees a world of people hurrying about their business who are utterly indifferent to his well-being. The writer must see both, and he must write about both, or his account of his own problems will be meaningless and his way of writing about other people will lack all intensity, all interiority.

So what do you do? You expand your cast of characters. You listen to the things people say in the street and on the bus; you listen to the stories of your friends' lives and sometimes you borrow them (with permission, of course). You research the way other people live so that you are able to write about more than the problems of being a writer, which, needless to say, are fascinating to yourself but of less concern to everybody else. Your books get bigger and their emotional palette gets richer and they get more fictional-because you are having to make more of this stuff up, not having lived through it. But at the same time, paradoxically, they become more truthful, more faithful to the complex reality which you have to believe is out there somewhere, waiting to be grasped by the novelistic mind.

That is what most writers do. It is what I have done, over the 20 years that I have been writing novels. But it is not what BS Johnson did.

Johnson began his second novel, "Albert Angelo", the same way that he'd begun his first. He created a hero who was a thinly disguised version of himself. First of all he called him Henry, because that had been the name of the hero in his first novel. Then he changed his mind and called him Samuel, because he wanted the book to be a homage to Samuel Beckett who, he thought, was the greatest writer in the world. Finally, he called him Albert. But it didn't matter what he called him, because Johnson was really writing about himself. He decided this hero was going to be an architect, because the problems of an architect seemed analogous to those of a writer. So, for the first 150 pages, the novel is about the emotional, professional and creative problems of an architect called Albert.

But then, at the very end of the book, Johnson abandons the pretence. "FUCK ALL THIS LYING," he scrawls in capital letters across one of the pages and in a desperate bid for sincerity he also abandons punctuation and syntax as he writes:

"fuck all this lying look what I'm really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture trying to say something about writing my writing I'm my hero though what a useless appellation my first character then I'm trying to say something about me through him albert an architect when what's the point in covering up... I'm trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth about my truth to reality about sitting here writing looking out across Claremont Square trying to say something about the writing and nothing being an answer to the loneliness to the lack of loving"

"Telling stories is telling lies, and I want to tell the truth... I want to tell the truth about me... about my truth." Isn't BS Johnson groping here for precisely that tantalisingly abstract goal: a true literary naturalism? Instead of moving further away from his own experience, he is starting to move closer towards it in the belief that he can only tell the truth about something if he has experienced it. Yet he also knows that this is impossible, because even in one small life there is so much incident, so much detail, that even the most compendious novel could not contain it. As he points out in "Albert Angelo", his hero "defecates only once during the whole of this book: what sort of a paradigm of the truth is that?"

On the one hand, we have what BS Johnson called "the enormity of life": chaotic, multifaceted, complex, infinite. On the other, we have the novel: a small object of, say, three or four hundred pages, severely circumscribed by the author's ability and experience, and by the attention span of readers, with their wearisome desire to be entertained. How can the second contain the first? If naturalism means an absolute fidelity to the "enormity of life," then even the most ambitious novel-be it Proust or Perec, Musil or Broch-cannot achieve it. The very attempt to do so represents a kind of insanity.

Yet BS Johnson was determined. Nothing less than authentic naturalism would satisfy him. His next novel was called "Trawl". It was not a work of fiction. It described a journey which he himself had made, a few years earlier, on a deep sea fishing boat along the coast of Norway and Russia. He had made this journey in order to isolate himself, to think about his misfortunes and disappointments and thereby, he hoped, to come to terms with them. It is a sombre, beautiful and moving book. When he delivered it (in 1966) his publishers were furious. "You told us that you were writing a novel," they said. "This is a novel," he answered. "No it isn't," they replied. "It's a memoir."

"It's a novel," Johnson insisted, "but a novel in which everything happens to be true. This is how all novels should be written. Writers should not make things up. It's a frivolous waste of time. Telling stories is telling lies. The only thing that matters is the truth."

