Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (63 page)

Farnol was too old and too short-sighted, to serve in the First World War. Like other bestselling novelists, such as Hall Caine and John Buchan, he propagandised and reported from the Front, adding palpably to the pressure to get America into the fight. After the war, as a biographer records, ‘his fondness for gangsters and dandies did not always serve him well. He took into his employ a certain cad who robbed him of thousands of pounds over many years.’ A chronically quarrelsome man, he fell out with his surviving brother Edward (Ewart had been killed in the war). Persistently unfaithful, he divorced his first wife in 1938, marrying a younger woman, Phyllis, in the same year. They lived in Eastbourne until Farnol’s death, with one adopted daughter. His second wife completed his last novel,
Justice by Midnight
(1956), for those old enough to remember the author of
The Broad Highway
.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order.

Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex life as, say,
slutty Lydia Bennet? E. M. Forster was a virgin until the age of thirty-nine when he had his first ‘full’ sexual experience (a ‘hurried sucking off,’ his most recent biographer, Wendy Moffat, informs us) with a passing soldier on a beach in Alexandria. By that point, five of Forster’s six novels were written and the last,
A Passage to India
, drafted. Until he was thirty, with his
oeuvre
behind him, he did not, he later confessed, ‘know exactly how male and female joined’. ‘Muddle and mystery’ between the sheets as well as in the Marabar caves.

Does a writer’s carnal experience matter? D. H. Lawrence, the most unzipped of British novelists, believed it did. His chauvinist sneer at Austen as a ‘narrow gutted spinster’ indicates that some rumpy-pumpy would have done wonders for her fiction. Of Forster, Lawrence told Bertrand Russell, ‘Morgan sucks his dummy – you know, those child’s comforters – long after his age.’ He should, one deduces, have graduated to his grown-up sucking earlier, for the good of English literature.

Moffat had first access to Forster’s recently (2008) derestricted diaries and plunged up to her armpits in them. Her thesis is that
Maurice
– the
Bildungsroman
in which Forster chronicles his own homosexual ordeal – is ‘his only truly honest novel’. The other five avoid the point. For Moffat, the primal moment in Forster’s life was when the over-mothered five-year-old discovered that by rubbing his groin against tree trunks, while picturing his tutor’s moustache, he could perform the child’s ‘dirty trick’. It might, one supposes, explain something about the wych-elm and the pigs’ teeth in
Howards End
. Forster’s progress in self-abuse is tracked by the indefatigable Moffat to its heroic heyday, when he did it ‘thrice in one afternoon’ in his eighty-second year, when – despite the trauma of two prostate operations (brought on by ‘excessive masturbation,’ his doctor gravely informed him) – ‘the worm that never dies’ gave its ‘last wriggle’. At prep school, a callous classmate yelled out: ‘Have you seen Forster’s cock? A beastly little brown thing.’ At the same school, Forster was abused by a passing paedophile who afterwards proffered a compensatory shilling, which was politely declined. At his public school, Forster was derided as a ‘cissy’ – that most hurtful objurgation in the schoolyard lexicon.

King’s College Cambridge was, by contrast, a haven. What was ‘cissy’ at Ton-bridge School was ‘hellenism’ among the more refined spirits where Morgan found lifelong friends, but no sexual fulfilment – impossible, of course, in a world terrorised by the Wilde scandals. Forster was also inhibited by ineradicable delicacy. Unlike Lytton Strachey – who gloried in the word – he would not even spell out ‘bugger’ in full in the diaries Moffat has pored over. Forster lost his faith at Cambridge (too little ‘fun and humour’ in the gospels) and found a warm place with the Apostles. Their ethical creed, expounded by G. E. Moore, would sustain him. It was at Cambridge he discovered what ‘friendship’ – homosexuality without sex – could be.

After graduation, Forster took the Edwardian Grand Tour with his mother, the redoubtable Lily. ‘Gide hasn’t got a mother!,’ he once complained, in reference to the franker author of
Si le grain ne meurt
. But views from
pensione
rooms and longest journeys furnished what he needed for his
annus mirabilis
, 1904, when three of his novels were substantially composed. At twenty-five he found his life ‘rather sad and dull’. He had, he felt, passed ‘the romantic desirable age’ in a condition of lust-racked virginity. He resolved to smoke in public on the grounds ‘it gives a reason for you’. Whether it was the cigarettes or not, at this point in his life, partners began to figure. First was Syed Ross Masood, a Muslim Indian – their relationship was ‘joyful but inconclusive’.

With the success of
Howards End
, Forster found himself a celebrity, rich but still virginal. There occurred at this point the event he describes (in his preface to
Maurice
) as life-changing. On a visit to the sexual anarchist Edward Carpenter, the sage’s partner, George Merrill, tapped him, ‘just above the buttocks’. It seemed, he said, ‘to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts’.

Forster had a goodish First World War as a ‘searcher’, tracking down, from the accounts of the wounded, soldiers ‘missing in action’. The work took him to Alexandria. Here he came into contact with the poet C. P. Cavafy – a more modern, less inhibited Hellene than had ever come his way at Cambridge. Sexually, Forster’s life began at forty. With the young Egyptian, Muhammad al-Adl, he had his first ‘anxious but very beautiful affair’. Moffat’s description of the breakthrough moment is a good example of her no-nonsense style: ‘Mohammed gave Morgan a “sudden hard kiss” and after “a gruff demur” leaned back, untied his linen trousers, and let Morgan masturbate him. This was a milestone. The struggle was over.’ And so, alas, were the novels. There followed a second visit to India and a Hindi ‘boy’, Kanaya, to match the Muslim. (Moffat, who spares us nothing, records that this was an occasion when Forster ‘penetrated’, deviating from his preferred pattern.)

