Paul Johnson (writer) - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Johnson was born in Manchester, England. His father, William Aloysius Johnson, was an artist and Principal of the Art School in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. At Stonyhurst, Johnson received an education grounded in the Jesuit method, which he preferred over the more secularized curriculum of Oxford. One of his tutors at Oxford was the historian A. J. P. Taylor.

After graduating with a second-class honours degree, Johnson performed his national service in the Army, joining the King's Royal Rifle Corps and then the Royal Army Educational Corps, where he was commissioned as a Captain (acting) based mainly in Gibraltar. Here he saw the "grim misery and cruelty of the Franco regime". Johnson's military record helped the Paris periodical Realités hire him, where he was assistant editor (1952–55).

Johnson adopted a left-wing political outlook during this period as he witnessed, in May 1952, the police response to a riot in Paris, the "ferocity I would not have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes." Subsequently, he also served as the New Statesman's Paris correspondent. For a time he was a convinced Bevanite and an associate of Aneurin Bevan himself. Moving back to London in 1955, Johnson joined the Statesman's staff; he was lead writer, deputy editor and editor from 1965 to 1970.

Some of Johnson's articles already showed signs of iconoclasm: in 1958 he attacked Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Dr No and in 1964 he warned of "The Menace of Beatlism." He was found suspect for his attendances at the soirées of Lady Antonia Fraser, then married to a Conservative MP. He received some resistance to his appointment as New Statesman editor, not least from the writer Leonard Woolf, who objected to a Catholic's filling the position, and Johnson was placed on six months' probation.

Statesmen And Nations (1971), the anthology of his Statesman articles, contains numerous reviews of biographies of Conservative politicians and an openness to continental Europe; in one article Johnson took a positive view of events of May 1968 in Paris, although remaining conscious of the problems of violence in periods of political change. According to this book, Johnson filed 54 overseas reports during his Statesman years.