Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (71 page)

She went on to have an affair with a worthless Pole, Floryan Sobienowski. He it was who probably infected her with the gonorrhoea (untreated) which precluded any more children and inflicted great pain in later life. Her German stories had brought her to the attention of A. R. Orage, editor of the magazine
New Age
. Mansfield was
soon prominent in literary London, evoking starkly different responses – even in the same people. Victoria Woolf opined, in her grand way, ‘to no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing’. But the body offended her. Mansfield, she recorded in her diary, ‘stank like a civet cat who had taken to street walking’.

She wasn’t a streetwalker, but Mansfield had cultivated the useful habit of taking editors as lovers. Orage had been one. The next, and even more important to her career, was John Middleton Murry. An Oxford undergraduate, of working-class origins, Murry had launched a literary journal with the jazzy name,
Rhythm
. A literary submission by Mansfield led to a relationship of furious instability. Both partners were superbly good-looking and totally neurotic. He, as it happened, was also disabled by gonorrhoea when they met (picked up from a genuine streetwalker). He gave up Oxford for Katherine. The couple hobnobbed with the leading modernists of the day. Murry was unfit for military service during the Great War and, for an intense few months, he and Katherine lived with D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen in their little utopian community in Cornwall. Murry, however, was disinclined to offer Lawrence the
Blutbrüderschaft
he demanded. Katherine was terrified by Lawrence’s battering of Frieda and threatening, with every apparent intention of doing so, ‘I’ll cut your throat you bitch.’ The couple sought utopia elsewhere and were both royally punished as Crich and Gudrun in
Women in Love
. When she was dying of consumption, Lawrence dispatched to Mansfield what one might call a ‘get worse’ card, ‘you are a loathsome reptile I hope you will die’.

Murry and Mansfield had an ‘open union’, fidelity was an irrelevance. The story she wrote in 1918, ‘Je ne parle pas français’, plausibly considered her best, reflects this ‘openness’. Raoul Duquette – a gigolo by preference, a prostitute and a pimp when he has to be – sits in a Paris bar, regarding the world, in late afternoon, admiring his own image in the mirrors around him. He is, among everything else, the author of self-published, literary
amusettes.
A memorable phrase pops into Raoul’s mind. On the writing pad and blotting paper, which such cafés supply their customers, he sees the titular phrase about not speaking French. It brings back the memory of a passionate relationship with an Englishman, Dick, who abandoned him only to return to Paris with an English girl, ‘Mouse’. The couple had eloped. Once arrived at the Parisian hotel, arranged by Raoul, Dick promptly abandoned Mouse on the supremely English grounds that his mother would disapprove. Raoul also deserted her on the supremely Parisian grounds that it was none of his business – and might be expensive. But her plight has left him a tender memory. Duquette is the amalgam of two foreign lovers who had exploited Mansfield. Dick is the pussy-footed Murry. Love-rats the lot of them.

Murry and Mansfield married in 1918 in a London Register Office. It was, said
Mansfield, like a ‘silly birthday’ – meaningless. By now her consumption was galloping and the remainder of her life was a desperate chase for the sun and a cure. The publication of her third collection,
The Garden Party and other Stories
(1922) established her as one of the major writers of her time. But her time was pathetically short. Death was now a prominent theme in her stories (notably ‘The Fly’ – with its hinted echo, ‘as flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport’). The Murrys’ financial situation was at last secure with his appointment, at £800p.a., as literary editor of the
Athenaeum
. Mad with terror, Mansfield sought cure and salvation with a series of quacks: her spleen was bombarded with X-rays, her ‘soul’ was attended to by a Russian guru (‘a levantine psychic shark,’ Wyndham Lewis called him). The bacillus in her lungs was ignored. She died, not even having reached the Dantean middle age of thirty-five.

Bibliomane.

