Not actual memoirs, needless to say, but a collection of short prose pieces Johnson put together during his fellowship at the University of Wales centre at Gregynog in 1970, eventually published not long before his death in 1973. It's most interesting for its Introduction, a kind of artistic manifesto (or maybe he would have preferred "manifest"?) in which Johnson sets out his ideas of what the post-Joycean novel can still do, and goes through his own novels to assess how far he has lived up to that. It's where we find his famous diatribes against "fiction" and "stories", neither of which have any place in literature as far as he's concerned. Literature "teaches one something true about life: and how can you convey truth in a vehicle of fiction?" — "Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies."

Some of the remaining items in the collection are rather overwhelmed by their titles: calling a travel piece about Bournemouth "What Did You Say the Name of the Place Was?" leaves us little doubt about how much Johnson is going toile the town, for instance. "Mean Point of Impact" turns out to be a reworking of Golding's The spire under aerial bombardment, whilst "Broad Thoughts from a Home" is a clever but rather too respectful Joyce parody. "These Count as Fictions" starts with a wonderful passage about finding curly hairs embedded in the (shared) soap and drifts into a lampoon of a story-writing manual. Probably the most entertaining piece, though, is "Never Heard it Called That Before", a gloriously surreal exploration of the possible origins of the London street-name "Balls Pond Road". Typically, given what's gone before, about half the pieces in the book are such that any reasonable reader (now that Johnson is safely dead and in no position to get stroppy about it) would have to call them "fiction" and "stories"...!

Johnson was obsessive, amongst many other things, about layout and typography, so it can be no accident that the book is set in Univers with a ragged right margin, and all the titles are in American-style "title-case", where most British publishers at the time would have used sentence case. The sans-serif look is presumably meant as a nod to Bauhaus design ideas, which were very important to Johnson — he quotes Mies van der Rohe in his Introduction, and he had the same three sentences about form and materials pinned up over his writing desk.

An eccentric, funny, but very principled book. Not many people will agree with Johnson's logic, but you have to respect him for it. ( )