Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (117 page)

To find his sexual drives had ceased

For Sophocles was no disaster;

He said he felt like one released

From service with a cruel master.

I envy him – I miss the lash

At which I used to snort and snivel;

Oh that its unremitted slash

Were still what makes me drone and drivel!

Droning and drivelling, one should add, some great fiction. Would Kingsley Sobersides have given us
Lucky Jim
or
The Old Devils
?

There’s no art in what I do.

Alistair Maclean was brought up in the Scottish Highlands, near Inverness, one of four sons of a Free Church minister. Gaelic was his first language. He attended school in Inverness and Glasgow – where a heavily accented English became his tongue. With his leaving certificate in his hand, and after a brief period of clerking, he volunteered for the navy in 1941. As an able seaman, and later a leading torpedo operator, Maclean served on escort duties for Russian convoys and later in the Pacific theatre. Although the heroes of his war-action novels are all officers, Maclean himself never rose higher than non-commissioned rank. Nor, although he saw active service, did Maclean have a bloody war. It evidently rankled. In his alcoholic later years, he would boast that he had killed over 200 of the enemy, been captured by the Japanese, tortured and escaped.

Demobbed, Maclean enrolled at Glasgow University and on graduation, with a middling degree in English, took up school-teaching. He took a German wife in 1953 and started a family – eventually there were three children. His sea-story, ‘The Dileas’, won a
Glasgow Herald
writing contest in 1954 and encouraged him to submit a full-length manuscript to the Glasgow publisher, Collins.
HMS Ulysses
, like Nicholas Monsarrat’s
The Cruel Sea
, was a ‘tell it how it really was’ novel about the Arctic convoys, and the inhuman pressures the theatre placed on sailors. Ian Chapman, the editor who nursed Maclean’s early career, astutely sniffed a bestseller, while other editors at Collins were appalled at the crudity of his writing. The novel gained an extra boost from Admiralty attempts to suppress it as a slander on the Senior Service. But Chapman was right and
HMS Ulysses
sold phenomenally. Maclean gave up the classroom chalk for the bestselling pen.

His later career was nomadic. The rapacious demands of the Inland Revenue drove him to tax exile in Switzerland. Hollywood lured him with dollars to Los Angeles. ‘I have no home,’ he said at the end of his life. His first marriage ended with divorce in 1972. He remarried (a Frenchwoman this time), but this also ended in expensive divorce five years later. He had come by now to despise himself for what he wrote. It drove him to acts of crazed generosity with money – and to drink. Alcohol destroyed his marriages but not his ability to churn out fiction and his earnings never tapered off. Even at his most sodden, he was pulling in a million a year: the pot never stopped boiling for Alistair Maclean. He had the knack (which coevals such as Desmond Bagley or Jack Higgins lacked) of creating narratives which adapted smoothly to film. He wrote, as Chapman said, ‘visually’ (verbally, as others said, he was no great
shakes). The opening sentence of his first, and best, novel,
HMS Ulysses
, illustrates Chapman’s point: ‘Slowly, deliberately, Starr crushed out the butt of his cigarette.’

Two of his works, thanks to TV re-runs, have immortalised his name:
The Guns of Navarone
(1957) and
Where Eagles Dare
(1969). The last was proposed to Maclean by the movie producer Elliott Kastner, who put in the order for ‘an adventure story that would
sweat
… set in the Second World War, with five or six guys overcoming enormous obstacles to rescue someone’. Starring in the film was Richard Burton. He and Maclean bonded on the set over vodka and then – as drunks do – came to blows after too much alcohol. The novelist claimed to have floored the actor. The film critic Barry Norman perceived a telling parallel. Burton was an actor of genius, who had sold out to Hollywood. Maclean wanted to be a great writer, but knew he never could be. Both soothed their professional chagrin with drink.

Maclean died in Switzerland. There was a memorial service in his home village in the Scottish Highlands. The local paper memorialised him, unkindly, as ‘The Daviot Drunk’.

Quint’s tale of the USS Indianapolis [in the film
Jaws]
was conceived by playwright Howard Sackler, lengthened by screenwriter John Milius and rewritten by Robert Shaw following a disagreement between screenwriters Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Shaw presented his text, and Benchley and Gottlieb agreed that this was exactly what was needed.

Imprisoned, like a fly in amber, in one of the films adapted from Maclean’s fiction, was a much more gifted novelist. Robert Shaw played ‘Major Keith Mallory’ (his last complete role) in
Force 10 from Navarone
(1978), a feeble sequel to the earlier and much superior Navarone actioner, in which Gregory Peck had played Mallory. It was Shaw’s fate to find himself immured in the inventions of lesser writers than himself. He is most famous for having invented, after some creative fisticuffs, Quint’s ‘Indianapolis’ monologue in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Peter Benchley’s
Jaws
(1975) – a creation which ranks with Orson Welles’s interpolated ‘cuckoo clock’ riff in
Citizen Kane
. Welles was Graham Greene’s equal. Peter Benchley was nowhere near as good a novelist as Robert Shaw.

Shaw was born in Lancashire, the son of an alcoholic doctor who had married one of his nurses and later killed himself with an overdose of opium when his son was twelve. He passed on his drinking disease. Shaw taught for a while, after leaving school in Cornwall (whose regional accent is detectable, even under his assumed American accent) and before coming to study in London at RADA. At school he excelled at sport, and might – had his career gone differently – been a professional rugby player (as was David Storey, for a while). In his acting career he would gravitate towards physical roles. Like Richard Burton, he could not afford to waste his considerable acting talent on the stage, where he had made an early reputation as a Shakespearian actor. Film paid more. His most commendable screen role was as Aston in the 1963 adaptation of Harold Pinter’s
The Caretaker
. Notably memorable is the character’s extended monologue about the abusive effect of electro-convulsive therapy on his brain. But Shaw’s name was made, and his career likewise, by his performance as the psychopathic SPECTRE assassin, Red Grant, in the James Bond film
From Russia with Love
, which also came out in 1963.