To his contemporaries Michael Sadleir must have seemed a successful businessman with some strange hobbies. He was, over the four decades of his professional working life, a publisher with the firm of Constable. The making of books was Michael Sadleir’s main business in life yet posterity tends to remember him (if at all) as a collector of books (the greatest Victorian bibliomane ever) and a biographer (he did definitive lives of Edward Bulwer Lytton, and of the Trollopes, mother and son). Sadleir is remembered least of all as a writer of period (Victorian/Edwardian) romance – specifically that variety to which today we apply the term ‘bodice ripper’. He was the son of the don (erstwhile Vice Chancellor of Leeds University), Michael Sadler (sic). Sadler Sr was also an enlightened collector and critic of modern art – something that brought philistine obloquy down on him from donnish colleagues. It was a happy filial relationship, as the younger Michael records in a tender memoir of his father, published in 1949.

Michael Jr had a gentleman’s upbringing: Rugby and Balliol, from which he took a good second in history, and won the Stanhope Prize for an essay on the playwright
Sheridan. In 1912 he joined the venerable firm of Constable & Co. Publishing, like ‘wine’, was a trade open to gentlemen. He would remain with the firm – as editor and later director – for forty-five years. There was an inevitable interruption for the Great War, during which Sadleir served in the War Trade Intelligence Department. After the war he was seconded, briefly, to the League of Nations before returning to the world of books where he remained happily for the rest of his life.

He began collecting nineteenth-century fiction volumes during the 1920s, building up what would become the best collection in the world. He sold it in 1952 to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), who built a special library for it: they paid the then immense sum of $65,000 – some of Sadleir’s prize volumes would, nowadays, attract three times as much apiece. Sadleir married in 1914. His wife, Edith, was the daughter of an Anglican canon. They had one daughter and two sons, the elder of whom was killed serving in the navy in the Second World War. It was in the early 1920s that Sadleir first turned his hand to writing fiction. His taste was for period works, with a strong dash of ‘low life’ and salacious plot. It was to protect his eminent father’s name from the associations of that fiction, and its low-life aroma, that he altered his surname to ‘Sadleir’.

It is reported that Sadleir’s friends good-naturedly did not refer to his novels – as one might not allude to a recent divorce or some other social disgrace. And it seems that he stopped writing fiction for many years, after being made a director of Constable in 1920: novels being beneath the dignity of his exalted rank – one could be a publisher of these things, but not decently write them oneself. It would be like doing one’s own gardening (the Sadleirs had a fine country house in Gloucestershire). The second phase of Sadleir’s fiction writing career is more interesting. It begins with
These Foolish Things
in 1937, a London novel; followed in 1940 by the sensationally popular
Fanny by Gaslight
, another (and better) London novel. During the Second World War there was a public appetite for escapism which Sadleir’s story was cannily designed to satisfy.
Fanny by Gaslight
was reprinted four times in its first year (as a publisher, Sadleir could handle the paper rationing problem) and sold 150,000 copies in its full-price, hardback form. It was adapted as a big-budget film in 1944, starring James Mason as the evil Lord Manderstoke and Stewart Granger as virtuous Harry.

The reader is introduced to Fanny Hooper as an apparently respectable Englishwoman, living on a small pension in France. Miss Hooper is befriended by a young British publisher, Warbeck. She tells him her life story, which he believes to be saleable. Fanny [Vandra] Hopper [sic] was an illegitimate child, consigned by her servant mother to the care of her ostensible father, William ‘Duke’ Hopwood, in London in the late 1850s. Duke in fact runs a respectable gin palace, the Happy Warrior, and a
less respectable brothel for the aristocracy, in Piccadilly. Despite his trade, Duke is a generous and generally admired man of the world. But he falls foul of a degenerate client, Lord Manderstoke, who revenges himself on Duke by beating a girl-prostitute to death and leaving her corpse to be found by the police in the Happy Warrior. Duke is killed, trying to escape arrest.

