Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (69 page)

‘All Quiet on the Tanker Front’ (1943)

‘The Amazon Women’ (1939)

‘The Badman’s Brand’ (1928)

‘The Bishop of Somaliland’ (1936)

‘The Blind Farmer and the Strip Dancer’ (1940)

‘Blood of the Scanderoon’ (1931)

‘Bombs and Olive Oil’ (1943)

The more you write, the less you have time to live. None the less, Bedford-Jones’s life – what little record of it survives – was eventful. He was born in Napanee, Ontario, Canada. The family was second-generation Irish and Henry’s father was a Protestant minister. He dropped out of college after a year and moved to Michigan where he found work as a newsman. He was naturalised as an American in 1908 and moved, a couple of years later, to Chicago. From there he again drifted on, around 1914, to Los Angeles.

Wherever he went, HBJ wrote fluently and copiously for newspapers and magazines. His main outlet for short fiction was the
Blue Book
magazine, for whom he
would eventually write some 350 stories and serials under a barrage of pen-names. There were numerous other outlets. The market for magazine fiction was ravenous, stoked by wood-pulp paper, steam presses and America’s high level of popular literacy. It was, for someone as good at it as HBJ, a rewarding line of work, if you could stand the heat – and he was pure asbestos. He was recruited into fast-order fiction as his main line of work by a patron, William Wallace Cook. Himself a prolific writer of dime novels and pulp fiction, Cook had written many of the Nick Carter (detective), Buffalo Bill and Klondike Kit stories and dime novels in the first decades of the twentieth century. The occasion of HBJ’s becoming Cook’s friend is told by Ruber: ‘When Cook’s first wife took ill and died unexpectedly, one legend recalled, he was too distraught to meet that week’s obligation of a 25,000-word novel. After the funeral, Bedford-Jones hastened home and wrote the novel under Cook’s name in a single draft, delivering it to the Post Office just before it closed. A week later Cook was surprised to receive an acceptance letter and check for something he knew nothing about. A grateful Cook introduced the young man to all the influential merchandisers of pulp in New York.’

HBJ’s middle years, in the 1930s, were tormented by an ugly divorce. Concerned that his youngest son was being maltreated by his first wife, he had the boy abducted. The mother then had him prosecuted for kidnapping – a serious offence following the sensational Lindbergh case. Getting the charges dropped (with the help of Erle Stanley Gardner – a lawyer as well as King of Pulp II) cost a fortune. HBJ wrote through the crisis, at the usual dizzying speed. Only diabetes, in the last five years of his life, slowed him down. In this handicapped state he concentrated on his rare-book collection and, having written so furiously, gently read his way into well-earned rest.

It was all quite different in America.

A German – later American – popular novelist who ranks in her own language with such bestsellers as Erich Maria Remarque, Hans Fallada, Erich Kästner and Leon
Feuchtwanger, Baum was – unlike them – consistently successful in English translation. Her cosmopolitan melodramas profoundly influenced Hollywood cinema in the 1930s, especially in collaboration with Greta Garbo (another glamorous expatriate) who starred in
Grand Hotel
in 1932. It was from Baum’s book that Garbo took her famous declaration, ‘I want to be alone.’ This novel and its follow-up
Shanghai ’37
(1939) established the vogue for sprawling
Narrenschiff
melodrama with modish settings and vaguely pessimistic mood. Arthur Hailey’s
Hotel
is a bastard offspring, best avoided.

Baum’s origins were Austrian bourgeois-Jewish. Her original vocation was music: while still a teenager she performed as a harpist in Viennese concert halls. Musical milieux (and unhappy harpists) would recur in her later fiction. Baum moved to Germany around 1912 on receiving a contract to play with the Darmstadt city orchestra. She had married her first husband, Max Prels in 1906. Prels is described as ‘a Viennese coffee-house habitué and sometime contributor to literary magazines’. After her marriage, Baum began to write stories, some of which were published under her name, others under Prels’s name. Her first published novel,
Frühe Schatten
(a chronicle of adolescent
Weltschmerz
) was published in 1914. It made no mark.

