Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (81 page)

Was there a homoerotic element in this obsessed friendship? ‘I’m half feminine,’ Fitzgerald once confessed. On his part, Hemingway was brought up as a little girl during the formative years of his childhood. His ‘exhumed’ novel,
The Garden of Eden
, revealed a surprising fascination with sexual role-play in this manliest of writers. Donaldson examines the homoerotic thesis scrupulously, but finally comes round to a simpler explanation: They were drunks; both of them drank to keep depression at bay. Fitzgerald called his attacks ‘stoppies’; for Hemingway they were the ‘black ass’. The only difference was that Hemingway had the bigger frame, a healthier
lifestyle and a greater tolerance for alcohol. None the less, wet brain got him in the end. Fitzgerald composed his own epitaph: ‘I was drunk for many years, and then I died.’ Hemingway had twenty years longer – that was the only difference. ‘Whoever won the battle between Scott and Ernest for writer of his generation,’ Donaldson concludes, ‘they both lost the war to alcoholism.’

The War quit on us.
Faulkner’s observation on having ‘missed’ the Great War

William Faulkner’s war service – more specifically, his versions of it – are a sore point for his admirers (which included, among others, the Nobel Prize committee). What comes to mind is the raving George IV on his deathbed, convinced he had fought gallantly at the Battle of Waterloo. William C. Falkner (sic) was born in America’s Deep South. His family moved a few miles when he was five, to nearby Oxford, Mississippi – that ‘little patch of native soil’ which would become the rich territory of all his major fiction. The first-born son, ‘Billy’, was named after a great grandfather, ‘Colonel’ William C. Falkner (né Faulkner – he changed his name for reasons unknown), a Civil War hero.

It was a heavy burden to bear for a boy with an early addiction to Romantic poetry (particularly the ‘decadent’ Swinburne), who grew up a puny five-foot-five in a family of husky six-footers. Billy’s father, Murry, ran a livery stable – at a time when Henry Ford was sending this particular line of business into the knackers’ yard of history. Decay was all around the growing lad and the South would not ‘rise again’ in William Faulkner’s time. The ineradicable belief was that it had been driven down by Yankees. Billy was precocious and showed early gifts in drawing, painting and poetry. From his tenth year onwards he devoured classic fiction. Balzac was a particular favourite and he would adopt the French writer’s multi-volume sequence format in his own writing. In his adolescence he saw poetry as his main form. He also began on what would be a lifelong career in alcoholism in his teenage years.

A bank clerk by day, young Falkner spent many of his leisure hours on the
campus of ‘Ole Miss’, the University of Mississippi. He and his friends were entranced by the glamour of the epic war being fought in Europe. Falkner saw his first aeroplane in 1915. The romance of conflict in the clouds, of an Arthurian kind – so different from the carnage of the American Civil War – became an obsession. As in Yeats’s poem, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ (‘I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above’),
glorious
death was foreseen.

On 6 April 1917 the US declared war on Germany. Falkner promptly volunteered, hoping to join the army aviation corps. Aware that he was physically unprepossessing, he stuffed himself with bananas and swilled pints of water, to blag his way through the medical. It didn’t work. He was turned down for not meeting the height and weight requirements. He was now certified that most inferior of American things, a wimp: a seven-stone weakling. But he wasn’t. He resolved to enrol in the British Royal Flying Corps (soon to become the RAF). It had a recruiting office in New York, and training bases in Canada. No bananas were required, but some subterfuge was necessary. With his pal Phil Stone, Falkner cultivated a British accent (traces would remain, in his Southern drawl, throughout life) and purloined forged papers which recorded he was as English as Edward VII and had been born in Finchley. He changed his name to ‘Faulkner’, reversing what his namesake ancestor had done. He and Phil carried fabricated letters of reference from an English vicar called, improbably, Edward Twimberly-Thorndyke. The scrutiny of those enlisting to join the fight in 1917 was not rigorous. The war was going very badly for England. Despite his 33-inch chest and ‘feeble moustache’, Faulkner was ‘in’.

