Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (62 page)

A true pardnership is the sanctifiedest relation that grows.
From Beach’s novel,
Pardners

A ‘he-man’ novelist, sometimes labelled the poor man’s Jack London, Beach specialised in tales of the Yukon, celebrating, in all its husky glory, manly comradeship in the frozen North. His forte as a novelist were fight scenes featuring graphically described bone-breaking, eye-gouging and groin-kicking – all rather ‘advanced’ at the time. Beach was born in Michigan, in a log house as he liked to recall in later life, somewhat exaggeratedly. His father in fact ran a fruit farm – a line of work which Rex took up himself in late life. The family moved to Florida in 1886. After a brief spell at Rollins College, Rex spent a year studying law in Chicago, before throwing it up to play professional football. Athletic, and yearning for the outdoor life, Beach joined the gold rush to the Klondike (like Jack London) in 1900 where (like Jack London) he spectacularly did not make his fortune – failing even to reach the minefields (Jack London did, but never struck it rich).

Denied gold, Rex won silver representing his country in water polo in the 1904 Olympic Games, in St Louis. The next year, he took up writing. His first novel,
The Spoilers
(1905, love and pick-axes in the Yukon) laid the way for a string of bestselling ‘Alaskan Adventures’.
The Spoilers
made the bestseller lists in 1906, as did
The Barrier
(1908), a story of half-breeds in Alaska; and
The Silver Horde
(1909), a novel
about salmon and the romance of canning them. Beach had married in 1907 and taken up residence in New York state, moving later to Florida with his wife Greta; the couple were childless. Beach committed suicide by shotgun in 1949, having suffered for two years from cancer of the throat and been recently widowed (in a number of ways, Rex Beach anticipates the career and death of Ernest Hemingway).

Beach was notable for the pioneer canniness with which he cultivated and exploited film rights to his literary property. He was the first American author routinely to insert a clause about movie adaptation into his book contracts. This foresight paid off:
The Spoilers
was filmed at least five times, on each occasion earning fresh revenue for its author (the novel was also adapted into a long-running stage play). Beach supervised a six-reel 1916 movie version, in which he himself appears. In 1930 Paramount brought out a version starring Gary Cooper. Most famously, in 1942, John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich starred in a Universal Studios version. It is not fanciful to trace a line from Beach to Duke’s tough-guy film persona.

He made a third fortune in later life from flower and vegetable growing and scientific farming, exploiting skills he had inherited from his father. Canny to the end, one of his last acts was to secure a then (1948) record-breaking $100,000 film-rights payment for his last novel,
Woman in Ambush
(published posthumously, in 1951 – never filmed).

Deeping was by no means without talent. The Times
obituary

Warwick Deeping was, for a few years, the most read novelist in the English-speaking world. He could also, despite his popularity in America, claim to be among the most tweedily English. Born in Southend, Essex, he was the son and grandson (on both sides) of Southend doctors, successful and highly respected citizens in their line of work. The only boy in his family, on leaving the Merchant Taylors’ boarding school in London, Warwick progressed to Cambridge, to read science and medicine, graduating with his MB in 1902. He trained for some time in London hospitals with a view to following the family profession, but the details of his life at this period are hazy, and suggest profound career uncertainties.

Some of his experience may be reflected in that of Kit in
Sorrell and Son
– also an only son and a clever young doctor. Like Kit, Deeping married early, to Maude Phyllis Merrill, in 1904. He could not, one imagines, have done so without financial support from his family (fathers enjoy a notably warm image in Deeping’s fiction). The marriage was to be lifelong, happy, but childless. The couple lived after marriage in Battle, near Hastings, where Deeping’s father and family had retired in 1900. From 1911 until 1919, they lived in a house they had themselves built. His father’s death, in 1909, may have furnished Deeping with sufficient legacy for him to further explore what to do with his life.

He had published his first novel,
Uther and Igraine
, in 1903. The Arthurian historical romance was well received. It, and a couple of similar modishly William Morris efforts, induced the author to give up his medical practice in Hastings altogether and try for literary fame. Later, the Great War introduced grimmer conflict than that of the Round Table: somewhat too old to carry a rifle in 1914 (he was thirty-seven) Deeping served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, Belgium, Gallipoli and Egypt. The RAMC typically took heavy casualties and he evidently saw frontline action. On demobilisation in 1919, Warwick and Maude moved to a new house in rural Surrey, where, despite his wealth, they would remain for the rest of their lives.

After the war he returned to fiction – but of a harder kind than earlier. In his new mode, Deeping enjoyed a sensational success with his ‘ex-serviceman’ novel,
Sorrell and Son
(1925), which went through forty British editions in the next fifty years, topped the American bestseller list and inspired two movies – one silent, one ‘talkie’. It is the story of ‘Captain Sorrell’, a decorated frontline officer and single father (divorced – he is the innocent party), who loses caste after the war and is obliged to work as a hotel porter – but suffers all for the sake of his son Kit. The novel is less bitter than A. S. M. Hutchinson’s even better selling ex-serviceman novel,
If Winter Comes
(1921). None the less it insists on old class hierarchies (Kit, for instance, habitually addresses his father as ‘pater’ – Americans loved that kind of thing). Unlike Hutchinson’s bleak chronicle, or Richard Aldington’s even bleaker
Death of a Hero
(1929),
Sorrell and Son
ends upliftingly. Sorrell Sr is returned to the gentleman class before dying, gallantly, of cancer: Kit becomes a leading London surgeon.

