Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (79 page)

After an unhappy year at home, in which he bounced about in various menial journalistic jobs, drank too much, and seriously contemplated suicide, he was thrown out by his father and went to live in a cottage in Georgeham, north Devon, on his £40 p.a. army disability pension. Here he began writing seriously. At this period there occurred what he records as the other most important event in his life: his discovery of Richard Jefferies’ books. He also married in 1925; there would be six children. Between 1918 and 1928, his energies were directed to the quartet of connected novels published as
The Flax of Dream
. Like all of Williamson’s anthropocentric work, it is a version of his own life. The hero, Willie Maddison, he called his ‘brother’. The setting is an idyllic Devon, a region for which, although not born there, Williamson’s feeling rivalled Hardy’s (he made the obligatory pilgrimage to Max Gate, where he talked too much).

Fame came with the publication of a book about one of the few inhabitants of North Devon that Williamson had time for.
Tarka the Otter: His Joyful Water-life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers
proved hard to write. The manuscript was revised seventeen times, and rejected by various publishers. Once in print, in 1927, it won the Hawthornden Prize, became a bestseller, and a reliable source of income for the rest of his life. His attitude to the animal world, depicted in
Tarka
, was unsentimental. He had nothing against otter- fox- and stag-hunting and his own behaviour to animals could be brutal. ‘He is alleged’, his biographer writes, ‘to have seized a kitten and smashed its brains out on the kitchen floor when he caught it destroying the fish dinner laid out in honour of a titled guest.’

In the 1930s, Williamson – one of whose grandparents was German – became
intoxicated by the rise of Nazism and what he saw on a trip to Bavaria in 1935. ‘The feeling I had while among the masses of people listening to Adolf Hitler at Nuremberg’, he rhapsodised, ‘was one of their happiness and goodness.’ Provocatively, he wrote a preface to the collective reissue of
The Flax of Dream
series in 1936, enlarging on this Nazi goodness. He fantasises a meeting between himself and a certain corporal, in that momentous Christmas 1914 truce. The preface, less lyrically, describes ‘Jews from the ghettoes of Poland … who become property owners of houses, streets of houses, small businesses and firms, almost overnight’. And it concludes with the sentence that sealed Williamson’s fate: ‘I salute the great man across the Rhine, whose life symbol is the happy child.’

Hitler was one god; during this period Williamson also hero-worshipped T. E. Lawrence. In a letter of May 1936, he described Hitler as the ‘father of his people: a man like T. E. Lawrence’. Lawrence of Arabia, Williamson believed, was the man who could save England. He was, or believed himself to be, on the verge of setting up a meeting between his two heroes, just before T. E. Shaw (i.e. Lawrence) had a fatal accident on his motorcycle in May 1935, having just telegrammed Williamson (did the Zionists do it?).

In the late 1930s, a period in which he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Williamson moved to Norfolk where he bought a smallholding which he farmed, on progressive principles. During the Second World War he was questioned by the authorities, briefly imprisoned, but not, as he later claimed, interned. His mode of life was so hermit-like that ostracism had no great impact. And he was so unimportant politically that any martyrdom was denied him. After the war Williamson returned to Exmoor and cottage life. Here he embarked on a second autobiographical saga, the fifteen-part
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
. It was begun in 1951 and concluded in 1969, with
The Gale of the World
– a novel in which Williamson recklessly blackguarded what few friends he had. The first volumes, which take in the war years, are among the best things he ever did. But he had difficulties finding top-rated publishers and the novels came into the world reviewless. One critic called the
Chronicle
‘the most unfashionable novel of our time’. It went beyond fashion, however, into the question raised by Céline in France: how much political poison does it take to destroy literary genius?

Or how much psychic trauma? Williamson’s second marriage broke up as his saga was concluding. Their son remembered him ‘beating up my mother, and bruises and screams, and I would come along and I would attack and as soon as I attacked him he would start crying, and say “What am I doing, that my son should have to stop me beating my wife” … I think it was something to do with the pressure of war.’ After his second wife left him, Williamson was what he had always wanted
to be, solitary – but not lonely. Well into his seventies, it is recorded, he retained his sexual appeal. He died, bemused and senile, having sweltered through the summer of 1976, looking, as one of his sons put it, ‘like a mummified Viking’.

