Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (2 page)
Read Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Online
Authors: John Sutherland
245. Guillermo Cabrera Infante
269.
Postscript:
George MacDonald Fraser
277.
Postscript:
Bret Easton Ellis
285.
Postscript:
Lydia Davis and Siri Hustvedt
286.
Postscript:
Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt
291. Martin Amis and Richard Hughes
There’s a huge popular appetite for secrets. As for the biographical ‘explanation’ generally it makes matters worse by adding components that aren’t there and would make no aesthetic difference if they were.
Nathan Zuckerman,
Exit Ghost
, Philip Roth
The personality of a writer does become important after we have read his book and begin to study it.
E. M. Forster,
Anonymity: An Inquiry
A shilling life will give you all the facts.
W. H. Auden (who instructed his friends to burn all his letters, after his death)
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter.
Henry James (before touching the light to a bonfire of his personal papers)
Authors are just fictional people about whom we have a few biographical elements, never enough to make them truly real people.
Jacques Bonnet
It does not follow that because a particular work of art succeeds in charming us, its creator also deserves our admiration.
Plutarch (in his
Life of Pericles
), translated by Peter Jones
A history of fiction in 294 lives
Once upon a time it would have been possible to write a comprehensive ‘Lives of the Novelists’ – around the time, I would hazard, that Walter Scott wrote his
Lives of the Novelists
. The 1825 field that Scott surveyed was more or less coverable by a single reader poring diligently over the ‘greats’, skimming the less than great, and sniffing at the waste-of-time majority before tossing it aside. In our time, an army of Scotts would be defeated by the two million or so eligible works in the vaults of the Scottish National Library, successor to the Advocates Library which served Sir Walter’s needs.
All modern histories of the novel are wormholes through the cheese (the novelist William Gibson’s neat analogy). The story of fiction that follows is almost as idiosyncratic as the subject itself, it being in the nature of worms to burrow less directly than crows fly – both, like literary critics, are scavengers. What I’ve written has been sustained by the belief that literary life and work are inseparable and mutually illuminating. This is not, as the epigraphs in the prelims suggest, a thesis universally accepted by the novelists themselves, but do worms care what the cheese thinks?
The reader may be shocked by encounters with a number of writers not normally granted entry to the sacred grove. I confess that I do value a range of fiction that literary history has often, in my view, wrongly undervalued. And the writers who have produced it often have the more interesting lives. By the same token, some names – including some great names – are missing from this book. I offer two excuses: first, quarts and pint pots; and second, isn’t this book big enough? A single book and one person’s reading career (however obsessive) cannot contain or cover this richest of literary fields. What I have aimed to achieve in breadth will, I hope, to some extent make up for these absences. All the novel’s varied genres are displayed in what follows, including (though the main focus is on adult literature) one or two writers best known for their books for children whom I could not bring myself to exclude.
It will be easy to see why most of those writers who did get in got in. What they have in common is that they are all novelists who have meant something to me, or who have come my way over a long reading career and stayed with me, for whatever reason.
John Sutherland
London, August 2011
I would like to thank John Davey, Jane Robertson, Peter Carson and Penny Daniel for their support, encouragement, assistance and (all too often) correction. The mistakes which remain are, alas, all mine.
The following abbreviations will be found appended to the entries:
ANB The American National Biography
Biog a biography which is a useful starting point
DCB Dictionary of Canadian Biography
FN the author’s full name(s)
MRT Must Read Text
ODNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The cited biographies and must-reads are my own wholly personal choices. Where biographical sources are not specifically cited they are taken from the biography which is appended at the end of the entry.
I have … used Similitudes.
John Bunyan was born in Bedford in 1628, in the lowest stratum of that middle England town. His father was an illiterate brazier and tinker, a wandering tradesman. Bunyan later allegorised life’s wanderings into a pilgrimage, heavy pack on back.
Largely self-educated, Bunyan had steeped himself in the English gospels. The most familiar portrait shows him with one book under his arm – the Geneva Bible. This is the volume which, at the outset of his
Progress
, Christian claps to his bosom, fingers in his ears, as he runs away from his amazed wife and family, shouting ‘Life, life, eternal life’ (and to hell with child support). It struck even Mark Twain’s Huck Finn as odd. He recalls (among the little he has read) a book ‘about a man that left his family, it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.’