Deeping’s novels lorded it over the American bestseller lists in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Doomsday
(1927) caught on to the rural, ‘mud and blood’ theme found in Mary Webb’s
Precious Bane. Old Pybus
(1928) has as its hero a father whose sons show the white feather.
Roper’s Row
(1929) is a doctor’s tale, of the kind later popularised by A. J. Cronin and Lloyd C. Douglas.
Exiles
(1930) takes as its setting a community of Britons living on private incomes abroad.
The Road
(1931) is a wartime novel,
as is
Old Wine and New
(1932). These were Deeping’s glory years, and his bestsellers made a mint of money for him. They seem not to have altered materially the quiet life he and his wife chose to lead. His
Who’s Who
entry lists his mild recreations as tennis, golf, motoring, gardening and carpentry. Cassell’s publicity photos (he was loyal to the one publisher throughout his career) portray a tweedy, pipe-smoking gentleman of the old school. By the mid-1930s, Deeping’s massive popularity had begun to wane, but he continued to write fiction up to his death, and posthumous works appeared for seven years after. He left £33,000 – a fortune in 1950. His wife survived him by twenty-one years.

Warwick Deeping, the novelist, is little revisited nowadays. But he gave his name to an anti-submarine vessel (commissioned in 1934) which was sunk by German torpedo boats, in relatively shallow waters, off the Isle of Wight in 1940. It has become a favourite wreck among the recreational diving community and keeps the Deeping name alive.

Novelist, Landscape Painter, Wood Carver, Boxer, Master of Fence and Athlete.
Edward Farnol’s description of his brother, Jeffery

Farnol was born in Birmingham, the son of a factory-employed brass-founder. One of the appreciation societies which, to this day, hold him in affection, records Jeffery’s seed-time as a romantic novelist:

His father, Henry, nightly read aloud to his wife as she sat sewing, after the boys had been put to bed. But Jeffery & his younger brother Ewart would creep silently down the stairs in their nightshirts & sit outside their parents’ door listening to their father’s beautiful, sonorous voice enacting all the characters while reading Alexandre Dumas, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens or Sir Walter Scott.

When Jeffery was ten, the family moved to London, spending time at Lee in Kent, a county whose laureate he would later be. He left school early. From the first he aspired to be a writer, not a metal worker, and for a number of years sponged off his family,
doing nothing. Finally, when his father encountered his layabout son emerging sleepily from his bedroom at noon (as he, the father, returned from his morning shift), there was a blazing row. It ‘ended by Jeffery being told that a job would be found for him with an engineering firm in Birmingham where he would be taught the useful craft of tool making’. He duly went off to lodge with an aunt; his brief experiences in the tool-making workshop were later romanticised in
Beltane the Smith
(1915). According to legend, a fracas with a foreman who called him a liar led to the apprentice being fired. A less legendary account has him being sent home for idling on the job. Observers record Farnol as being physically tiny (he wore size 5 in shoes throughout life) but ferociously physical by way of compensation. In later life he worked out with the age’s premier body-builder, Eugene Sandow, and mastered the many arts of fencing. His rapier technique was admired.

For a while Farnol lodged again with his long-suffering family in London and studied at Westminster School of Art night classes. From childhood he had loved wood carving, particularly ships and dramatic scenes from history. But art did not pay; nor did model-making; or, at this stage, writing. In 1900 he married Blanche Hawley, the sixteen-year-old daughter of an American artist, over in England to visit relatives. She was, like him, diminutive (a ‘Pocket Venus’) and probably pregnant before the marriage. Neither family was informed of the event.

Farnol borrowed £12 from his brother Edward, and emigrated to New York in 1902. Through the good offices of his artist father-in-law, the moderately eminent F. Hughson Hawley, he was employed there as a scene painter at the Astor Theatre. Farnol and Hawley, who had wanted better things for his daughter than an impecunious English dwarf with a paintbrush, quarrelled. The marriage broke up, temporarily, and Jeffery went off to slum it by himself in a ‘rat infested studio’ in New York’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’; a low period of his life, commemorated in
The Definite Object
(1917). He continued to write, doggedly, and in 1907 finally got a volume published,
My Lady Caprice
. It did not set the East River on fire. But it was over these tough years that he wrote the 200,000 words of his Regency romance,
The Broad Highway: A Romance of Kent
. No American publisher would take the manuscript on the grounds that it was ‘too long and too English’. Enterprisingly, Blanche sent it to her mother in England, who submitted it to Sampson Low, who accepted it with a £250 advance.

Published in 1910,
The Broad Highway
went on to be a massive hit in the UK, and a year later in America, where it sold getting on for half-a-million copies. ‘Too English’ was now a strong selling point. Farnol’s narrative opens with a humorous ‘Ante Scriptum’ in which the author mulls over with a ‘companion of the road’ what kind of novel he shall write. The action opens in the Regency period with the reading
of ‘Buck’ Vibart’s eccentric will. To one nephew, the scholarly Peter, he leaves ten guineas. To another nephew, the ‘rake’ Maurice, he leaves £20,000. Either nephew will be eligible for a half a million pounds, ‘if either shall, within one calendar year, become the husband of Lady Sophia Sefton of Cambourne’. Rollicking complications ensue. Farnol’s nimble picaresque, sword-clashing, and rose-tinted vision of the Regency period was much imitated – most profitably by Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland. Suddenly windfall-rich, the reunited Farnols returned to Britain and settled in a country house, Sunnyside, in Lee, Kent. Jeffery set to writing a string (eventually forty-strong) of ‘Regencies’, pirate tales and stories of the road. None achieved the runaway sales of
The Broad Highway
, although the Farnol name assured good sales right up to the time of his death. His theme – the pleasures of exuberant youth, usually in some romanticised past period of English history – never varied.