Cadet Faulkner duly reported for training in a base near Toronto, on 9 July 1918. As the romantic scenario required, he left behind him a girl, Estelle, who he loved madly and who – as the same scenario required – allowed him the
summum bonum
before he went off to death or glory. He went on to marry Estelle in 1929 and they had one daughter. As a cadet, his uniform had white chevrons, and he did not enjoy full officer status – the King’s commission would come later and so would the flying. First there was dreary drill and interminable lectures. There were lumbering two-seater biplanes on the base, but none of the frontline Sopwith Camels (made immortal, elsewhere, by Captain W. E. Johns). Nor were cadets allowed near any actual aircraft for months. Men were much more expendable than equipment. Over the four months of his training, Faulkner sent wildly dramatic letters home – some of his most inventive early fiction. They chronicled a series of daring-do exploits, climaxing – as he described it to his amazed family – in a reckless loop-the-loop which led to him crashing, upside down, and having to be cut out of his machine. He had cost the British monarch, he chortled, some £2,000.

Biographers have looked, but there seems to have been no record of this event,
and no committee of inquiry – invariably required when an expensive item of military property is destroyed in training. Would a trainee pilot (in a two-seater) have survived dismissal from the course for a manoeuvre which, as Faulkner implied, was carried out in a spirit of sheer devilry? Joseph Blotner, author of the immense biography which has biblical status among Faulknerians, concludes, grimly: ‘It seems clear that Cadet Faulkner did not crash. Did he ever fly?’ Probably not, Blotner intimates. He was what the cadets contemptuously called a ‘kiwi’ – a bird that never takes to the air.

Faulkner graduated in November 1918, the same month, as he bitterly said, ‘the war quit on us’. For his return home to Oxford, Mississippi, he had bought himself an officer’s uniform, complete with pips and swagger stick (he would sport a military-looking trenchcoat for the rest of his life). He was still a cadet, and would not receive an ‘honorary’ lieutenant’s rank for two years. Impersonating an officer is a court martial offence – although in the chaotic demobilisation of millions no one in 1918 checked up on the bona fides of ‘Lieut.’ Faulkner. He was, however, a fake. He continued to elaborate his ‘war’ over the following years, developing a ‘mythical limp’ and alluding, vaguely, to broken legs in his ‘crash’. His friend and patron, Sherwood Anderson, was convinced Faulkner had a silver plate in his skull. As the decades passed, the warrior fantasy grew. Faulkner hinted, obliquely, at having seen combat over Germany. In 1943, sending a good-luck charm to a young relative who was training with the RAF, Faulkner said he would have liked to have sent his dog tags: ‘but I lost them in Europe in Germany … I never found them again after my crack-up in ’18’. There was no ‘crack-up’.

After the war Faulkner drifted aimlessly. He drank heavily, visited brothels, and had a series of jobs, the longest lasting must have been as one of the least efficient employees in the history of the US Mail. He jacked that job in with the jaundiced comment: ‘I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.’ During this fallow period, he was writing (mainly poetry) and gathering ideas and creative energy. His first novel was written, he claimed, over a few weeks in 1925 in New Orleans, before departing on a tour of Europe. He was encouraged by Anderson, who was instrumental in getting it into print in 1926, with Boni & Liveright, an imprint which guaranteed influential reviews.
Mayday
, later retitled
Soldiers’ Pay
, covers three months (April to May 1919) and is an example of what the Germans termed
Heimkehrliteratur
– return-home fiction. British bestsellers in the genre were
If Winter Comes
by A. S. M. Hutchinson and
Sorrell and Son
by Warwick Deeping. A deeply resentful genre, this variety of fiction depicts the shabby treatment the returned ‘hero’ receives from those for
whom he has risked all. The resentment is graphically evident in
Soldiers’ Pay
(for which read ‘short-change’) in the return of the mortally wounded, DFC-decorated RAF veteran who is at the centre of the narrative:

Donald Mahon’s homecoming, poor fellow, was hardly a nine days’ wonder even. Curious, kindly neighbors came in – men who stood or sat jovially respectable, cheerful: solid business men interested now in the Ku Klux Klan more than in war, and interested in war only as a matter of dollars and cents; while their wives chatted about clothes to each other across Mahon’s scarred oblivious brow.