Like others of his station in life, the pulpit was Bunyan’s university and preachers his teachers. Religion, in Bunyan’s view of life, was battle; and the pilgrim’s staff was a weapon with which to crack heretical skulls:
No Lion can him fright,
He’ll with a Giant fight,
But he will have a right
To be a Pilgrim.
The other cheek was never turned.
He was a Christian soldier, forever marching as to war – literally. Before the age of sixteen John Bunyan enlisted in Cromwell’s ‘Roundhead’ parliamentary army. He recalls that service and the epic victories over the long-haired foe and – not least – his sinful self in the spiritual journal,
Grace Abounding
. There he chronicles his heroic struggle with such vices as bell-ringing (and worse) and his life-and-soul discovery that he was, after all, one of the elect. Election was confirmed when a comrade took his place on guard duty only to be ‘shot into the head with a musket bullet’. Could a sign be clearer?
He married around 1650 and had four children by this first marriage. His wife’s names are unknown – but it is deduced she strengthened his religious sense of mission. She died in 1658 and he remarried the following year. From 1655 he addressed congregations as a militant Baptist preacher. He despised Quakers almost as much as Royalists. The schisms of this period defy description: they would have
split the atom, if it had been theology. In 1660, with the return of the new King Charles (one of the elite, not the elect) from France and the downfall of the Commonweal, Bunyan was imprisoned for obstinately preaching without a licence and ‘devilishly and fiendishly’ not attending lawful church service.
He would spend, with brief intervals of freedom, some twelve years in Bedford prison – as what we would call a prisoner of conscience. It was there, suffering for his faith, that he conceived and wrote
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, as well as a flood of other books, verse and pamphlets. He expected to die in prison and was prone to crippling bouts of what he called ‘despond’.
The Bedford jail was, in the late seventeenth century, rather more humane than the human sty which appalled the great prison reformer, John Howard, a hundred years later. It was situated in Silver Street, in the bustling centre of the town. It was in the prison day-room that Bunyan wrote. Inmates, even in a relatively humane penitentiary could not expect candles – leave those to the sinful playhouse.
It was more a kind of house arrest than incarceration, if not actually a ‘club penitentiary’, as Americans call their open prisons. Solzhenitsyn, who compiled the
Gulag Archipelago
in Stalin’s vile camps, was obliged to consign his great narrative to memory, while the incarcerated Bunyan evidently had access to writing materials – and printers. It wasn’t quite Proust’s cork-lined bedroom, but adequate. Victorians, such as the artist Frederick Walker, liked to picture Bunyan in durance vile, but the truth was less melodramatic. Something more like Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own might be more appropriate – but with the lock on the outside.
The full title of Bunyan’s great work is:
The Pilgrim’s Progress FROM THIS WORLD TO That which is to come. Delivered under the Similitude of a DREAM. Wherein is Discovered, 1. The manner of his setting out.—2. His Dangerous Journey; and — 3. His safe Arrival at the Desired Countrey.
Bunyan justified the imaginative aspect of his allegorical work (Puritans have always been suspicious of fiction) with an epigraphic quotation from the Book of Hosea 12:10: ‘I have … used Similitudes.’ Similitudes, or ‘Fiction’ was licit: the Bible said so. But it was slippery. Clearly the gospel story was historical truth – not ‘similitudinous’. Like every novelist after him, Bunyan was a conceptual fence-straddler: ‘Real, but not real.’ One leg on either side.
The Pilgrim’s Progress
’s influence on the subsequent history of fiction is clear enough. The pulpit is always there, for a certain kind of novelist. Before embarking on
Vanity Fair
(the title, of course, flagrantly lifted from Bunyan) Thackeray informed the editor of
Punch
– the wonderfully named Mark Lemon – that he
regarded his mission as a novelist as ‘serious as the parson’s own’. D. H. Lawrence went a step further: the novel was, he declared, ‘the one bright book of life’ – the Bible for modern man. At least, as written by Lawrence it was.
The Pilgrim’s Progress
is the all-time fiction bestseller. There have been more editions than anyone has counted. It is still widely read by the multitude (particularly in residually puritan America) for the same reason that it was read in the seventeenth century – it is a novel which can be read by those who distrust novels. But Bunyan’s achievement is greater than moving tons of copies out of the Amazon warehouse, year-in, year-out. His allegorical narrative made room for the novel to be morally serious. It was the necessary first step for the book of life.
He died as he would have wanted. Having been drenched in a rainstorm and subsequently contracting a chill, he insisted on preaching, precipitating a fatal fever which stopped his voice forever.
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