Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (67 page)

In her twenties, Ferber took up work as a journalist in Wisconsin, Milwaukee and Chicago. She suffered a serious breakdown in her health in 1909, at which period she began seriously to write fiction. Her first story, ‘The Homely Heroine’, was published in
Everybody’s Magazine
in May 1910. She wrote her first novel,
Dawn O’Hara, the Girl who Laughed
(1911) while recuperating from her illness. Ferber had her first notable success with her short-story series featuring Emma McChesney, travelling saleswoman, over the years 1913–15, and they were successfully (and remuneratively) adapted for the stage. She served in the American Red Cross during the First World War, following which, her novel
The Girls
, the story of three generations of spinsters (from old maid to flapper), came out in 1921.

In 1924 she hit the big time with the number 1 bestseller,
So Big
. It established a vogue for narratives celebrating American ethnic diversity and American grit – a theme to which Ferber brings interesting sidelights. The action is set in the first two decades of the twentieth century and the central character is the inevitably indomitable Ferber woman, Selina Peake. A school teacher in the ‘Dutch district’, southwest of Chicago, Selina marries a ‘truck farmer’ (i.e. smallholder, who takes his produce to market daily), Pervus Dejong. They have one son, Dirk, nicknamed ‘So Big’ from his favourite childhood phrase. When Pervus dies, Selina takes on the farm and makes a go of it, raising high-quality produce and delicacies for the swank hotels of the city. By the sweat of her brow Selina makes a better life for Dirk who goes to college and becomes a member of Chicago’s upper class. He is a wealthy idler, unworthy of the maternal sweat which has made his life so easy. Ferber, one
deduces, had profound doubts about the hedonism of the ‘jazz age’ depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
This Side of Paradise
(1920).
So Big
won a Pulitzer, certifying her as one of the country’s distinguished writers.

Ferber then moved to New York, accompanied by her mother, and in Manhattan was recruited into the ‘Algonquin Hotel’ set (
New Yorker
writers, such as Benchley, Parker and Thurber were its nucleus). Her later bestsellers include
Show Boat
(1926) which enjoyed enduring success as a Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein musical. Her ‘oil well’, as she called it, was the novel
Cimarron
, which came out in 1930. This ‘American Epic’ opens with the great 1889 ‘Run’, or ‘land grab’ in Oklahoma. Sabra Venable, a genteel southerner, migrates with her devil-may-care husband Yancey Cravat to the new territory, with the traditional ‘Whoop-ee!’ Yancey, an ‘enormously vital’ man, is nicknamed ‘Cimarron’ by virtue of an admixture of ‘Indian’ in his genetic make-up. He and Sabra settle in the (fictional) town of Osage, where he sets up a newspaper, the
Oklahoma Wigwam
, before going off to join Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. As usual in Ferber’s fiction, the plucky woman has to take charge. Twenty years pass. Oil is discovered and transforms the Oklahoma economy. Sabra becomes Oklahoma’s first congresswoman. In the last scene Yancey returns, a dying bum. Sabra ‘forgives him everything’ and comforts him as he drifts away (‘Sleep my boy’). An anthem to American women pioneers,
Cimarron
is dedicated to Ferber’s own mother.

Ferber produced a string of bestsellers on similar sprawling themes, including
Giant
(1952), which became the film vehicle for James Dean’s final performance. Her twelve novels and nine plays were adapted into no less than twenty film adaptations. She never married and, it is suspected, may not have had a sexual relationship with anyone of either gender.

Oh yo’ daddy’s rich and yo’ ma’ is good-lookin’, So hush, little baby, don’ yo’ cry.
Heyward’s lyrics for ‘Summertime’

DuBose Heyward wrote the slim novel
Porgy
(1925) which was later immortalised by George and Ira Gershwin. The folk opera of the crippled black man and his ‘woman’
Bess was first staged on Broadway – on 10 October 1935 – with the black lead singers, Todd Duncan and Anne Brown. It was touch and go until the last minute that it might be whites in black face. Heyward’s name would have been known to the audience on that New York evening as the author of ‘the first major southern novel to present blacks realistically.’ But for every million who listen, nowadays, to Miles Davis’s rendition of ‘Summertime’, for which Heyward wrote the lyrics, less than one reads the fiction which is the ballad’s literary source. A great-great-grandson of Thomas Heyward, Jr., a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, the novelist’s paternal ancestors were South Carolina planters. One of them, Nathan Heyward, had prosecuted the revolutionary, Denmark Vesey, who in 1822 incited the slaves (a majority of Charleston’s population) to take over the city. Vesey’s uprising, timed for Bastille Day, failed. He was hanged along with thirty-five other uppity blacks.