‘The middle age of buggers,’ Virginia Woolf confided to her diary (with Forster in mind) ‘is not to be contemplated without horror.’ But it was Woolf, not Forster, who killed herself. The event, Forster confided to
his
diary, ‘turned my shit pale green and almost scentless’. Forster’s later years proved anything but horrific. A younger set of gays, led by the
über
-louche Joe Ackerley, created a new network of friends – to whom he was a Gandhiesque icon. He stood fast during the Second World War, articulating the liberal ideals for which Britain was fighting in noble broadcasts and essays. His last years were passed in the comfortable berths of a residential fellowship at his alma mater, King’s, and the cosy arrangement he set up, in joyous criminality, with the love of his life, the metropolitan (married) policeman, Bob
Buckingham, twenty-three years his junior. He was, reportedly (although, luckily for him, no one did report him), happy and, at last, a practising homosexual. But no longer a practising novelist. He suffered a stroke and died in Cambridge.

Other women change their names.

A pioneer of the romantic ‘saga’ for mainly women readers, de la Roche’s sixteen-strong Jalna/Whiteoaks sequence is reckoned to have sold over 11 million copies worldwide. Roche was born at Newmarket, Ontario, in rural Canada, the only child of a dry-goods salesman. Aiming higher in life, she added a French prefix and some aristocratic class to her name. ‘De la Roche’, as she now called herself, was brought up near Toronto, with many moves of childhood residence (the father’s business never thrived) and lived most of her adult life in the company of a cousin, Caroline Clement, who had been adopted by Roche’s parents. De la Roche and Clement themselves adopted a pair of orphans during their years together. They were also ardent dog lovers – and, possibly, commentators have speculated, lovers. There is some dispute, and fierce refutation, as to whether de la Roche might not have been a ‘child molester’, Clement being an infant when their relationship began.

De la Roche was for some years a student of art and began writing for the magazines in the early years of the twentieth century. Her first volume, a collection of linked short stories,
Explorers of the Dawn
, was published in 1922. The idea for ‘Jalna’ (the grand home through many generations of the ‘Whiteoaks’ family) came to her while spending some time in a summer cottage by a landed estate in Ontario. It was, of course, a fantasised vision of her own non-existent aristocratic background.
Jalna
(1927), a runaway bestseller in America, Canada and England, was the first of sixteen novels in the series, culminating with
Morning at Jalna
(1960). Nine of the series deal with the years after the late 1920s, the remainder range backwards into the family’s past. The dominant character is the hundred-year-old matriarch, Adeline.

Aimed principally at the woman reader, the
Jalna
saga was partly inspired by
Galsworthy’s
Forsyte Saga
and it bequeathed richly to the later emerging genre of multi-episodic radio and TV soap opera. Following the success of her series, de la Roche and Clement lived in style in Britain until 1938, when the author’s bad health, and fears about coming war, returned them to Canada. During their residence in the UK, they were frequent guests at Windsor – someone there evidently liked the novels.

My own idear is that these things are as piffle before the wind.
Mr Salteena, being stoical in the face of disaster

Surveying the large outlines of nineteenth-century fiction, one is struck by a singular gender difference. Women novelists tend to start early in life – often long before they become women – as if somehow born to the job. Men rebound into writing fiction later in life, typically after failing in, or defecting from, other more ‘serious’ jobs. Women novelists in the nineteenth century are – many of them – spectacularly precocious. Writing is not a last, but a first resort. One thinks of Grace Aguilar penning her first play at the age of twelve. Or Mary Shelley, composing
Frankenstein
at the age of seventeen. Or Jane Austen, reading out first drafts of ‘First Impressions’ to her family (father prominent, one likes to imagine, nodding appreciatively at the Mr Bennet jokes). And, of course, the sisters in Haworth – pre-pubescent – weaving their magical Angrian and Gondalian webs of narrative. What impels them to do it? To please their fathers, or father-figures, is the answer that the psychobiographers suggest. It’s very plausible. If true, the clinching example of girl’s fiction as a paternal offering is Daisy Ashford, the youngest novelist ever to achieve worldwide fame.

Daisy was brought up in Lewes, Sussex, into a prosperous and numerous Catholic family. As a nine-year-old girl she wrote novels after tea and before bedtime (a strict 6 o’clock) for the delectation of her father, a Civil Servant in the War Office: a readership of one. He copied the stories out for her, in a more legible adult hand, but retained her turns of phrase and orthography. Given the size of the Ashford brood, Daisy clearly won more than her fair share of paternal attention. Before she could put pen to paper, she dictated her first story to her father, ‘The Life of Father
McSwiney’, which she composed, aged four. Daisy’s mature
oeuvre
includes ‘The Hangman’s Daughter’, ‘Where Love Lies Deepest’, and the novel on which her fame rests,
The Young Visiters
.

The Young Visiters
was published in 1919 by Chatto and Windus, as a curiosity, with an introduction by J. M. Barrie, who – manuscript in hand – vouched for the bona fides of the ‘nine-year-old authoress’ and that the work was ‘unaided’. The Chatto editor in charge of the project, Frank Swinnerton, himself a novelist, interviewed the now fortyish author before giving it the go-ahead. She was, he recalled, ‘shy, giggling and tremendously excited at the prospect of being published’. Miss Ashford daringly asked Swinnerton for as much as £10. Chatto came through, voluntarily, with £500 and eventually paid thousands more. As the
Daily Mail
recorded, one half of London was laughing over
The Young Visiters
in 1919. The other half was impatiently waiting for the next edition to be printed, so they could get hold of the work that everyone else was in fits about.