Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (143 page)

It’s wonderfully done, and pure Lodge. But, as is now famous, Domvilleian disaster struck as he was preparing
Author, Author
for press. Colm Toíbín, a novelist whose career was meteorically in the ascendant, was bringing out his Jamesian novel on exactly the same subject.
The Master
would beat
Author, Author
to the post. And, as the first book does, it got the longer reviews. Lodge created a self-lacerating book out of his humiliation,
The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel
(2006). But time has its own ironies. A hundred years on and who has lasted? Mrs Humphry Ward? Be serious. ‘Henry, wherever you are, take a bow’ is Lodge’s ironic reply. It is amazing – and wrong – that Lodge, the greatest comic novelist of our time, has never won Britain’s premier literary prize, the Booker, nor been shortlisted other than once for it. But, one suspects, his time will come. If the judges wait too long, humiliatingly, he will not be around to make his bow, wherever he then is.

We all come from some place, and if you are in your place for some time, your place intensifies you.

Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada. In his childhood the family moved to a farm in Dunvegan, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. He attended various universities, full and part time (teaching in the intervals), from 1957 to 1968, graduating with a doctorate in Victorian Literature from Notre Dame, in 1968. He taught for three years at Indiana University before taking up a post as professor of Creative Writing at the University of Windsor in Ontario. MacLeod, over the course of his professional life, kept a foothold in his native region, writing (during the long summer vacations his profession afforded) in a clifftop cabin ‘looking west toward Prince Edward Island’.

MacLeod’s is the most compact of literary careers. Over the four decades of his writing, he has published fewer than a score of short stories, initially in literary journals and subsequently gathered in two modest collections,
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
(1976) and
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun
(1986). In 1999, he published his first novel,
No Great Mischief
. All of MacLeod’s fiction, short and long, deals with life in Nova Scotia – New Scotland – on the eastern Canadian seaboard. The people in his stories are miners, fishermen, loggers, crofters, their wives and offspring. Historically, these people are poised on a cusp. Their ancestors as far back as the seventh generation followed the same hard path: they hauled nets, quarried the earth, felled trees, ploughed and grazed the ungrateful, winter-blasted soil. They also spoke Gaelic – a language that is, as the author puts it, a ‘beautiful prison’, a dialect that unites the clan and cuts it off from the outside world. As one of MacLeod’s wise old women observes: ‘No one has ever said that life is to be easy. Only that it is to be lived.’ Despite its hardships, it is a rich and authentic life – stocked with the wisdom, hard-won skills and cultural possessions of a people. What does the future hold? One of MacLeod’s spokesman heroes, a miner whose children will have a ‘better’ life, offers a bitter prophecy:

Our sons will go to the universities to study dentistry or law and to become fatly affluent before they are 30. Men who will stand over six feet tall and who will move their fat, pudgy fingers over the limited possibilities to be found in other people’s mouths. Or men who sit behind desks shuffling papers relating to divorce or theft or assault or the taking of life. To grow prosperous from pain and sorrow and the desolation of human failure. They will be far removed from the physical life and will seek it out only through jogging or golf or games of handball with friendly colleagues.

These wayward sons of Nova Scotia will have ‘gentler deaths’. In return for what? Emptier lives. The Gaelic songs will be sung for only one generation more – to an audience of anthropologists and folklorists with their recording machines, in performances that are less preservation than cultural taxidermy.

As his clan name indicates, MacLeod derives from that wave of Highlanders driven into exile by the Clearances – ethnic cleansing, early-nineteenth-century style. Ancient anger smoulders, like the glow of a peat fire, at the heart of these stories. A more complex anger, one senses, is directed inward. The author is himself one of those sons who deserted the ‘physical life’ of his people. In one of his stories, sardonically entitled ‘Clearances’, a Cape Breton sheep farmer is urged by his restless son to sell the family property. Its ‘ocean frontage’ has taken the idle fancy of some rich Germans who want a second home. It must have crossed MacLeod’s mind, as he sat gazing through the window of his second home, maintained with the earnings of distant classrooms, that he has something in common with those foreigners.

In his mid-sixties, MacLeod was suddenly famous. He was ‘discovered’ and now ranks as a great Canadian author (a conjunction that would once have raised a patronising sneer in New York and London). Literary history will situate him among the ‘post-colonial’ writers, connoisseurs of ancient oppression, and he deserves to rank high in that company. Chauvinistically (my name, after all, is as clannish as his), I would also like to reclaim a part of MacLeod for Scottish literature – alongside Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a writer with whom he has affinities. There is something immensely reassuring about MacLeod’s late-career success. Good writing, it seems, will out. Talent like his needs no hype. Nor need it deal with metropolitan or modishly high-concept themes. His narrative technique is deceptively simple. Judging by the texture of his prose and the sparseness of his output, he is a craftsman who patiently whittles and winnows until he has the perfectly shaped literary object. The bare-bones style of MacLeod’s writing (which has not significantly changed over the course of thirty years) and his habit of heaping detail upon detail like stones on a cairn are best shown by quotation. Here, in the title story from his first collection, ‘The Lost Salt Gift of Blood’, he describes the most important room in an old woman’s home:

The kitchen is small. It has an iron cookstove, a table against one wall and three or four handmade chairs of wood. There is also a wooden rocking chair covered by a cushion. The rockers are so thin from years of use that it is hard to believe they still function. Close by the table there is a washstand with two pails of water upon it. A washbasin hangs from a driven nail in its side and above it is an old-fashioned mirrored medicine cabinet. There is also a large cupboard, a low-lying couch and a window facing upon the sea.