I wanted peace and I wanted roots.

A writer who, in his maturity, occupied the dubious territory between literary respectability and bestsellerdom, Bromfield was born ‘Brumfield’ in Ohio, of Scottish/American pioneer extraction, into a farming family. He was destined to take over the family farm and duly enrolled at Cornell University to study agriculture but, at the age of nineteen, resolved on a drastically different vocation, switching to courses in journalism at Columbia. As his later career would reveal, his attachment to farming was not extinguished – merely postponed. In the First World War years, 1917–19, Bromfield served with the French army as an ambulance driver, winning a Croix de Guerre for gallantry and the Légion d’honneur. He had broken off his studies to serve and Columbia awarded him an ‘honorary war degree’. He returned to his country a hero and settled in New York where he picked up what work he could as a journalist, marrying socialite Mary Appleton Wood in 1921. Despite the ubiquitous delinquencies of Prohibition and the Jazz Age, the marriage proved happy and durable.

Bromfield’s first novel,
The Green Bay Tree
, was published in 1924. Like everything he wrote, it evinced stylistic loyalty to the great English and American realists. Bromfield always went for firm storylines, strongly drawn characters and plain prose. His early fiction comprised what he called ‘panel novels’, or novels written to a blueprint design.
The Green Bay Tree
employs a familiar ‘New Woman’ scenario; the heroine, Ellen Tolliver, is a pianist who leaves her small American town for cultural freedoms offered by the larger world. Conflicts ensue.

Bromfield followed up with
Possession
(1925), which consolidated his new line of work as a novelist who could live by his pen. In the same year, 1925, he embarked on what was initially intended to be a vacation in France, which turned into a fourteen-year-long sojourn. He settled with his family at Senlis, outside Paris, where two
of his three daughters were born. In France, as one of the ‘lost generation’, Bromfield befriended, among other advanced spirits, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway (whom he helped get into print). His next novel
Early Autumn
(1926) won a Pulitzer Prize, and showed little trace of the lost generation’s experimentalism or daring. Whatever else, Louis Bromfield was not ‘lost’: few novelists have directed their careers more profitably.
A Good Woman
(1927) marked Bromfield’s entry into the bestseller lists – where he would occupy a secure berth for a decade. This story of a mother in the Midwest who sacrifices her prospects in life for the well-being of her child, was to the taste of middle-class, Book of the Month club-subscribing America. So too was
The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg
(1928), which recounts the life (told after her death) of an American spinster who has just died in Italy.

In 1932 Bromfield spent four months in India, a country which preoccupies much of his later fiction. At the same period, he returned to the US. ‘I wanted peace and I wanted roots for the rest of my life,’ he recalls in his autobiography. Those roots, he determined, were in Ohio – not Paris, or New York. The decision to go back is reflected in
The Farm
(1933), an agrarian saga covering 100 years of farming life in Ohio, which is Bromfield’s finest effort in fiction. But in 1935 he revisited India. It was the prelude to his greatest popular success in fiction,
The Rains Came
(1937), set in the Indian state of ‘Ranchipur’, ruled by an enlightened and progressive Maharajah and Maharani. The country is still under British colonial rule, represented in the novel by two doctrinaire tyrants, Lord Esketh and General Agate. Tom Ransome, a rich Anglo-American artist, has come to India to find some meaning in his otherwise empty life. He finds it. The climax is the bursting of a mighty dam, an equivocal symbol of progress and the imposition of Western notions of civilisation on the Orient. The monsoon endures. Bromfield was virulently anti-British in this phase of his life – sentiments reflected in his polemic
England, a Dying Oligarchy
(1939).

The Rains Came
rode high in American bestseller lists for two years and was adapted into a wildly melodramatic movie in 1939. It installed Bromfield on Hollywood’s celebrity A-list. In 1945, it was he who hosted the wedding of his friends, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Now very rich, Bromfield bought three large tracts of land in Richland County, Ohio, in 1939, renaming them ‘Malabar Farm’. He introduced progressive agrarian techniques and made his name as an innovative pioneer of ‘sustainable’ farming. His estate is now an Ohio State Park. Probably of the millions who visit, relatively few know that he was a novelist. There are worse literary monuments. He continued to churn out novels in the 1940s and 1950s. Always solidly popular with a loyal corps of readers, his fiction was no longer bestselling nor critically fashionable. Thirty years after his death, he was posthumously elected to the Ohio Agricultural Hall of Fame.

