Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (64 page)

Miss Ashford wrote nothing more after going to board at a convent school aged thirteen, in Haywards Heath. Fiction was put away with other childish things. She married a farmer, ran a hotel, and had children of her own. Doubtless she told a rattling good bedtime story. Her identity as the authentic author of a work, often considered a fake because it was so good, was confirmed, at the end of a long and useful life, in 1972, in a
Times
obituary. The flavour of the romance is given in the first paragraph:

Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him. He had quite a young girl staying with him of 17 named Ethel Monticue. Mr Salteena had dark short hair and mustache and wiskers which were very black and twisty. He was middle sized and he had very pale blue eyes. He had a pale brown suit but on Sundays he had a black one and he had a topper every day as he thorght it more becoming. Ethel Monticue had fair hair done on the top and blue eyes. She had a blue velvit frock which had grown rarther short in the sleeves. She had a black straw hat and kid gloves.

Ethel is also given to ‘sneery’ looks when things do not go quite her way.

Daisy, one deduces, had come across library copies of the romances of Rhoda Broughton (
Cometh up as a Flower, Red as a Rose is She
, etc). But beneath the precociously fluent – but comically inept – veneer of high romantic rhetoric there is the hawk-eye of the child. The child’s view, in any number of ways, registers the surfaces of quotidian life missed by the less innocent, but more penetrative, adult eye. Thirty-seven-year-old (‘elderly’ indeed) Edward Casaubon’s attachment to nineteen-year-old Dorothea Brooke, for example, requires for its full moral analysis
the adult seriousness the author of
Middlemarch
brings to the affair. But what are the characters wearing on that important first visit to Lowick when the Casaubon–Brooke match is tentatively formed? We know about the marriage suit he has in mind, but what colour is the suit which the Revd Casaubon is wearing that day? Of what material is Dorothea’s visiting dress? The innocent eye sees more, and sees less.

Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash and be clean?

Mary Meredith was born in rural Shropshire – the region in which she set her fiction. She was proud of her ‘blood’; it ran pure Celtic on both sides of her family. Her father, George Meredith, was Welsh by origin (and, coincidentally, bore a famous novelist’s name); he is described as a ‘country gentleman and tutor’. Mary’s mother, a distant descendant of Walter Scott, was from Edinburgh by birth. Mary was the first of six Meredith children. She spent her early years in a fine country house in Much Wenlock. Her father took in boarding pupils and did some gentlemanly farming in the extensive grounds. Mary ‘adored’ him and was, in a sense, his prize pupil. The family was well off and she also had a governess. At fourteen she was sent away to be ‘finished’ at a school in Southport. Aged twenty, Mary was afflicted with what would be a lifelong thyroid deficiency, Graves’ disease. Easily curable now, it was not then and was particularly traumatic for a young woman. She was a lifelong invalid and – crucially – facially disfigured by the condition with goitre, protuberant eyes and chronic lassitude. From birth a reserved girl, she became a reclusive woman.

The Merediths moved home several times during Mary’s adolescence and young womanhood – always, however, to rural locations. Then her life was thrown into emotional turmoil by the death of her father in 1909. The following year she met a teacher, Henry Webb (a nephew of the channel swimmer hero, Captain Webb) and they married in 1912. He was, her biographers tactfully agree, a father substitute. There would be no children to the marriage. Webb’s work took him and his wife to Weston Super Mare, far from her beloved Shropshire. Uprooted, Mary began writing her first regional novel,
The Golden Arrow
. The central character, John Arden, was
clearly based on her father. The Webbs returned to Shropshire in 1914, where she finished the novel which was published in 1916.

It was followed up promptly by another Shropshire saga,
Gone to Earth
(1917), in which Webb hit her grim groove. It was well reviewed. Amazingly, Rebecca West chose it as her book of the year – something one can only ascribe to a critical neurosis triggered by the war (going badly for the Allies in 1917) and her disastrous love affair with H. G. Wells. As the title suggests,
Gone to Earth
is a novel which should be prescribed reading for all members of the House of Commons, when they debate, as they seem likely to do until the crack of doom, the issue of hunting with dogs. The heroine, Hazel Woodus, is one of Webb’s hallmark children of nature, a denizen of the woods, hills and streams – with something of the witch (as her mother was) about her. She carries with her a fragrance of ‘morning air’ and her soulmate is a pet fox, ‘Foxy’. Her father makes coffins – ominously. Ominous too is the opening paragraph:

Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky – shepherdless, futile, imponderable – and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

The novel is set during the First World War (in which Webb had three serving brothers). Delectable Hazel catches the eye of the local squire, a hunting man, Jack Reddin. One glimpses, as in a distorting mirror, reflections of
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
. To cut a long story short (which Webb doesn’t), Hazel has to choose between two legs or four. The novel ends with him leading a hunt (tally ho!) in which, to save Foxy, Hazel scoops the beast in her arms and plunges down a mine-shaft.
Liebestod
.

By the early 1920s the Webbs could afford to buy their own house, Spring Cottage, at Lyth Hill, near Shrewsbury. Henry had taken up a teaching post in London in 1921, so Mary had time to herself to write. The frequent separation put the marriage under strain, but Mary’s visits to London, and her increasingly well-regarded fiction, raised her profile in the literary world. Earning well from her fiction, with no family to distract her, Webb had the leisure to be a woman of letters and develop the sub-Brontëan genre of fiction in which she was now a leading light. This eminence was certified by the award of the Prix Femina prize for
Precious Bane
, in 1924. The novel is historical, set in the early nineteenth century and, inevitably, in Shropshire. The heroine is Prue Sarn – another child of nature, beautiful but for a harelip (the link with Webb’s own disfigurement is painfully obvious) which renders her, in the eyes of the village, perhaps a witch. Despite this, Prue is chosen as his love by a manly weaver, Kester Woodseaves. The novel ends, unusually for Webb, happily,
when Kester – like Lochinvar – scoops Prue up to gallop away with her on his horse. A barrage of erotic dialogue ensues:

‘Tabor on, owd nag!’ says Kester, and we were going at a canter towards the blue and purple mountains.