As he lay in the hospital dying of tuberculosis, George Orwell found that he could calm his panic by writing down, as a reporter might, the exact contents of the room around him. There was comfort in inventory. One feels the same painful pressure – and artistic relief – in MacLeod’s writing.

In the largest sense, MacLeod’s fiction articulates the pathos of social progress. His is the generation of Nova Scotians that broke away from an essentially peasant existence – anachronistically preserved by a wilderness and its natural resources (mature forests, coal, cod) that no longer exist. His is the last generation that, from indelible childhood memory, knows the past. But he knows much else. He went to the university, cultivated his mind, bettered himself. He is none the less haunted by a sense of lost authenticity, by the life not lived.

It isn’t really about anything.
Simon and Schuster’s explanation for rejecting an early draft of
A Confederacy of Dunces

The circumstances surrounding John Kennedy Toole’s fictions are as American gothic as anything even Flannery O’Connor could devise. Without any of his friends suspecting he had authorial ambitions, Toole wrote
A Confederacy of Dunces
(1980) in the early 1960s, while doing his national service in Puerto Rico. Eerily apt, in the light of later events, the title is taken from Jonathan Swift’s jaundiced rule of literary life: ‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.’ The manuscript was submitted to Simon and Schuster, where Robert Gottlieb, after dickering about for two years, eventually turned it down in 1966. By 1969 Toole had been for some years an English instructor at Dominican College, working in his spare time on his Ph.D. A modestly fulfilling academic career was in prospect. But in the late 1960s Toole began to behave in a paranoid way, as his friends and colleagues recall, and he suddenly disappeared. It later emerged that he had taken off on a three-month automobile odyssey to California. On his way back, he called by Flannery O’Connor’s house in Georgia. Then, outside Biloxi in Mississippi, on 26 March 1969, he connected some garden hosepipe to the exhaust of his car and gassed himself. He was just thirty-one years old.

Toole left no will. An only child, he did leave a suicide note for his parents, which his mother read and destroyed without divulging its contents. Among her son’s effects she found the manuscript of his rejected novel, which she had never read, and his correspondence with Simon and Schuster. Thelma Toole thereafter always maintained that the New York publishers (more particularly, that ‘Jewish creature’, Gottlieb) had effectively murdered her son by first raising, then dashing, his hopes. More than one commentator has hinted that John’s relationship with his overwhelming mother may have had something to do with his suicide; it certainly conditions much of his fiction.

Although she was seventy and had an invalid husband (a car salesman in his earlier years), Thelma Toole devoted the rest of her life to getting John’s novel published and his genius vindicated.
A Confederacy of Dunces
was eight times rejected. But after eleven years, Mrs Toole, with the help of writer Walker Percy, induced Louisiana State University Press to accept it. Percy wryly recalls: ‘While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me. What she proposed was preposterous … her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said … if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist … I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.’ The narrative – unsurprisingly perhaps – centred on a gloopy young man’s relationship with his domineering mother in steamy New Orleans.
A Confederacy of Dunces
was duly published, won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1981, became an instant bestseller and a work of cult fiction to rival
Catcher in the Rye
.

Reportedly, Toole’s literary remains comprised a carbon of the rejected
A Confederacy of Dunces
and the finished manuscript of another novella called
The Neon Bible
(1989). He had allegedly written it for a literary competition when he was sixteen, just after going up to Tulane University. Apparently Mrs Toole knew nothing about this other work until well after her son’s death. It would have seemed logical to publish
The Neon Bible
in the immediate uprush of Toole’s posthumous fame, in the early 1980s. But there were difficulties, most of them originating with the author’s mother. Since he had died intestate, Louisiana law made all Toole’s relatives on his father’s side co-owners of his estate. Thelma Toole – who evidently despised her dead husband’s family as ‘shanty Irish’ – had persuaded them to waive their rights in
A Confederacy of Dunces
, but they were not inclined to part with their shares of
The Neon Bible
.

There was also the complication that Mrs Toole had early on given the manuscript to another publisher, Rhoda Faust, with verbal permission (as Ms Faust claimed) to publish the work – and Faust was disinclined to surrender the property. There followed a complicated series of lawsuits during the course of which – in 1984 – Mrs Toole died. In her will, she nominated Kenneth Holditch as trustee for
The Neon Bible
and left instructions that he was to prevent publication in perpetuity. Mrs Toole’s resentment at her relatives and Ms Faust now exceeded her desire to get her son’s work in print. Having fought like a lioness to have him published, she now fought even from beyond the grave to have him suppressed. A reluctant Holditch followed her instructions until the courts finally overruled him in 1987. Thus it is that – literally over Mrs Toole’s dead body – posterity had
The Neon Bible
. It is certainly worth having – not least for the biographical light it throws on this strangest of novelists.

The story covers a period from around 1937 to 1953 and is set in rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. David, the hero-narrator, grows up an only child in redneck poverty. His shiftless father drifts from job to job, beats his wife and lets David get beaten up by young thugs his own age. The family are ostracised by respectable townspeople, because they cannot afford to pay church dues. Eventually the father dies, a GI in Italy. His survivors do not much care. David gets love only from his eccentric Aunt Mae, a sixty-year-old floozy, but she resurrects her show-business career for the duration and goes off to Nashville, leaving the boy wholly friendless. David’s world is one of mysterious violence, utter solitude and a rock-hard Southern Baptist Church, whose neon sign on Main Street (a garishly coloured page of the Bible) threatens his eventual damnation.