Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (38 page)

As Peyton drops, however, the rope breaks. He swims away, bullets pinging into the water around him. He scrambles ashore, evades capture and makes his way south – through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape. Finally he reaches home – his wife, smiling, is waiting to greet him at the door:

As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon – then all is darkness and silence!

Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

Major Ambrose Bierce was honourably discharged from the service, a more bitter man than when he had put on his blue uniform, as an idealistic private, in 1861. He went west, where the war had been least traumatic, working as a journalist in San Francisco.

In 1871, Bierce married and in the same year he published his first story, ‘The Haunted Valley’, in a journal edited by Bret Harte. It was an auspicious start. Bierce’s marriage was a ‘good’ one, as the world judged such things, and brought him money and status. The couple spent some years in England, where he wrote for British papers, and their first two children were born in the country. Bierce returned to San Francisco in 1875, becoming, over time, a senior figure in that dynamic city’s newspaper world. In this capacity he formed what would be the most important relationship of his life, with William Randolph Hearst (whom he cordially loathed), joining the magnate’s
San Francisco Examiner
, in 1887.

At this point, personal troubles crowded on Bierce. He separated from his wife and one son committed suicide; another would later die of drink. Bierce was increasingly obsessed by the ‘Octopus’ – the railroad barons, notably Collis P. Huntington, whose steely tentacles, he believed (along with other San Francisco writers like Frank Norris), were strangling the West. Over the next few years, during his relationship with Hearst, Bierce produced the vivid, and often savagely anti-war, Civil War short stories, on which his posthumous reputation rests. The bulk of them are collected as
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
(1891). Bierce’s majestic exercise in ‘cynicism’,
The Devil’s Dictionary
, was published in 1906. In his seventies, Bierce toured the Civil War battlefields where he had fought and bled as a young man. He then crossed the border into Mexico and was never heard of again – perhaps he went to fight again in that country’s then raging civil war, perhaps simply to die as an ‘unknown soldier’.

This final act has crowned Bierce’s career with romantic legend (see, for example, Carlos Fuentes’s fantasy of the unchronicled Mexican years,
The Old Gringo
, subsequently filmed, with Gregory Peck in the title role.) There are less dramatic hypotheses. Glenn Willeford speculates that: ‘Since his best fiction writing had been the war stories, the old writer wanted to obtain more war material in order to continue in his profession. The only way to accomplish that was to go and experience another war.’ Less Old Gringo than Old Hack.

I was told by my lamented friend George Eliot that she would never read critiques.
One of Wingfield’s Prefaces, dated from the Garrick Club

‘The Honble. Lewis Wingfield’, as he insisted on being credited on his title pages, is living, and travelling, proof that interesting lives can result in interesting – if not necessarily great – fiction. Most great fiction, as a general rule, is created in a condition of cloistered retreat from what Conrad called ‘the destructive element’. But, occasionally, a novelist hurls himself in – and none plunged more recklessly into the element than Wingfield.

Lewis Wingfield was born the youngest son of the sixth Viscount Powerscourt and educated at Eton and in Bonn. He gave up the army at the request of his mother, who feared for his health, though his subsequent career was anything but mollycoddled. During 1865, he was for a while an actor – and throughout life he was fascinated by the question of how Shakespeare should best be staged. As his
ODNB
entry notes: ‘Wingfield has left many examples of his eccentric behaviour, such as going to the Derby as a “negro minstrel”, spending nights in workhouses, and pauper lodgings, and becoming an attendant in a madhouse. He travelled in various parts of the East and was one of the first Englishmen to journey in the interior of China.’ This last visit inspired his novel,
The Lovely Wang
(1887).

Wingfield was stationed in Paris during the siege by the Prussians in 1870, communicating with the
Daily Telegraph
and
The Times
by balloon. For a while he was a painter (renting Whistler’s studio) and later a theatrical costume designer – a subject on which he wrote a book which is still consulted. However, Wingfield’s health never recovered from a tour with the British Army in the Sudan in 1884.

In the course of this extraordinary life, Wingfield found time to write a dozen novels. They manifest the same brio as do his exploits.
The Curse of Koshiu
(1888) is among the best things he did in fiction. ‘A Chronicle of Old Japan’, based manifestly on personal acquaintance with the new Japan, it recounts the fall of the House of Hojo, in the fourteenth century. They can claim to be the bloodiest clan in the country’s bloody history, as the reader is lip-smackingly informed: ‘When the first of the line erected a strong fortress – the Castle of Tsu, which will serve as background to many scenes in this our chronicle, he gave to it a bloody baptism, by burying beneath the foundations two hundred living men.’

The plot is simple, and strong. Two half brothers, Sampei and No-Kami, one the son of a concubine, the other a spouse, head the Hojo family – so strong an entity, that it dominates even the imperial Mikado himself. The history of Japan, as Wingfield
observes, is constructed around fraternal strife: in this case, the cause is a woman. The more savage of the brothers, No-Kami, sentences a righteously rebellious farmer, Koshiu, to be publicly crucified with his wife – his children being beheaded in front of him as he dies. It takes place during ‘a beautiful and still evening in autumn, with the opalescent sky of crystalline clearness, which so often in Japan, gives us a hint of the infinite.’ During the execution, described lingeringly over a whole chapter, Koshiu curses the Hojo. So it comes to pass. The narrative ends with battle, hara-kiri and the destruction of the Castle of Tsu by cataclysmic earthquake. The Hojo are no more.