‘But no!’ I said. ‘It mun be frommet, Kester. You mun marry a girl like a lily. See, I be hare-shotten!’

But he wouldna listen. He wouldna argufy. Only after I’d pleaded agen myself a long while, he pulled up sharp, and looking down into my eyes, he said –

‘No more sad talk! I’ve chosen my bit of Paradise. ’Tis on your breast, my dear acquaintance!’

And when he’d said those words, he bent his comely head and kissed me full upon the mouth.

Webb was by now extremely ill and her marriage was effectively at an end. She was unable to finish what would have been her sixth novel, the yet more historical medieval romance,
Armour Wherein He Trusted
. She died, aged forty-six, in October 1927, and ‘went to earth’ in the grounds of Shrewsbury Cathedral.

Precious Bane
had been hugely admired on its publication by the Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. He voiced his admiration for her ‘neglected genius’ in April 1928, in a speech at the annual Royal Literary Fund Dinner. It was written up in the newspapers the following day and, six months after her death, Webb became the novelist of the day. Cape published a collected edition of her novels which sold like hot cakes.

It was not all Baldwinian praise. A smart young London journalist on the
Evening Standard
, Stella Gibbons, was given the task of editing the
The Golden Arrow
, which was being serialised in the newspaper in 1928. The result, four years later, was the witty spoof,
Cold Comfort Farm
. Flora Poste, a metropolitan ‘flapper’, is orphaned and goes to live in her aunt Judith Starkadder’s farm, in ‘Howling, Sussex’. ‘We are not like other folk, maybe,’ she is warned. But they are very like the folk in
Precious Bane
. Gibbons catches the Webbian tone wittily, as in the opening to
Chapter 3
of
Cold Comfort Farm
(see the passage from
Gone to Earth
, above): ‘Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns.’ Flora is not daunted by broodingly handsome Seth (whom she packs off to Hollywood), the child of nature Elfina, or old Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed and has never got over it. She cheerfully propels all of them into the twentieth century.

There is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages … Ulysses would make a Hottentot sick.
Alfred Noyes, author of the perennially popular poem, ‘The Highwayman’

Joyce was born in Dublin, middle-class and Catholic. He died neither – nor even a Dubliner, a city he never revisited in the last twenty-one years of his life. Half-ironically, it pleased him to claim aristocratic lineage and he sported a heraldic Joycean device in later life but his youthful family circumstances were humbler. He was the eldest surviving son of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Joyce (née Murray), a wife ten years younger and many ranks lower, as her husband thought, in social standing. Mary would die prematurely, exhausted by thirteen pregnancies. Her death was traumatic for ‘Jim’ and echoes, guiltily, through the opening chapter of
Ulysses
. A brood of nine children and a series of reckless mortgages impoverished John Joyce. His son had to adapt to coming down in the world and picked up the tricks of genteel cadging which would serve him in good stead as an author.

Ireland itself was in a period of decline in the late nineteenth century. The opening section of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916) centres on a raging argument about Parnell, the nationalist hero who was brought down by scandalous sexual misconduct with Kitty O’Shea. Wilde’s downfall was not more sensational. ‘Dante’ (the Joyce family nickname for his aunt Elizabeth) exults at Catholic morality’s victory: ‘– Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!’ Stephen’s father weeps for Ireland. Stephen (i.e. James Joyce) merely observes.

As he grew up, Joyce, like Stephen Dedalus, came to think little of his father – perhaps because, like his namesake, he was unwilling to fly high. He acknowledged the inheritance of a fine tenor voice and musical talent; otherwise, he owed no great filial debt. But fathers, as Joyce’s fascination with
Hamlet
testifies, are not easily erased from their sons’ lives. John Joyce figures prominently in the
Portrait
, in
Ulysses
, and as Earwicker in
Finnegans Wake
. John had failed many careers. In Joyce’s boyhood he was a local government official. The family was well enough off, and at this stage small enough for the six-year-old eldest son to be sent off as a boarder to Clongowes Wood College in co. Kildare. True to the proverb the Jesuits would have him for life – but not quite as the order would have wanted. Joyce professed to hate Clongowes and distilled his hatred into
A Portrait
where Stephen, true to his martyr’s name, is bullied, ‘pandied’ (corporally punished), misunderstood by teachers and – at the very lowest point – tipped into a cesspit, precipitating a dangerous bout of amoebic dysentery. The school records him as a brilliant pupil and, oddly, given his acute myopia, a decent sportsman.

He was withdrawn from Clongowes for non-payment of fees in 1891 – the year of Parnell’s death. It was not a comfortable home which welcomed him back to Dublin. His father’s improvidence, and drunkenness, and possible financial misdealings had brought the family to bankruptcy. Joyce gives a picture of the domestic squalor in
A Portrait
: ‘[Stephen] pushed open the latchless door of the porch and passed through the naked hallway into the kitchen. A group of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table. Tea was nearly over and only the last of the second watered tea remained in the bottoms of the small glass jars and jampots which did service for teacups.’ But there was worse than destitution: John Joyce was violent when drunk and his domestic brutality is vividly depicted in the short story in
Dubliners
, ‘Counterparts’.