Like Burton, Shaw enjoyed (if that’s the word) riotous sessions with fellow drunk and screenwriter, Alistair Maclean, on adaptations of that novelist’s work. He died on the set of a wholly undistinguished film, aged only fifty-one, leaving a clutch of distinguished novels. ‘I would rather’, he once said, ‘go down as having written one good novel than be acclaimed as a great actor.’ The best of his novels,
The Hiding Place
(1959) and
The Man in the Glass Booth
(1967), deal with imprisonment. In the first two, British airmen who have bailed out of their bomber during the Second World War are imprisoned by a German in his cellar, and deluded – for years after the Allies’ victory – that Germany has actually won the war. They make their escape into a world of confusion. The man in the glass booth is a Nazi war criminal (inspired by Adolf Eichmann), on trial in Jerusalem.

Shaw died leaving three wives, ten children, five novels and debts of hundreds of thousands to the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – with whom he was always in hot water. His novels are now out of print and undeservedly unread, while
Jaws
replays, year in year out, on TV and in revival houses. Wetherspoon’s pub has been named after him in his birthplace of Westhoughton, Lancashire, although he always felt his home was Ireland, where he spent the last seven years of his life when not on set – in the Gaeltacht village of Tourmakeady, Co. Mayo. Ireland’s enlightened laws had allowed him to live there tax-free. A memorial was raised to him in the village in 2008.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

On the night of 13 February 1945, three months before the end of the Second World War, Kurt Vonnegut was a POW sheltering in an underground animal slaughterhouse during the devastating fire-bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse Five (
Schlachthof Fünf
) was the shelter from the slaughter. ‘We got through it’ Vonnegut wryly recalled, ‘because we were quartered in the stockyards where it was wide and open and there was a meat locker three stories beneath the surface, the only decent shelter in the city. So we went down into the meat locker, and when we came up again the city was gone and everybody was dead. We walked for miles before we saw anybody else: all organic things were consumed.’ Vonnegut and his fellow American POWs, exhumed at dawn from their underground coffin, were set to work ‘corpse mining’ – excavating blackened bodies for a second cremation on open piles. The live meat took care of the dead meat.

Vonnegut survived the slaughter to write
Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969). Thousands didn’t survive. In the novel, Billy Pilgrim, the unheroic hero, is a POW in the same shelter as Vonnegut during the devastating fire-bombing. He too survives – but he goes crazy. Vonnegut published many personal accounts of his Dresden experience – as well as that in
Slaughterhouse-Five
. The following is from an interview in 1974. ‘I was present in the greatest massacre in European history, which was the destruction of Dresden by fire-bombing … The American and British air forces together killed 135,000 people in two hours. This is a world’s record. It’s never been done faster, not in the Battle of Britain or Hiroshima. (In order to qualify as a massacre you have to kill
real
fast). But I was there, and there was no news about it in the American papers, it was so embarrassing.’ RAF estimates later downscaled the civilian casualties to a ‘mere’ 35,000. But Vonnegut’s point stands. Fiction, like history, has been generally silent about Dresden. Victors, as Hitler said, write history. They also forget the embarrassing bits. Vonnegut himself had almost insuperable
personal difficulties writing his ‘Dresden novel’. He had to forge an entirely new ‘schizophrenic’ technique, weaving realism, SF schlock (little one-eyed green men from Tralfamadore, resembling toilet plungers), and slapstick social comedy into a startlingly innovative pattern.

The thesis of
Slaughterhouse-Five
is T. S. Eliot’s – mankind cannot bear too much reality. Life is so horrible, that only fiction can deal with it – and, crucially, the more horrible the life experience, the more fantastic (unrealistic) the fiction. After Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno famously declared, poetry was impossible. One of the underlying contentions of
Slaughterhouse-Five
is that after Dresden, fiction (specifically ‘War and Peace’ fiction of the old Tolstoyan kind) is impossible. A way out of the impasse was science fiction. Billy Pilgrim, a time and intergalactic traveller (or, more likely, merely nuts) ends his post-Dresden pilgrimage incarcerated no longer by Nazi Germany but by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, some 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles from earth, whither he has been transported by flying saucer (widely believed in during the 1960s).

Billy’s imprisonment on planet Tralfamadore is in a geodesic dome – a style of architecture much favoured by hippy communes in the 1960s – made tolerable by furniture from Sears, Roebuck (less favoured by hippies), and the even more luxuriously upholstered, but wholly brainless, starlet Montana Wildhack, who is also flying-saucered across the vast tracts of space as Billy’s ‘mate’ (she is also one of Hugh Hefner’s playmates). They will be earthling specimens in the Tralfamadorian national zoo, kindly treated and grateful for the dome, the furniture, and each other. ‘I was there,’ is a constant interruption in the text. In two places in the novel, Vonnegut actually gives himself a Prufrockian speaking part. Walter Scott was not present at Culloden. Tolstoy wasn’t at Borodino, Thackeray wasn’t at Waterloo, nor was Stendhal. Norman Mailer – though the myth persists – didn’t see a lot of action in the Pacific campaign. Interestingly, Vonnegut himself did not call
Slaughterhouse-Five
a ‘novel’ but, more awkwardly, ‘my Dresden book’. Billy Pilgrim is not Vonnegut, but a fellow POW called Joe Crone who did not survive the war. Crone was, like Billy, comically malcoordinated, a soldier doomed always to be the platoon klutz. He let himself starve to death before the firestorm and is ‘buried somewhere in Dresden, wearing a white paper suit’. Vonnegut resurrected him.