Wheels turn. The Heywards lost everything in the Civil War and Dubose’s father was reduced to working (‘like a black’, as the phrase was) in a Charleston rice mill. He fell in the machinery and was killed, when his son was three years old, after which care of the family fell on Heyward’s resourceful mother, Jane. The family lived in a succession of shacks, ‘too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash’, as the local jest put it, but not so poor (no white family was, even after the war) as to have to do all their own household chores. Heyward’s biographer records that his first language, picked up from house servants, was Gullah – the dialect used by local blacks of Angolan origin. Jane (Janie) Screven Heyward made herself an authority on Gullah culture, and she supplemented the little money she made by elegant needlework, giving tea party performances of ‘darkey songs and stories’. By the time of her death in 1939, she was recognised as one of the most accomplished ‘dialect recitalists’ of her time – a parlour anthropologist.

Heyward dropped out of school at fourteen. His first employment was collecting ‘funeral money’ from blacks – who superstitiously believed that by handing over an obol-like dollar they would keep the Grim Reaper at bay. In 1905, he got a position as a cotton checker on the docks, supervising black labourers, and was appalled by waterfront degradation and criminality – the inspiration for his ‘Catfish Row’. But he admired the manliness which could effortlessly tote a 500-pound bale. Chronically frail himself – he contracted polio at eighteen – his biographer speculates that ‘Heyward’s fascination with the brute humanity he observed on the docks was driven by envy.’

In 1908 he went into the real estate business and made a fortune, retiring at the age of forty to devote himself to writing
Porgy
. He was encouraged by his wife, Dorothy, also a writer, whom he had married in 1923. They had met at a writers’ workshop, in New Hampshire. Heyward inherited his mother’s fascination with
Gullah culture and in 1922, published
Carolina Chansons
, a medley of ‘grotesque negro legends … superstitions … imagery and music’. As his biographer records, he was – as a result of his research – developing a powerful social conscience. In the same year, 1922, for a world burdened with a less developed social conscience, the wild ‘Charleston’ dance became the rage across white America. The greatest African American poet of the century, Langston Hughes, praised the black world Heyward had constructed, ‘with his white eyes’, but for the modern reader of
Porgy
, it is the white ears which pose the greater problem. The hero, for example, has one vice – gambling. When a character holds up the street-corner crap game in which Porgy is a player, to boast about his ‘lady’, a ‘born white folks’ nigger’, another player breaks in: ‘Yo’ bes sabe yo’ talk for dem damn dice. Dice ain’t gots no patience wid ’oman!’

Is this ethnography or racist caricature? When Porgy is described as having ‘unadulterated Congo blood’, unlike the octoroon, Sporting Life, what point is Heyward making? Is white blood, stretching in a continuous stream back to the Declaration of Independence, a nobler fluid than that originating in the Heart of Darkness? African American readers are uneasy about a writer whom his biographer, unironically, calls ‘A Charleston Gentleman’, and whose magnum opus gained worldwide fame thanks to two Jewish composers. As Kendra Hamilton complains, ‘
Porgy and Bess
has been a way for whites, in America and in Europe, to participate vicariously in fantasies of what they imagine African-American life to be.’ ‘Whites’ have generally had no such qualms: the Gershwin opera is regularly revived. The novel, alas, remains obstinately out of print.

Heyward went on to a remunerative career lecturing and screenwriting in Hollywood. He has lead credits on the film of Eugene O’Neill’s
The Emperor Jones
, and Pearl S. Buck’s
The Good Earth
. Both centre on heroes of colour – his specialty. He continued writing fiction dealing with a ‘Color Line’ which would not be erased in American society until twenty years after his death. His later novels include
Mamba’s Daughters
(1929) and the play
Brass Ankle
(1930); a powerful study of miscegenation.

