Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (78 page)

In 1914, afflicted by fits of melancholia, a condition to which the Huxleys were congenitally prone, the young man was removed to the Hermitage, a private nursing home in Surrey. ‘Nerves’ were diagnosed – but the main cause of his distress was not divulged until Julian Huxley’s autobiography,
Memories
, was published in the 1970s. Trev had fallen in love with one of the maids at the family’s country house. She was attractive and intelligent, but indelibly common. In true Arnoldian fashion, the young man resolved to ‘raise’ her, taking her to plays, concerts and lectures. Sarah, the Huxley family’s senior maid, threatened to expose the relationship. As one of the family put it, brutally: ‘The girl was village educated in a mild way. It couldn’t have worked. His friends could never have been hers; nor hers, his … We sent her off into London somewhere.’

It was a finely calibrated thing. The elder brother Julian (later to become the world’s leading zoologist) could marry a Swiss governess, Juliette Baillot, but no Huxley could marry a
housemaid
. They could, of course, use them sexually; that was one of the conveniences of genteel life. Aldous lost his virginity to an upper servant in 1913, when he was nineteen. He had found himself alone in his father’s London house in Westbourne Terrace, and ‘decided to go out for a stroll during which he picked up a girl who he assumed to be an au pair on her evening off. He took her back to the house and made love to her on the sofa.’ Huxley was, in his biographer Sybille Bedford’s words, ‘extremely susceptible to pretty women’, and this event marked the beginning of an athletically active sexual career. In
Time Must Have a
Stop
(1945), the devirginating initiation is painted more darkly. The nineteen-year-old hero, Sebastian, takes a prostitute back to his father’s empty house, for a ‘shudderingly’ awful experience: loss of virginity amid rubber corsets, ‘bored perfunctory kisses’ and ‘breath that stank of beer and caries and onions’.

Trev, by contrast, wanted desperately to do the right thing by his housemaid, and it is probable that he was sent to the Hermitage – as she was sent ‘into London somewhere’ – to separate them. If so, it failed disastrously. While he was at the Hermitage, he heard that the girl was pregnant, something he seems previously not to have known. On a Saturday morning in August 1914, Trev left the Hermitage for a walk on the Downs. He did not return. Since he had an appointment in London on Monday there was no great alarm. He had perhaps gone up to town early. When no news had been heard of him after a week, a search was mounted. His body was found in a nearby wood. As a mountaineer he knew all about ropes and their breaking strain. He had climbed a tree, tied a rope around a branch fourteen feet up, put the noose around his neck, and jumped. Both the rope and his neck snapped. His broken and soiled body was found on the ground.

Echoes of Trev’s suicide, and what led up to it, hover like a moral stink over all Aldous’s fiction. Had his brother done the ‘right thing’ in the face of having done the ‘wrong thing’ – or merely succumbed to a second-rater’s lack of moral ruthlessness? Servants were there to serve – not least the upper class’s sexual requirements. Huxley never quite worked the problem out. His last novel,
Island
(1962), is, as Frank Kermode bluntly says, ‘one of the worst novels ever written’. Few have bothered to disagree. Inferior as the book is, the informed reader catches a glimpse of Trev for the last time,
in articulo mortis
. The narrative opens with the hero, Will Farnaby, having fallen from a tree, ‘lying like a corpse in the dead leaves, his hair matted, his face grotesquely smudged and bruised, his clothes in rags and muddy’. He has thrown himself down from a cliff-face onto the tree (which broke his fall) on being surprised by a snake. Will, however, is not in Surrey but in a South Seas Eden. He survives to endure the barrage of Buddhistic-rationalist preaching that all Huxley’s later heroes have to put up with. Weaker men would throw themselves off the cliff again. Was Trev the weaker, or the stronger, or merely the unluckier of the brilliant Huxley brothers? Aldous could never decide.