Baum divorced Prels and married Richard Lert, the conductor of the Darmstadt orchestra, around 1916. The marriage was happy and Baum abandoned music for motherhood. The couple, along with the German population as a whole, suffered financial hardship during the First World War. Baum’s first husband, Prels, was meanwhile working for the Berlin publisher, Ullstein, and amicably furnished an introduction for his ex-wife. Having given up the harp for good, Baum now resolved to write full-time. During the war years and early 1920s she duly churned out a string of undistinguished ‘entertainment novels’ – romances aimed at the young adult woman reader.

Proficient as she was at this line of work, Baum was not by nature a hack. Thomas Mann was her idol. Her technique in her mature fiction derives from the critical doctrine of
Neue Sachlichkeit
(‘New Objectivity’, hyper-realism). On the strength of
Stud. chem. Helene Willfür
(1928), a New Woman novel with a well-researched scientific background, Baum was awarded an exclusive contract by Ullstein. Her fiction was serialised, and her glamorous image publicised, in Ullstein’s
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
, which, in the 1920s, boasted the largest magazine circulation in the world. It was in the
BIZ
pages that
Menschen im Hotel
(1929), i.e.
Grand Hotel
, was first published. Ullstein’s publicity made much of Baum’s working in a Berlin hotel to gather material, as had Arnold Bennett at the Savoy for his hotel novel,
Imperial Palace. Grand Hotel
’s success was boosted in the American market by
a Broadway adaptation, which ran for 257 nights. The American publisher, Doubleday, subsequently invited Baum to New York to promote their translation of the novel and by July 1931,
Grand Hotel
had sold 31,000 copies and topped
Publishers Weekly
bestseller list.

Once in America, Baum took up remunerative employment in the film industry, despite a total ignorance of the techniques of screenwriting, and still imperfect English. In 1932, with the triumph of the Nazis, she and her family entered permanent exile, settling in Hollywood, where she helped promote the 1932 MGM production of
Grand Hotel
, starring John Barrymore, Greta Garbo and a young Joan Crawford. The film was a box office hit, and made Baum a household name among English-speaking readers. A string of works aimed at that market (and the big screen) ensued:
Men Never Know
(1935),
Career
(1936),
A Tale from Bali
(1937),
Grand Opera
(1942).

After 1933 her books were banned and burned in Germany. By the end of the 1930s she was writing primarily in English, and continued to do so until her death in 1960. It was only after the Second World War that her fiction was translated back into German. Despite the fame of
Grand Hotel
, Baum’s better novel is
Shanghai ’37
. The story of nine intertwining lives is centred, again, on the grand hotel milieu with an extravagantly international dramatis personae. The novel touches on such topical themes as the rise of Nazism and climaxes with the Japanese invasion of Shanghai and the assault on the international community there. One of the cowering English children in the unnarrated hinterland of the novel – it is pleasant to fantasise – was little James Ballard.

In the 1950s, Baum enjoyed modest book-club successes with novels such as
The Mustard Seed
(1953) and
Written on Water
(1956). But for the English market, she tends to be remembered, if at all, as a one-title author, and a vehicle for Garbo. Baum categorised herself as a ‘first-rate second-rate author’. She left a posthumously published autobiography, with the ironic title,
It Was All Quite Different
, in 1964.

American style has no cadence.

Chandler was born in Chicago. On both sides of his parentage he could claim Irish-Quaker extraction. His father Maurice was a railway engineer at a period when new tracks were creating work all over the continent. Maurice followed the job, was drunken when at home, and soon drifted away from his son and wife. Chandler’s mother, Florence Thornton, was resourceful in the face of this breakdown. Chandler would always need such women in his life – older, competent, emasculating. Florence (a newer American than her husband) emigrated, first to Ireland, where she had relatives, then to England where she had better-off relatives. Still beautiful, she had affairs, Chandler recalled much later, but she was not fool enough to remarry.