The story opens with three discharged veterans returning home by train. One is an air cadet, Julian Lowe (faintly symbolic name) who has never flown; the second, Gilligan, an exuberant doughboy infantry private; the third, Mahon, the horrifically wounded heroic pilot thought dead by his family and unfaithful fiancée in Georgia. Mahon, in his dying days, is taken charge of by Gilligan and a war widow Gilligan falls in with (and later falls in love with, as does the cadet). There is a supremely telling moment, early in the narrative, when Lowe – who has never seen the action he was trained for – regards the shattered body of Mahon and thinks: ‘To have been him! … Just to be him. Let him take this sound body of mine! Let him take it. To have got wings on my breast, to have wings; and to have got his scar, too, I would take death to-morrow.’ He speaks, one apprehends, for his author.

One of the fascinations of
Soldiers’ Pay
is that Faulkner writes better as the novel progresses.
Chapter 8
, with its flashbacks to combat, and the dogfight which destroyed Mahon, is particularly impressive. One sees the emergence of the author of
The Sound and the Fury
(1929), three years later. The other fascinating aspect of
Soldiers’ Pay
is the light it throws on the schizoid quality of the novelist – all novelists – who can both be themselves and something beyond themselves. ‘Lies were important to Faulkner,’ Richard Gray observes. You could argue they are important to all novelists. Fiction and falsity are inextricable. Cadet Faulkner had been close enough to the real thing to smell it. It was close enough – if not for his personal military ambitions, then for his writing. And if some of the fiction washed back into his image of himself (a work of fiction for most men) it is a thing of little importance.

I have never yet met anyone who practised Black, or even Grey, Magic who was not hard up.

Dennis Wheatley was born into one of the few branches of ‘trade’ traditionally regarded as a career fit for gentlemen. His father was a prosperous West End wine merchant. Dennis was the only son and was brought up in the expectation of his taking over the family business. The Wheatleys lived, comfortably but not ostentatiously, in Streatham. It was not – then or now – an address to boast about and Dennis, who had a broad streak of amiable snobbery in his make-up, aimed from his earliest years to leave the South London
palais de dance,
Lyons Corner House, and picture palace well behind him. But he was unhappy at his public school, Dulwich College (where, it’s nice to think, he was a near-contemporary of Raymond Chandler) and left after a year for the more bracing education offered by a naval academy. ‘He never shone academically,’ records his friendly biographer, which is an understatement. He never even mastered the art of spelling. He read fiction voraciously, however, and three novels shaped him:
The Prisoner of Zenda, The Scarlet Pimpernel
and
The Three Musketeers
. His own fiction would ring innumerable changes on their adventure plots.

On leaving school (no question of university) he spent a
Lehrjahr
in Germany, where he learned all about Hock and Moselwein and, it being 1913, witnessed the ominous militarisation of that country. On the outbreak of war, young Wheatley was among the first to sign up. He was also, fortunately for him, among the last to see frontline action. A series of cushy postings, unsought by him, as a junior officer in the Territorials kept him out of the fight until late 1917. After a few weeks in the trenches he was invalided back – it was not wounds, or gas, but his chronic bronchitis.

Wheatley’s diary (his ‘fornicator’s game book’ he called it) records engagements with a startlingly large number of
filles de joie
during these years. Clap was always more of a wartime risk for him than the Hun. He was, meanwhile, conducting courtships with respectable girls, often two at a time, of his own – or preferably higher – class. Despite having all his teeth removed at an early age, rotted by his lifelong addiction to sweetmeats and dessert wine, he was dashingly handsome and man-of-the-worldish. During the war Wheatley also fell in with a male companion who would have a profound effect on him. On demobilisation they became inseparable friends. Eric Tombe, a self-professed decadent (an ‘intellectual sensualist’, Wheatley called him) introduced him to the occult and to interesting
delinquencies of the Dorian Gray kind. Tombe was a confidence trickster and led his wine-merchant friend into dangerous places. He was eventually murdered, by an even shiftier rogue than himself. Wheatley immortalised Tombe in the person of the devilishly good-looking, scar-faced vigilante, Gregory Sallust (‘Sexlust,’ to connoisseurs of Wheatleyism).