It is made clear, from numerous asides, that Wingfield is among the very few Englishmen of his time who have actually seen Japan. And, by many decades, the first to describe, for example, the ‘hibachi’ barbecue. He had also read his sensation fiction. The novel, which is replete with sex and violence, rattles along. As action fiction goes,
The Curse of Koshiu
is quite as good as Fleming’s
You Only Live Twice
, or James Clavell’s
Shogun
.

Supposedly, W.S. Gilbert came by the idea for
The Mikado
in 1884, when a Japanese sword clattered down from his wall. One may suspect that Wingfield is also in the mix somewhere. He did not, alas, write any novel about his minstrel experiences at the Derby.

I am that queer monster the artist.
Henry James writing to Henry Adams

Henry James Jr was born in New York. Henry James Sr was a religious philosopher in the Carlyle-Emerson mould – something he passed on to Henry Jr’s gifted elder brother, William, author of
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902). Henry was never much taken with religion. On either side, his grandfathers were emigrants to America who had struck it very rich: in dry goods on his father’s side, cotton on his mother’s. James’s heroes, such as Newman in
The American
(whose wealth comes from we know not where) and Strether in
The Ambassadors
(whose wealth comes from the manufacture of ‘a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use’, mischievously supposed to be the chamber pot) are similarly placed. Money has to be made before culture can happen.

Henry’s upbringing was richly nomadic – a succession of American schools and instructors, fruitfully interrupted by years in Europe. European museums made an indelible impression. His father’s comment that he was a ‘devourer of libraries’ is much quoted and is, manifestly, no exaggeration. He is recorded as already writing stories ‘mainly of a romantic kind’ in his early teens.

James made an abortive start in law at Harvard in 1862. The Civil War had broken out and two of his brothers took up arms, while he was exempted on grounds of disability. He described how that disability happened in his late memoir,
Notes of a Son and Brother
(1914). He was eighteen and serving as a volunteer fireman. Fighting a fire in a stable, he found himself ‘Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences, where the rhythmic play of my arms, in tune with that of several other pairs, but at a dire disadvantage of position, induced a rural, a rusty, a quasi-extemporised old engine to work and a saving stream to flow, I had done myself, in face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an obscure hurt.’ The horrid obscure hurt has been interpreted as everything from castration to lumbago.

James published his first stories and critical pieces during a war they in no way reflected and by his early twenties was recognised as a rising author. He made literary friends easily throughout the whole of his life. His conversational charm was legendary and he developed table-talk into an art form. It is recalled vividly by Ezra Pound: ‘The massive head, the slow uplift of the hand,
gli occhi onesti e tardi
, the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture … I had heard it but seldom, yet it is all unforgettable.’ One can only wish that Thomas Edison had come along with his great invention fifty years earlier.

In 1864 the James family moved to Boston, whose literary milieu was, if anything, richer than New York’s. The Boston publisher, James T. Fields, and his
Atlantic Monthly
, were particularly supportive. James was all the while immersing himself in English and French literature and developing his own theories as to how the art of fiction might be just that – an ‘art’. In 1868 he published six stories and fifteen critical pieces, chewing away at the problem. He went to England the following year and was taken up by London literary society, though it was not an unmitigatedly happy period. Letters to his brother dwell on the private agonies of constipation – acute at this period and chronic throughout his life (ingenious links have been made with the tortured motions of his prose style).

It was while in England in 1870 that he learned of the death of his cousin, Mary (‘Minny’) Temple, from tuberculosis. Immortalised as Milly Theale in
The Wings of the Dove
(1902), he was plausibly in love with her. It is recorded that in late life, ‘Locked in a drawer in Lamb House, wrapped in silver paper, James kept a photograph of a
young woman. Once when Violet Hunt came to visit, James unlocked his treasure and carefully unwrapped it. He touched it as though it were sacred.’ There are those who believe his love for woman died with Minny. What seems clear, from fictions such as ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1888), is that James thought marriage, and what came with it, deflected the artist. It took the mind off art as it would have taken a monk’s mind off God.

He returned to America on Minny’s death, mournfully informing a friend, ‘It’s a good deal like dying.’ He came back to England two years later for what would be residence rather than an extended visit. Henceforth he would be, as he told his brother William, ‘ambiguous’ nationally. Fiction was above nation. The English novel was paralysed, as a genre, in high-Victorian provincialism, and sadly needed its Flaubert. James, as much at home in Paris as London, would supply it. At this period, he produced his first novels with his hallmark ‘international theme’,
Roderick Hudson
(1875),
The American
(1876–7),
The Europeans
(1878). The ‘innocent abroad’ comedy,
Daisy Miller
(1879) reveals a lighter comic touch but a vein of anti-Americanism which displeased some transatlantic readers.

As the decade ended, he was creating his most ambitious work to date,
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881) – the James novel about whose achievement there is least critical dispute. Whether he ever achieved as satisfactory a portrait of a man remains a matter of dispute. The novel was well received but a fluent stream of journalism and travel writing still supplied his main literary income. The English and American reading publics were not, en masse, ready for his novels, and this irked him. Already, authoritative commentators like William Dean Howells were hailing him as a ‘master’ – the hope of the Anglo-American novel. Why could he not bring in enough money to carry that mission through? His friend George du Maurier, before writing it himself, offered him the plot of
Trilby
, which James declined. He was not
that
desperate. None the less he looked enviously at the thousands Svengali brought its ‘inartistic’ creator, and the tens of thousands
Robert Elsmere
brought his humble devotee, Mrs Humphry Ward.