Raymond’s rich English uncle Edward took an interest in the clever little boy. His way was paid through Dulwich College, a minor public school, in south London. He was a day boy, living with his mother in a grand house nearby, but the five years he spent at Dulwich College were formative. Chandler had the old school tie tattooed on his soul for life. He won prizes and took full advantage of the ‘classic’ education offered him. Uncle Edward, open-handed as he was, would not stump up for university, which, given his ability, Chandler would have walked into. Aged sixteen, he left Dulwich with the expectation that, after a year learning languages in Europe, he would enter the Civil Service.

What he did in Paris is unknown other than that, to his later chagrin, he neglected to lose his virginity. He duly took the Civil Service exams and came out at the top of the list. It was obligatory to naturalise. At what later point he became American is fuzzy. He was appointed as a junior clerk to the Admiralty but only lasted six months before resigning. He could not, he later said, stand the ‘suburban nobodies’. Or, one deduces, the banality of the desk-bound career that lay ahead: without a degree, without membership of the best London clubs, he would never get to the top of Whitehall’s slippery pole and would be another Pooter trudging to work and back with a briefcase, brolly and bowler.

Not a single letter of Chandler’s before 1937 survives or much other documentary record. The only accounts we have of his early life are circumspect and casual recollections in his late years. When, in those years, his publisher suggested an autobiography, it was fended off with a Chandlerism: ‘Who cares how a writer got his first bicycle?’ There are things one does care to know. Why, for example, did Uncle Edward pull the plug on him? Whatever the reason, the money stopped coming and Raymond and his mother had to move to less salubrious lodgings. For a year or two
he scraped a living as a journalist and wrote reams of poetry in his spare time – some of which was published (it’s not very good).

In 1912 he returned to America and took a succession of clerking jobs in small towns before ending up in California. ‘Why?’ he was once asked. ‘Everyone does,’ he replied. In San Francisco, at a very low point, he worked as a tennis-racquet stringer at a measly $12.50 a week. A clerical position with an ice-cream firm in Los Angeles furnished enough to rent an apartment. Possessed of superb manners, cultivated, interestingly ‘foreign’, and – at this stage of his life good-looking – Chandler was taken up by well-off friends. He brought his mother over to live with him. Chandler stuck with the creamery for three years and his mother for life.

It was now 1917 and he was twenty-eight. Enthused by the war, in which so many of his ‘fellow’ Englishmen were dying and, perhaps, unenthused by four years with Mom, he decided to join in the fight. America was not recruiting so he went north to Canada to join up. Chandler saw action in France and sustained a serious head wound. Given his public school background, it is odd that he was not commissioned. He left the service a sergeant. It is plausibly suggested that his later, pathological, drinking and regular blackouts may have originated in the psychophysical trauma of his months in the trenches. Head injury (by ‘sap’, fist and pistol butt) as his biographer Tom Hiney notes, is prominent in his fiction.

Honourably discharged, Chandler rejoined his mother and went back to work in the creamery. At this period there entered the second woman in his life, Pearl Eugenie Pascal. The wife of a concert pianist (her second marriage), in the throes of a divorce, ‘Cissy’, as everyone called her, was a woman of the world. Tantalisingly, only one studio photograph of her seems to have survived. It confirms Chandler’s repeated compliments as to her ‘peach skin’ beauty. He also mentioned other snaps of her naked, from her ‘modelling’ days – which were now far behind her. Cissy was old enough (by eighteen years) to be Chandler’s mother. But he had one already, and she disapproved. Any formal union was put on ice for four years. It’s strange that a thirty-plus decorated veteran, creator, no less, of the most famous tough guy in detective fiction, should await his mom’s consent, or death (Florence was afflicted with a lingering cancer) before marrying the woman he loved. It is curious too that he let himself be duped as to Cissy’s proclaimed age (something that a quick look at her sheaves of divorce papers would contradict). Until after they married he believed she was in her pre-menopausal early forties.