Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (107 page)

Having lost his first millions, he enterprisingly landed a job at the Universal Pictures warehouse, uncovered rampant fraud and was soon the company’s youngest Vice President. Dates get rather hard to fit in at this point – but Robbins claimed, while soaring to executive heights at UP, he was also serving as a submariner in the war. The claim, as spun out to a succession of gullible journalists, was clinched with some convincing details about life below the waves: ‘I was on a submarine, and if you’re on a submarine for 22 days you want sex … We were either jacking each other off or sucking each other off. Everybody knew that everybody else was doing it. If you were able to handle it, you could get fucked in the ass, but I couldn’t handle it that well. We jerked off too, but you get bored with that.’ Whatever else, Robbins’s CV was never boring. His submarine, he once claimed, had been torpedoed and he was the only survivor.

He came to fiction, he recalled, when challenged by another senior executive to come up with a better story to adapt into film than was currently coming UP’s way. The result was
Never Love a Stranger
(1948), the story of Frank Kane, which follows, more or less, the preceding narrative of Harold Robbins’s first twenty years. It was published by Knopf (surprisingly, given that firm’s literary prestige) and was a bestseller, after fending off some passing prosecutions for obscenity. The rest of the story can be followed in the
Publishers Weekly
bestseller lists. Robbins can claim to be one of the five top-selling novelists ever.

Robbins’s biographer, Andrew Wilson, joyously pokes holes in the tallest tales Robbins perpetrated – those about Harold Robbins. He was not a foundling boy; nor was he, as he liked to claim in his wilder moments, an illegitimate offspring of the last Russian Tsar. His first (Chinese!) wife did not die of a diseased parrot bite. He was not an intrepid submariner; in fact young Harold prudently dodged the draft. He did not make a fortune and lose it in the commodities market. He was born, Wilson’s digging revealed, Harold Rubin. His mother had died and his father adopted him into the new family he had made. Rubin Sr was a prosperous Brooklyn pharmacist (that much was true) and a generous parent. Harold’s upbringing was middle class and unexceptional: there were house servants and holidays in Florida. Harold was educated at the prestigious Manhattan High School. Masturbation was not on the curriculum, nor was coke served in the canteen. He did not make millions in ‘futures’, flying planes across the continental US to do so.

He met his first wife, Lillian, at school. She was not, as Harold later claimed, a vaginally virtuosic Chinese dancer, nor did she die of a parrot bite. The marriage to Lillian (described as ‘plain’) lasted twenty-eight years and survived a string of affairs and illegitimate offspring. It was his taste for orgies, later in life, that drove her to divorce him. As for his meteoric business career, Lillian’s father was someone at Universal Pictures and got his future son-in-law a lowly job in the firm’s accounts department. The bit about writing his first novel to prove he could do better than the stuff being served up at the time seems to have been true.

Whatever lay behind him once he took up the pen, Harold Robbins certainly sold books in amounts which there was no need to exaggerate. Hemingway once asked him why he wrote: ‘wealth’, replied Robbins. Money wasn’t enough; it was ‘wealth’ that Robbins made.
The Adventurers
(1966), a wildly romanticised roman-à-clef, based on the South American playboy politician, Porfirio Rubirosa, brought Robbins close on $3 million with the film rights. The film, starring Candice Bergen and Alan Badel, regularly scores high in all-time-turkey competitions. In the heady liberated period after the
Lady Chatterley
acquittal of 1960, Robbins’s fiction probably produced more ‘hard-ons’ (as he called them) than Viagra. Robbins was among the first to appreciate that post-Chatterley ‘permissiveness’ allowed not merely sexual explicitness, but sexual sadism – episodes such as that in
The Carpetbaggers
(1961) in which the hero identifies the man who raped and skinned his mother by his tobacco pouch (it’s made from his mother’s breast).

Less stomach-turning is the heroine in
The Betsy
(1971), who can only orgasm to the scream of an over-revved car engine. Something like that is found every twelve pages in Robbins, one smut-hound calculated. On the topic of cars, he owned, in his heyday, a fleet of twelve customised Rolls-Royces and a yacht to rival the billionaire
Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi’s (the thinly veiled ‘Baydr’ in the 1974 roman-à-clef,
The Pirate
(1974)).
A Stone for Danny Fisher
(1952), retitled
King Creole
(1958) for the film version, was produced as a vehicle for Elvis Presley, when James Dean – already cast for it – was killed. Some nine of his novels were adapted for the screen. Presley’s performance is not good, but the best of the lot; Dean would have been interesting.