Priestley became in the months after Dunkirk a leader second only in importance to Mr Churchill. And he gave us what our other leaders have always failed to give us – an ideology.
Graham Greene

J. B. Priestley was born in Bradford, the son of a schoolmaster. His mother, an Irishwoman – ‘probably a clogs-and-shawl mill girl’ – died two years after her son’s birth, leaving him to be brought up by a kindly stepmother. His origins in Bradford (‘Bruddesford’) coloured his subsequent life. Socialism he inherited from his ‘puritanical’ father; puritanism, signally, he did not. Libido and labour intertwined throughout his adult life. On leaving grammar school, Priestley had his first employment in a wool merchant’s office. He read H. G. Wells’s
The History of Mr Polly
in 1910 and lost his virginity in 1913. There was some local journalism – nothing to prophesy great things, although it was clear that his future was not in wool. Priestley volunteered (‘chump that I was’) on the outbreak of war and served in the infantry, rising to the rank of subaltern. He was lucky only to be wounded (multiply but not cripplingly) and gassed. Lieutenant Priestley finished his service for king and country in the Entertainment Unit of the British Army. The experience of Haig’s ‘sausage machine’ sickened and hardened his socialism and class consciousness – and, possibly, his Anglophobia. Orwell, never a friend, suspected him of Soviet sympathies during the Cold War.

On being demobbed in 1919, Priestley took up a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The war’s carnage had left places for northern grammar school boys like him. He read history and graduated with a 2:1. He already had a wife and a child (and, quite soon, a pregnant mistress). On graduation he went to London where he freelanced as a journalist. In 1925 his wife Pat died of cancer and Priestley made a second marriage to Jane Wyndham Lewis in 1926. This relationship was strained by his infidelities – notably a steaming affair with the young actress, Peggy Ashcroft. Although his image was that of a plain man’s ‘Jolly Jack’ – and he was facially as ugly as a ‘potato’ – Priestley’s adult life was sexually athletic.

In his early London years Priestley became friendly with the bestselling novelist, Hugh Walpole. The two of them concocted a ‘correspondence novel’,
Farthing Hall
, in 1929 – it was a useful apprenticeship. Priestley’s first novel under his own name,
The Good Companions
(1929) was astonishingly successful, selling thousands of copies every day in its first months of publication. The novel is dedicated to Walpole, ‘for a friendship that has even triumphantly survived a collaboration’ and is a modern picaresque (‘gas-fire Dickens’, his publisher called it), dealing with
a travelling troupe of players with the unhappy name, the ‘Dinky Doos’, who specialise in a ‘non-stop programme of Clever Comedy and Exquisite Vocalism’. Plot complications follow. It was sneered at by the literary elite. ‘If I wrote
Anna Karenina
they’d still say I was turning out twaddle for the mob,’ he complained, bitterly. The hauteur of London critics was something that rather disinclined him towards fiction in later years when he aimed at being a sage.

Angel Pavement
(1930) did as well with the ‘mob’, and, unlike its predecessor, made the American bestseller list. The tone is grimmer, reflecting the post 1929 slump. ‘Not a glimmer of sentimentality’, as Priestley put it. The action centres on the firm of Twigg & Dersingham, eminently stuffy dealers in veneer and inlay, based in ‘Angel Pavement’, a sleepy cul-de-sac in the City. The business shenanigans of a ‘piratical’ chancer, James Golspie, drive the plot.

In later life, Priestley referred to these two unashamedly middle-brow works as his ‘golden gushers’. He had struck it rich and could move to a mansion in Highgate – where the Hampstead intellectuals lived. In 1934, he published his Cobbett-inspired
English Journey
, whose reportage brought home the working-class realities of the slump to middle-class England. In Hollywood, in the mid-1930s, where his services were in demand, Priestley came across the pseudo-scientific theories of Ouspensky, Jung and – most influentially – J. W. Dunne. The result was his ‘time plays’,
I Have Been Here Before
(1937),
Time and the Conways
(1937),
An Inspector Calls
(1946), and a work of science fiction and apocalypse, set in Arizona,
The Doomsday Men
(1938). ‘Twaddle’, indeed.

