B.S. Johnson died by his own hand in 1973. He was 40, and the author of seven novels, all of them rather odd in ways that put publishers off because their oddities made them expensive to produce and hard to sell. He bullied the publishers haughtily and often got his way, though at some cost to himself: the books were hard to sell. Fred Warburg, responding to Johnson's peremptory complaints about a paperback advance beneath his dignity, explained to him that his 'ideas about how novels should be written are, if not unique, at least held by a tiny, but tiny minority'. Warburg saw Johnson's manic insistence that his novels should contain no lies as a threat that he would produce nothing but a string of varied autobiographies, and he suggested that if, as he expected, he lost money on them, he would hold the author to his promise to remedy the situation by producing 'a brilliant bunch of lies'. But he knew that Johnson would consider such fiction 'a vulgar pandering to an ill-informed public'.

LRB 5 August 2004 | PDF Download