A rotten work of genius.
Ford Madox Hueffer’s verdict on Lawrence’s early novel,
The Trespasser

Novelists’ deaths are quite as interesting as novelists’ lives. None more so than that of D. H. Lawrence. His mother is reported to have been told by a friend that her infant son would be riding in his carriage by the time he was forty. She replied, sighing, ‘Ay, if he
lives
to be forty!’ Better health might have rendered David Herbert Lawrence a sooty collier, or one of the more interesting prostheticians in Nottingham, or an outer-London schoolteacher, or, had he not been certified ‘unfit’, one of the many mute inglorious authors whose name liveth for evermore not in literature, but on lichen-covered 1914–18 village war memorials. It was a lifelong hearse that carried the author of
Women in Love
past all those destinies to literary greatness.

Lawrence was the fourth child of five, of a miner in a coal-mining village some ten miles from Nottingham. Arthur John Lawrence had married above himself to a woman who had almost become a schoolteacher. Lydia Beardsall had been won over by the sheer force of his animal magnificence, but life in a miner’s cottage proved less wonderful. It was a mixed marriage and one whose mixture Lawrence would ponder throughout his short career – most lyrically in the prelude to
The Rainbow
: the men are clogged in the nutritious soil, the women’s eyes are fixed on the sky and the church on the horizon. How to be both ‘rooted’ and yet ‘grow towards the light’?

Lawrence’s father (whose potent fucking is imaginatively glorified in Mellors’ domination of Connie Chatterley) was a collier in the pit-pony-and-butty pre-industrial era, when mining was manual and ‘dignified’. He was, as
Sons and Lovers
records, periodically drunken. But eventually his wife Lydia ‘broke’ him – or, as Lawrence ambivalently puts it, she broke his ‘manhood’. The son was never sure whose side he was on in that struggle. John Lawrence was instinctively scornful of those ‘stool-arsed jacks’, like his younger son. Lawrence grew up with twin heritages, twin dialects, and radically conflicting ideas as to what life was about. He was, it was clear, too frail for the pits – even if his mother had allowed him. He found salvation through that wretchedly tiny aperture allowed the working-class child – ‘the scholarship’. His brains got him to Nottingham High School, he was the first boy from his village to go there. He did not, however, shine. He was carrying too much class baggage and even at this age a profound disbelief in ‘systems’.

Bert, as he was then called, left school at sixteen with two more years learning than most miners’ sons. He got himself a clerical position with a firm in Nottingham which sold surgical appliances; his salary was a little under ten shillings a week. As
recorded in
Sons and Lovers
, Bert was not initially his mother’s favourite. Lydia Lawrence was uninterested in her sons until they outgrew childhood and could qualify as ‘lovers’ – adults that is. Her eldest, William Ernest, had arrived at that point in life first. He (‘another stool-arsed jack’) was doing well in London when he was stricken down by pneumonia and erysipelas and died. Lydia was distraught – widowhood could not have affected her more bitterly. Bert also came down with pulmonary illness a few months later and came close to dying. That attack was, with hindsight, the first touch of the TB that would later kill him. At this point, however, it saved him. As recorded in
Sons and Lovers
, Mrs Lawrence transferred her radioactive affection to her second son. It was reciprocated. Paul’s last whispered word in the novel is the Strindbergian ejaculation, ‘Mother!’

Lawrence was now writing early drafts of
The White Peacock
. He had grown up handsome but not yet bearded. There were, as he left his teenage years behind him, other women in his life – most importantly Jessie Chambers. A farmer’s daughter, well educated, with a fine sensibility, she collaborated with him on his early writing. Late in life Lawrence was asked by a friend why he had not married Jessie. He replied, arrogantly: ‘It would have been a fatal step. I should have too easy a life, nearly everything my own way, and my genius would have been destroyed.’ Instead, his health and his mother’s tenacious grip led to his staying close to home as a pupil-teacher in Eastwood for three years. He performed well enough to go on to Nottingham University and enrol for a teaching certificate, though not a degree course. Would higher education have made him a more confident writer, or would it, like Jessie, have clipped his ‘genius’?