Just as successful was the romantic comedy of newly-wed complications in Yorkshire,
When We Are Married
(1938) – the first play ever to be televised. By the outbreak of war, in 1939, Priestley was finally the English sage he had always wanted to be. He could easily have gone to America, but stayed to face the music – which would have been very hot, had the Gestapo got hold of him. Priestley was outspokenly patriotic during the Second World War, particularly in his BBC
Postscripts
, after the Sunday 9 o’clock news, in the perilous months after Dunkirk. As Graham Greene said, only Churchill was more efficacious in raising the fighting spirit of the English people. Churchill – or others in authority – did not relish the comparison and, it is alleged, got him off the air. Priestley’s left-wing views – and harping on about ‘new world orders’ after victory – were the given explanation. His attempt, later in the war, to enter active politics with his idiosyncratically conceived ‘Common Wealth Party’ failed.

Priestley could none the less sting as a political gadfly and was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, during the Cold War. He had public, knockabout, quarrels with highbrow adversaries such as F. R. Leavis and
toffs like Evelyn Waugh. His trump card was always his sales, his box office receipts, his national fame, the love of the ‘mob’. He divorced his wife Jane (who had been heroically complaisant) in 1952 to make a third, lasting, marriage, after years of mutual adultery, in 1953 with the writer and archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. The British people liked him the more for his honest, straight-speaking radicalism. He was always the most amiable of dissidents, in his Yorkshire tweed, puffing thoughtfully on the inevitable pipe, speaking ‘sense’ and – as he confessed – constitutionally ‘tactless’, convinced that he had ‘a hell of a talent’, but no genius. Even Mrs Thatcher liked him, although it was in James Callaghan’s premiership (‘Sunny Jim’ was very much a politician in the Priestley mould) that the Queen awarded him his Order of Merit in 1977. He had turned down two peerages on socialist principle.

None of his later novels have lasted, even those, such as the two-volume
The Image Men
(1968), which he thought his best work. Nor has his great literary-philosophical work,
Literature and Western Man
(1960) endured. His principal success, in the last phase of his career, was the partnership in 1963 with Iris Murdoch, on the dramatic adaptation of her novel
The Severed Head
. He was, in his later years, one of England’s cultural ‘teddy bears’, in the mould of John Betjeman and his fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett: the incarnation of English grumpy niceness. And the author of two enduringly readable novels.

He offended.
Daniel Farson’s epitaph on Williamson

Had Hitler won the war, Henry Williamson might well have been installed as Minister of Fiction. But Hitler lost, and Williamson was cast into oblivion. His biographer, Daniel Farson, offers a pathetic vignette of the novelist sitting in his ‘writing hut’ at the bottom of his garden, waiting for honours and reviews that would never come. The bloody traitor should have stuck to otters was the general verdict. Williamson was born near Lewisham, one of the sons of a city bank clerk with whom his relationship was, at best, cold. After an unhappy few weeks as a city clerk himself, he eagerly signed up aged nineteen (‘sixteen’ he liked to boast) so as ‘not to miss the fun’ on the outbreak of war in 1914. He was in the frontline in weeks. Williamson’s
whole worldview was transformed by an event there, at Christmas 1914, when an unofficial truce led to a friendly meeting between enemy soldiers in no man’s land. ‘There, on the one side,’ he recalled ‘were all the Germans in field-grey, together with our chaps, all talking and exchanging photographs.’ Chaps together.

As momentous was his experience of his first offensive, a few weeks later. Exhilaration at the opening barrage (‘like the end of Wagner’s
The Ring
’) gave way to horror, terror and despair, as the ‘push’ slaughtered men by the hundred thousand. Williamson was commissioned in June 1915, fell apart at the Somme, and was invalided back to England, shell-shocked in 1917. His breakdown is chronicled in
The Patriot’s Progress
(1930). He wrote no less than seven novels about the war. Men who had gone through what he went through, Williamson believed, became solitary, anti-social and inherently anti-patriotic, for the rest of their lives. His two marriages –both of which ended in separation – were troubled by a chronic inability to form long-lasting relationships, or to stay faithful within them. Relations with his numerous children were similarly troubled.