"What about all the other novelists who have made up stories?" they asked. "Cervantes? Austen? Flaubert? George Eliot? Joyce? Are you telling us that you are right and they were wrong?" To which he replied: "Yes."

But still he was not satisfied with the books he had written. "Trawl" was a novel of the inner life, a novel about thoughts and memories. But thoughts and memories, it seemed to Johnson, do not arrive in an orderly fashion, sequentially, the way one is obliged to present them in a book. They jostle randomly for precedence in the loose, unstructured consciousness. He felt that there should be a way of making a novel reflect this. And so he decreed that his next novel-which he called "The Unfortunates"-should not be published in the usual way, with consecutive pages stitched together at the spine, to be read one after another. Instead, he divided it into sections, of between one and 16 pages, and insisted that his publishers present these sections loosely, in a small box, so that the reader could shuffle them and read them in any order they wanted: a version, perhaps, of the experiments with chance procedures which John Cage had attempted a few years earlier.

Johnson saw each of his novels as a problem to be solved. The specific problem varied slightly with every book, but the deeper, underlying problem was always the same: how, using the poor, inadequate, blunt instrument of language, can you capture anything of the simultaneity and multiplicity of modern life? Writing about the loosely assembled pages of "The Unfortunates", he said: "I did not think then, and do not think now, that this solved the problem completely... But I continue to believe that my solution was nearer; and even if it was only marginally nearer, then it was still a better solution to the problem of conveying the mind's randomness than the imposed order of a bound book."

Johnson's conception of his novels was roughly the same as the famous verdict which Harold Pinter gave on his own plays: each one he saw as "a different kind of failure." Still, a man cannot go on failing for ever. Especially when it becomes obvious that the task he has set himself is impossible.

In his next two novels, Johnson stepped back a bit from truth. He allowed himself-as writers often do when publishers are pressuring them to produce new books, and they have families to support-to recycle two old ideas which had occurred to him before he developed his craving for naturalism. He wrote two novels in which the characters were invented and events sprang from his own imagination. In one sense, he was betraying himself. But the subjects of these books were, at least, close to his heart. One of them was about the indignity of old age; the other was about social injustice. Some people think they are his best novels. Perhaps they are. But he had allowed himself to stray from his chosen path, and it was time to start following it again.

So he began another novel, a trilogy in fact: three novels about his mother's death (she had died from cancer in 1971) and her life. It was a life which straddled most of the 20th century, which meant that the trilogy would have to encompass the history of that century: two world wars and the decline of the British empire. The first of these novels was to be called "See the Old Lady Decently" and would be not just about giving his mother a decent burial, but about giving Britain's imperial ambitions a decent burial, too. Johnson was finally doing what novelists are supposed to do: broadening his canvas. But he was broadening it to the point where it was bound to rupture and tear.

In this novel, Johnson had to become a social historian as well as a novelist and the book starts to collapse under the weight of his passion for inclusiveness. He was consumed by the notion that nothing, however small, could be left out of a novel without it creating a distorted version of reality. "Writers," he said, "can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification." Johnson became like the novelist in Michael Frayn's comic novel "The Tin Men", who never gets any further than introducing one character and spends pages describing him in absurdly complete physical detail, terrified by the thought that unless he describes every body part, the reader will be distracted by the possibility that he might have deformed toes or peculiar armpits. The consequence, of course, is that the act of writing itself becomes an impossibility. And this was the situation in which Johnson now found himself. Here he is, desperately trying to recreate some of the social and political atmosphere of the year 1928, when suddenly he breaks off and says to the reader:

"Look, there were millions of people, thousands of peoples, hundreds of countries, all of them going in every direction and performing every kind of significant and insignificant act. How could anyone impose order on that multitudinous discontinuity? History must surely be lying, of one kind or another, no more true than what used to be called fiction? How can any one mind comprehend it? And would there be any point if it could?"

Here he seems to be going beyond his already paralysing sense that naturalism in literature is impossible, and into a kind of existential despair about the futility of all literary activity-of the very activity to which he had devoted his entire life.