Harold’s heyday came and went. He spent his millions and when he died, aged eighty-one, a living witness to the preservative powers of cocaine, gambling and lechery, his debts ran into seven figures. Was it money, sex or sheer chutzpah that drove Robbins? Probably sex. He had an insatiable appetite for wives (five of them) and call-girls (one London agent wryly recalled recruiting doxies by the dozen for his visiting star author). Screwing was, however, off the menu in his last years, after – high on cocaine – he fell in his shower and shattered his pubic bone. No more hard-ons for Mr Robbins. God, one deduces, must be a literary critic. None of his famous friends came to his funeral. It added the necessary Gatsby touch.

MELVYN BRAGG: What must you do to be famous?
ANTHONY BURGESS: Die.

Even those who have read little of his fiction will know certain things about Anthony Burgess. Best known is the fact that he had a death sentence pronounced on him in 1959, when a brain specialist diagnosed a tumour. With a predicted year to live, he wrote five Damoclean novels to support his future widow. Among them is his most famous,
A Clockwork Orange
(1962), for which, to add to the feat, he invented a new language – Nadsat. Perversely he welcomed the death sentence as twelve months of guaranteed immortality: ‘I had been granted something I had never had before: a whole year to live. I would not be run over by a bus tomorrow, nor knifed on the Brighton racetrack. I would not choke on a bone. If I fell in the wintry sea I would not drown.’ But neither, with his head about to rot off, could he do a proper job of work: he would have to become a professional writer to provide for his wife. He ‘sighed and put paper in the typewriter’. The prognosis proved
wrong and the terminal year extended into three decades of paper rolling through the typewriter.

Burgess, we should recall, was an inveterate spoofer. One of his more famous spoofs was reviewing his own pseudonymously authored fiction – tepidly. The tumour crisis has been questioned by biographers (most fiercely by Roger Lewis) as Burgess was not always to be trusted in such matters. In 1980, for example, he did an interview with his co-religionist Graham Greene, for the
Observer
. It led to a public quarrel when the older novelist accused Burgess of putting words in his mouth that he (Greene) had to look up in a dictionary.

Unlike Greene, John Burgess Wilson (his birth name) was born Catholic, in Manchester, the son of a lowly accountant father who played the ‘old joanna’ in pubs and picture houses by night for money. His mother, who had worked the music-halls as ‘Beautiful Belle Burgess’, died shortly after his birth in the great flu epidemic of 1919, as did his sister. He was brought up by an aunt until his father married one of the licensees he worked for. She did not much care for her stepson. The circumstances of his boyhood were
echt
working class but moderately prosperous and he had a good basic education at various Catholic schools. With music all around in his home he taught himself to play the piano, cultivating a precocious musical gift. His life was thrown into turmoil again, aged nineteen, when his father died of a heart attack, leaving his financial affairs in disorder. Wilson went on to earn himself an undergraduate degree (only an upper second, to his chagrin) in English at Manchester University in 1940. While a student he had met his future wife, Lynne Jones, and they married in 1942. She was a war bride and he was by then a sergeant in the Education Corps, one of the cushier berths in the army.

In his autobiography,
Little Wilson and Big God
(1988), Burgess records the most traumatic episode of the Second World War for him and even more so for his wife. In 1944, Lynne was violently attacked by a gang of American GI deserters during the London blackout. Unlike for Alex and his Droogs in
A Clockwork Orange
the motive was robbery, not sex. Her wedding ring was wrenched from her finger, breaking the bone: it evidently struck Burgess as symbolic as well as horrific. Lynne, who was pregnant, was kicked unconscious and miscarried what would have been their first child. Moreover, the injuries she sustained prevented her ever conceiving again. In later life she drank compulsively to the point of physical violence and collapse, taunting Burgess with her infidelities, precipitating impotence within the marriage, and his tit-for-tat adulteries outside it. The worst of these miserable years lay ahead and were only ended with her alcoholic death in 1968. Divorce was prohibited by the rules of a faith which was ingrained into his being.