Prince of hokum

If Cheyney is remembered at all, it is as a mass producer of ersatz ‘Yank’ thrillers for the British market and upmarket gangster
noir
for the French market (more fools them). At his zenith (1936–46), Cheyney was selling up to 5 million a year, with beyond-parody titles such as
Dames Don’t Care
(1937),
Dangerous Curves
(1939),
Your Deal, My Lovely
(1941). Cheyney ‘out-Wallaced Edgar Wallace’ in his best years. The Cheneyesque bouquet may be sampled by the following, where an undercover G-Man is explaining to a low down dirty rat that he is about to be rubbed out: ‘“Listen, wop,” I tell him, “An’ you ought to listen because you ain’t goin’ to hear any more after this. I’m goin’ to make a certainty of you. I’m goin’ to finish you like the lousy rat you are.”’

Cheyney was born,
echt
cockney, in Whitechapel, the son of an oystermonger. His salvation was a mother who took charge of her five children, kicking out their Billingsgate-and-booze stinking dad, to make herself proprietor of an Oxford Street corsetière emporium. Kate Cheyney was tigerishly ambitious for her sons, particularly ‘Reggie’. She contrived to get him into a minor public school and thence a ‘respectable’ job as a lawyer’s clerk. It was a huge step up from the fish barrow, but he had his eye on higher, less Pooterish things than Mum wanted. Cheyney’s friend Michael Harrison, whose biography is entitled, uncompromisingly,
Peter Cheyney: Prince of Hokum
, infers that Cheyney’s sexuality was deformed by his overpowering mother. He would marry three times, childlessly. ‘Reggie’ was initially drawn to the West End music hall. He wrote patter and song lyrics, and occasionally trod the boards himself. His brother, Arthur, was a stage performer who routinely warmed up audiences for Chaplin and Karno.

Like all his generation, Cheyney was swept up into the First World War in which he claimed, throughout life, to have been ‘severely’ wounded as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire, leading his men over the top into battle. In fact, he received a nick on the earlobe barely more serious than that which women endured for their earrings. No wound was blightier: on the strength of it, he
wangled a desk-job in his English depot, rising to the lowly rank of lieutenant at the time of his ‘demob’. But showbiz still called and Cheyney married a music hall starlet, Dorma Leigh, in 1919. The marriage certificate records the groom as ‘Captain Evelyn Cheyney’ and the wedding photo has him in uniform with three pips and a suspicious row of medals. He would in later life double-barrel himself as ‘Southouse-Cheyney’ and affect a gold monocle and the de rigueur tortoise-shell cigarette holder.

The marriage collapsed in a couple of years, on vague ‘conjugal’ issues. Throughout the jazzy 1920s and bleak 1930s, ‘Peter’, as he now was, scraped a living in the Soho-based entertainment world. In 1933, his career stabilised, with an editorial post on the
Sunday Graphic
. His politics were now right-wing and he was a supporter and friend of Oswald Mosley. He had been ingrained with casual anti-Semitism from his early years in Whitechapel. Cheyney’s personal life further stabilised with remarriage in 1934. Like the first, the union was convenient rather than passionate. The second Mrs Cheyney was the daughter of a colonial DC, divorced, possessed of two children, money and class. Now closing on forty, Cheyney finally found his
métier
. In 1936 he published his first FBI agent ‘Lemmy Caution’ (‘let me caution you’) tale,
This Man is Dangerous
. The books were marketed, astutely, by William Collins, with elegantly kitsch jacket illustrations by John Pisani. Over the next fifteen years, Cheyney’s output was prolific: 150 full-length novels and short-story collections – the bulk was constructed around series heroes. Partnering Caution was Slim Callaghan, first introduced in 1938, a seedily mackintoshed, 100-fag-a-day smoking Sam Spade, with an office in High Holborn. During the Second World War, Cheyney came up with the ‘Dark’ series of spy novels, featuring the activities of a secret espionage unit, under the command of spymaster Everard Peter Quayle. These are reckoned the high point of a resolutely low-flying literary career.