The narrative then jumps to 1871 when Fanny (now ‘Hooper’) goes into service with the aristocratic Seymores. She finds herself attracted to the mysterious head of the house, Mr Clive, who is – in fact – her father. Forced to move on, Fanny declines to become a high-class whore, but serves as a maid in an upmarket brothel, whose business is meticulously described. The story builds to a melodramatic climax in which Lord Manderstoke, malign as ever, provokes Fanny’s true love, Harry, into a duel. Harry is mortally wounded. His well-born family – outraged by the connection – forbids Fanny from seeing him, even on his deathbed. Seven months later, their daughter is born. Fanny dies in 1933 as Warbeck is completing the writing up of her story – which he respectfully offers the English reading public, seven years later, to take their minds off the Luftwaffe’s falling bombs.

Fanny by Gaslight
rattles along with all the vivacity of the ‘Anonyma’, softcore Victorian pornography which the bibliophile Sadleir relished and collected. It is the precursor, and arguably progenitor, of such neo-Victorian productions as Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea
(1966), John Fowles’s
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969), A. S. Byatt’s
Possession
(1990) and D. T. Taylor’s
Derby Day
(2011).

James Bond is Sapper from the waist up and Mickey Spillane below.
Ian Fleming, on the moral physiology of 007

Herman Cyril McNeile was born in the sublimely inaptly named Higher Bore Street, in Bodmin, Cornwall. The one thing he did not do, as a novelist, was bore – nor would anyone claim any ‘higher’ quality in his fiction. He was the son of a naval captain, later a prison governor (if his disciplinary practices were anything like those endorsed by Sapper the inmates must have had a hard time of it). Young Herman was educated at Cheltenham College and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich,
as training for the army career his family had in mind for him. He duly joined the Royal Engineers (fondly called ‘sappers’ by the infantry) in 1907. Traditionally the army’s cleverest officers are to be found in RE ranks. His Germanic Christian name may have been an embarrassment: in adult life he was known as ‘H. C. McNeile’. As expected, he served gallantly in the First World War (trench warfare put engineers in the frontlines and often under them), winning a Military Cross at the Battle of Ypres and receiving the wounds that would lead to his premature death, while still in his forties. Like other men going off to war, he married in 1914. His wife Violet Baird was the daughter of a half colonel of the Cameron Highlanders. He himself would rise to the same rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

McNeile published several novels (as ‘Sapper’ – the army discouraged authorship) with a military theme. Supposedly Lord Northcliffe of the
Daily Mail
was so impressed that he pulled strings to get ‘Sapper’ demobilised to biff the Hun on the pages of his newspaper. After the war McNeile retired from the army, took up residence in Sussex, and in 1920 began publishing his ‘Bulldog Drummond’ adventure stories. They were, as marketed by Hodder and Stoughton, wildly popular, catching the postwar mood of free-floating resentment, particularly among the middle classes, who felt betrayed by a ‘Victory’ which had cost so much and returned so little.

As we first encounter him, Captain Hugh Drummond, DSO, MC, has been demobilised after a ‘good’ war and is bored by peace. He rackets around the Junior Sports Club and at home has a fanatically loyal man-servant, the ‘square-jawed exbatman’, James Denny. Bulldog is physically massive and ugly in a handsome sort of way, a heavy smoker, a heroic beer drinker, a fine boxer and – when his fists fail – trained in the eastern arts of Ju Jitsu by a Japanese master ‘Olaki’. Bulldog (so nicknamed for his ferocity in trench fighting) needs work, so he puts an advertisement in the papers: ‘Demobilised officer, finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential.’ In response to his advertisement, Bulldog is recruited by a smashing young filly, Phyllis Benton. Her father has been imprisoned by the sinister ‘Carl Peterson’, a stateless master-criminal dedicated, as such swine inevitably are, to the destruction of England. Peterson’s accomplice is his ‘daughter’ (in fact his lover) Irma. As the ‘Comte de Guy’ Peterson plots to bring about a total stoppage of British industry by manipulating ‘Red’ trade union organisers and intellectuals. ‘A gigantic syndicalist strike’ is set in motion. The long-term aim is to ‘Bolshevise England’.