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Pamela Hansford Johnson |
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Among modern novelists, Pamela Hansford Johnson is likely to be remembered best for her stylistic lucidity and psychological acumen. In an age of experimental novelistic techniques often intended to draw attention to themselves, Johnson's style is transparent and her form, classic. She deplores "complication" as a "mania" of "our era," and her entertaining and intelligible fiction may be read as a reaction against it. Critics have faulted her for a lightness, a failure to confront the complexity of our time, but they may have overlooked her own distinction between complex but essential truth and complicated, dissociated technique. For her, Tolstoy represents an epitome of the first, and late Joyce, the second. If that is a reductive evaluation, it is one which she shares with other writers and critics of this century, including Virginia Woolf. Johnson's own art belongs to a more modest category, but none can argue that her purposes in it are not ambitious or profound: "I hope to tell, in my writing, the absolute truth ...
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