A study in constant reinvention

Now that the great wave of postmodernism has receded, leaving us all behind (as Yeats wrote) gasping on the sand, there's little talk of ''experimental" writing. Back almost half a century, though, during the period I lived in London and edited New Worlds, there was a great deal of such talk, and considerable action to match. The French new novel was much in evidence. Boris Vian was being published in the United Kingdom, as were truly innovative stories by Carol Emshwiller, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Disch in the United States. Dissatisfied with the conventions of pulp-derived science fiction, writers such as Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and others writing for New Worlds were all looking for something fresh. As Ezra Pound had suggested decades earlier: The age demanded an image. And we all went looking for it.

There in London we were swimming upstream of a rather staid literary establishment, mind you -- as any self-styled revolutionary must. But there was a lot of talk about upturning the old apple carts, about fresh directions and agendas for fiction, some of it carried on by seasoned writers like Aldiss, some committed by those of us whose literary history totaled about 10 minutes. The most visible of all, as practicing experimental novelist, polemicist, poet, and editor, was Bryan Stanley Johnson.

Jonathan Coe's biography of the man he deems ''Britain's one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s," ''Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson" (Continuum, $29.95), has been long in the works and long awaited. All who know Coe's own work (''The Winshaw Legacy," ''The House of Sleep") expected something extraordinary. Our expectations are surpassed. This may well be one of the finest literary biographies ever written.

Born in 1933, dead of suicide in 1973, with a working life of just over a decade ''unknown nowadays to most British readers under forty," as Coe remarks (and I daresay to most all US readers), Johnson produced a basketful of poems, several dozen unproduced plays and teleplays, numerous reviews, essays and tracts, and the seven novels for which he is likely to be remembered. Sagely, it is with those that Coe begins, in a section titled ''A Life in Seven Novels" tracking the spoor of Johnson's personal experience and thought.

They are by any reckoning fascinating work. In ''Travelling People," mimicking one character's heart attack, pages shade through gray to black. ''Albert Angelo" has holes cut in pages, allowing glimpses of future events. ''The Unfortunates" came with pages loose in a box, an attempt to re-create the randomness of experience. ''See the Old Lady Decently" juggles together comic scenes of Johnson's mother's life, transcriptions of tapes from his father, poems about motherhood, glimpses of the author at work on his book, and tour-guide-like recountings of Britain's imperial rise and fall complete with blanks for the reader to fill in. Christie (in ''Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry") painstakingly records in an accountant's ledger every sling and arrow of his life and the recompense owed him, just before his death inscribing therein ''Balance written off as bad debt."

Believing that the novel, indeed literary tradition itself, would survive only by constant redefinition and reinvention, Johnson abjured standard narrative procedure -- plot, suspension of disbelief, social realism, and all that lot -- forever on the hunt ''to find a form that accommodates the mess." Yet for all his experimentation, the stories Johnson told, most often rooted unabashedly in his own life, are deeply human, deeply moving. Always in evidence, as Coe points out, are ''his command of language, his freshness, his formal ingenuity, the humanity that shines through even his most rigorous experiments, his bruising honesty."

As much as possible, Coe lets Johnson's own words and the words of those who knew him speak here, content to give support in the unobtrusive manner of a fine accompanist. Finally, however, he has much to say, or perhaps more accurately much to question, about what literature is and what it can be, about the relationship of life to art, about the problem of literary biography, about Johnson's own problems of living.

Johnson was, as a friend remarked, ''a man wracked by self-certainties." What Coe sniffs out among the baffles and blinds of his subject's life is the gradual loss of those certainties, a loss, finally, of faith in the art that had sustained him. Long after the reading, the impression persists that Coe may have given us that very ''representation of the inside of my mind" to which Johnson aspired. And this, of course, both in intent and in execution, whether novel or biography, is the highest art.

With his suicide, Johnson took the last of his many extreme positions. Coe quotes Milan Kundera, that ''the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel." Bryan Johnson found there at the end, having dismantled his ramshackle house, that he had no place left to live.

James Sallis's new novel, ''Drive," is just out from Poisoned Pen Press.