Just a few weeks after writing those words in 1973, BS Johnson finished his new novel. His publisher considered it flawed and asked him to think again. The same week, his wife left him, taking their two children with her. Neither of these rejections was intended to be final. Both were precipitated by Johnson's own behaviour, his aggressive, uncompromising literary and emotional attitudes. But they were enough to confirm him in his despair. Late one night at his home in Islington, he got drunk, ran a warm bath, stepped into it and opened the veins on his wrist with a razor blade. He bled to death in the noble Roman manner-partly, I believe, as an act of homage to one of his literary heroes, Petronius, the author of "The Satyricon". But while Petronius died surrounded by friends, listening to poetry and gossip about Emperor Nero's court, Johnson died alone. His body was discovered several hours later by a friend, who alerted the police.

What can we conclude from this story of a writer whose pursuit of literary naturalism drove him to such a terrible end? I think we can only conclude-if you will forgive me for descending into bathos-that he was wrong; that he was looking for something which does not exist, cannot exist and which also, if found, would turn out to bear no relation to what we call "literature." I have been living alongside BS Johnson for seven years now, and this experience itself has driven me slightly mad. Sometimes I find myself arguing with him, trying to shift him from his ridiculous, inflexible positions. I want to say to him: "Look, Bryan, if you want your books to be totally faithful to reality, it's very easy. Go into one of the cafés in Islington and turn on your tape recorder and record people's conversations. Then come home and transcribe them and keep doing that until you've got two or three hundred pages. There you will have your 'authentic' naturalism and you know as well as I do that there is not a single person in the world who would want to read it. It would be unreadable. Now ask yourself why this is the case, and you will realise that it is everything that is unnatural in a novel-the selecting and editing, the inventing and polishing-which makes it worthwhile. Novels improve upon life; even novels which tell stories about people who lead wretched and unfortunate lives. Because at least those stories have a shape which pleases us, which consoles us. Even your own novels are full of beautiful shapes, because you are too much of an artist, you couldn't stop yourself from putting them in. They are the least lifelike things in those books and they are also the best things and the only things, in fact, that make them worth reading."

A television producer I know wanted to make a documentary about BS Johnson, but none of the channels were interested. He was told that nobody wanted to watch programmes about writers any more. Instead, British audiences wanted something called "reality television"-real people, in real situations, doing ordinary things and snatching their 15 minutes of fame. The irony of it-BS Johnson, the great hunter after reality in the novel, shunted aside to make way for "reality television." In "Big Brother", 12 people are trapped in a house together, 24 hours a day, surrounded by television cameras. Every night, for half an hour, you see the edited highlights: but that is not all. If you have digital television, you can watch "Big Brother" live, 24 hours a day, unedited, in real time. While you are sitting on your sofa, eating your lunch, you can watch them sitting at their table, eating their lunch. You can watch them going to the toilet, or sunbathing, or staring into space. If you cannot sleep at night, you can stay up and watch them sleeping instead. And it is strangely compulsive. The cameras create a contrived situation, of course, but all the same it is pretty authentic, pretty natural, pretty "true." It is as close as you can get to real life, on television anyway. It is boring at first, but after a while you get used to the boredom. You start to like the boredom. And that is when you know that a little part of you has started dying. Watching something like this for too long is like taking the first step on the road towards death. It is anti-life, just as BS Johnson's perverse desire to reduce the novel to the status of real life was also something that drove him towards death. Art is not like that. Art is on the side of life. And a reader feels this most strongly when a novel is being most untruthful, least lifelike.

So, in the end-for all my inescapable Britishness, my horror of the abstract, my love of the rooted and the specific-even I have to reject naturalism. Yes, I want my novels to be plausible, I want them to be believable. But I also know, as a reader, that it is when I allow myself to be seduced by the enchanting untruthfulness of fiction that I feel myself to be most alive.

© 2003 Prospect Magazine