Otherwise, not to understate things, Burgess had a peaceful war, spending much
of his wartime in Gibraltar. He enjoyed teaching and – more particularly – lecturing. Some might say he never did anything else throughout the whole of his life. On demob in 1946, Burgess taught in a grammar school and a teacher-training college. Restless by nature, he took up work with the colonial teaching service and, in 1954, was posted to Malaya. It was a leisurely life, still offering a few colonial comforts not to be found in austerity Britain. And Burgess always claimed he wrote best with the sun on his back. Phenomenally proficient with words, he learned the local language, Jawi, and began writing fiction in earnest – at the rate of a novel a year (later collected as
The Malayan Trilogy
or
The Long Day Wanes
). The first of his published works,
Time for a Tiger
(1956), is named after the local hooch’s advertising slogan and chronicles the break-up of the teacher-hero’s marriage – comically. While the British Empire was breaking up, Malaya was, at this time, in the very uncomical grip of the ‘Emergency’ – the Chinese communist uprising.

Burgess’s writing, from the beginning, was marked by a Joycean verbal exuberance, tempered by cosmic melancholy – Burgess’s worldview was quintessentially theological. In personal life, and in the great trends of history, he discerned an inevitably recurring swing between Augustinian moral tolerance and Pelagian moral severity. This meshed with his belief in free will – sloganised by Alex’s ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’ which heads every one of
A Clockwork Orange
’s seven sections. Goodness, Burgess believed, could only be achieved by a progress through sin. You cannot be programmed, or educated, into virtue: it is as unnatural as the titular orange. Burgess’s grimly post-lapsarian worldview is articulated at its most mechanical in his dystopia,
The Wanting Seed
(1962) in which a future society swings, historically, between Roman orgy (Gusphase) and Puritan tyranny (Pelphase). That, he believes, is the systole and diastole of the universe – its great pendulum. His religious doctrine is given its fullest expression in the best of his novels,
Earthly Powers
(1980), a panorama of the twentieth century, as seen through the saurian eyes of an aged Catholic queer (based, as knowing reviewers apprehended, on Somerset Maugham). Remove established religion from life,
Earthly Powers
asserts, and the vacuum will fill with Jonestown fanaticism and rivers of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Earthly Powers
was pipped at the post for the Booker that year by William Golding. Forewarned and piqued (
Rites of Passage
is not, all agree, Golding’s best novel) Burgess unsportingly boycotted the ceremony, claiming, unconvincingly, that he had no dinner jacket.

On his return to England from Malaya, and after his twelve-month brain-cancerous furlough, Burgess’s career had taken off in the 1960s. A natural performer, he was always in demand as a bluff reviewer and TV interviewee. His novels, after the 1960 barrage, sold brilliantly. He was regarded as an authority on Joyce, writing good books on the author, and composing an operetta for radio,
Blooms of
Dublin
(1982), based on
Ulysses
. The bible of the ‘theorists’ who were taking over British literary criticism was Roland Barthes’
S/Z
(1970). Burgess retorted, wittily, with his novel
M/F
(1971). He shied at the Bond mania with an ‘eschatological’ spy novel,
Tremor of Intent
(1966). There seemed to be nothing he could not turn his hand to, if not better than the competition, then more cleverly. At the same time, there were harrowing complications in his private life. In one of his casual adulteries in 1964 he had made love to a young Italian research student who promptly disappeared from his life. She was married to a black man but bore a white (Burgess’s) child, Andrew. This information was withheld from him until after Lynne’s death from cirrhosis in 1968, when he was finally free, by the strict doctrines of his church, to do something about it. Liana Macellari (a countess) eventually became Burgess’s second wife in 1968 and they went on to set up home, finally, in Monaco (for tax reasons – both partners were rich). ‘Am I happy?’ Burgess asked himself in his second volume of autobiography
You’ve Had Your Time
(1990), ‘probably not.’ But, he granted, nothing on earth could have made him happy and, quite likely, neither would heaven – if he got there. By way of consolation for the unhappiness, there was the money.