Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (95 page)

Having lost a year of study, Warner transferred from classics to English – a softer option. The change of subject had momentous career consequences. It brought him together with W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and other founder members of the ‘Thirties group’. Like Auden, Warner scraped a ‘gentleman’s third’ (Spender – never one to do things by halves – flunked out with no degree whatsoever). Like his comrades, Warner fell back on school-teaching to keep the wolf from the door. During the slump there were no easy jobs – even for gents. His first serious efforts as a writer reflect the mechanophiliac ‘pylon’ poetry Spender was writing in the early 1930s and Auden’s perverse sentiment that the most beautiful walk in Oxford was along the stinking canal by the gasworks. No dreaming spires for these young men. But the main influence on Warner’s writing originated elsewhere: the Muirs, Edwin and Willa, had translated Kafka’s
The Castle
in 1930 – it exploded like a bomb on insular British culture.

Warner’s first published novel,
The Wild Goose Chase
(1937), is a Kafkaesque allegory of totalitarianism. The novel’s best-known episode is a football match in which the pitch elastically reshapes itself to favour the home side. This chapter (which Spender believed the
second
best thing of its kind ever written – the first is unrecorded) was published in the house journal of the Thirties group, John Lehmann’s
New Writing
. Like others in that group, Warner was at this period what he called in later life a ‘near communist’. But the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact, as with other fellow travellers, extinguished any loyalty he might have had to Moscow. Warner wrote his masterpiece,
The Aerodrome
(1941), in the run-up to the Second World War and published it during the conflict. Fictionally it echoes Orwell’s ‘As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’
The Aerodrome
’s narrative pivots on the binary opposition of an old English village, presided over by the ‘Rector’, and the new, nearby aerodrome, presided over by the ‘Air Vice Marshal’. One represents totalitarian ‘apparat’, the other liberal English ‘muddle’, as E. M. Forster called it. Woven into this design is a complicated love story centred on the orphan hero, Roy (a version of ‘Rex’, as critics note). To win the war, Old England has to ape its enemy, destroying the principles for which it initially fought the war. Victory merely recreates the enemy in yourself – such is the irony of history. During the war Warner, too old and too crocked to serve, taught and wrote. It was, he said, ‘escapism’. At the war’s end, he was sent on a BBC mission to Germany and the concentration camps. What he saw, inescapably, precipitated another breakdown. The first, at Oxford, had made him a modern novelist; the second extinguished that career.

As Theodor Adorno famously pronounced, writing, after Auschwitz (Belsen in Warner’s case) was pointless. Warner accepted a series of cushy British Council jobs, well beneath his talents, in Greece and Germany, and drank excessively. He changed marriage partners, leaving his loyal wife and three children for Barbara Hutchinson, the wealthy widow of a Rothschild. Later he drifted to America, where he landed even cushier college jobs at Bowdoin and Storrs. Life became one long, sodden, sinecure. Over the years he mainly translated classical texts. His
Thucydides
, in its Penguin Classic (half-crown) livery, sold over a million copies. His desultory efforts in fiction, particularly an unlucky essay in Wodehousian comedy, were less wanted by the reading public.

In his seventies, Warner retired to rural Oxfordshire with Frances (his first wife, who he remarried in 1966), where, despite a heroic intake of alcohol in the neighbouring pub, he survived until his eighties. At his funeral, as his biographer records, ‘no figures from the London literary world were present’.

Sodom and Begorrah.
Dylan Thomas on
Murphy

Beckett was born in Foxrock, near Dublin, Ireland, to a Protestant family. He records the occasion of his birth with gloom-edged precision: ‘I was born on Friday the thirteenth and Good Friday too. My father had been waiting all day for my arrival. At eight p.m. he went out for a walk, and when he returned, I had been born.’ Biographers have queried the date, time and paternal absence. Elsewhere Beckett recalls: ‘You might say I had a happy childhood.’ He does not quite say it himself. His father was a prosperous housing contractor (not
quite
an architect, as Beckett pedantically observed). His mother, musical by nature, had no luck moving her younger son, Sam, towards that ‘safe’ line of work, but she remained the dominant figure in his life until well into middle age. As a child, he loved games, particularly cricket in which, ever enigmatic, he batted left-handed and bowled right-handed. Ireland, between 1916 and 1922, was in rebellious upheaval but it did not materially affect the Becketts, or him. He attended the same school as had Oscar Wilde (Portora Royal) where, like his elder brother Frank, he was more distinguished as an athlete
than as a scholar. Even at this early stage of his life, he was observed to be unusually ‘private’. What he later called his ‘crescendo of disengagement’ had begun.

Beckett went on to read Modern Languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1923. He steeped himself in French poetry and Dante (like cricket, a lifelong passion) and drank heavily. On graduation, he took up a two-year teaching assistant post at the École Normale in Paris. Here he was introduced to James Joyce, whose occasional amanuensis he became. There was a complicated relationship with Joyce’s disturbed daughter, Lucia, who was infatuated with him. It led to a ‘bust up’. He could not bring himself to love Lucia, he said enigmatically, because he was ‘dead’. James Joyce he was very much alive to. In Paris, Beckett published his first books, the long poem
Whoroscope
(about Descartes) and a study of Proust.

On his return to Ireland he seemed destined for an academic career. But his habits were increasingly – and rebelliously – bohemian and he eventually gave up the university. After an unsettled few years, much illness, and a frustrating inability to find his
métier
as a writer of fiction, he settled in Paris in 1937. Again he took up the role of Joycean acolyte. ‘To the dismay of some of his friends,’ his biographer records, ‘Beckett began to imitate Joyce’s mannerisms.’ It extended to imitating the master’s distinctive footwear: like Cinderella’s sisters (Beckett’s feet being the larger) he had to squeeze his feet into the master’s shiny, but smaller, shoes.

For some five years Beckett had been working on an autobiographical work, narrated by a ‘Mr Beckett’, called
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
. Clearly an act of Joycean homage, it mixes dialects, neologisms, parody and jokes (one of the best being the title – a department in which Beckett was always strong). It opens with the hero masturbating and pursues a maze of subsequent mind-centred fantasies.
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
proved unpublishable and Beckett himself later dismissed it as ‘immature and unworthy’. He was better pleased with the short stories collected under a title which would make it wilfully difficult to see the light of print in his home country –
More Pricks than Kicks
.

Beckett was getting by at this period of his life with handouts from his parents. He was disturbed emotionally and submitted to their wish that he undergo psychoanalysis in London. He was interested to discover in himself a ‘womb fixation’ – an unhealthy attachment to his mother. He had not, in Jungian terms, been ‘entirely born’. It was an idea which would recur throughout his later writing and drama. His major work of the 1930s was the novel
Murphy
. The narrative again plays out within the hero’s mind. A Dubliner and a ‘seedy solipsist’, Murphy inhabits a condemned building in London where he ruminates, naked, in a rocking chair. There is an intricate denouement via a chess game with revised rules. The hero dies in an explosion detonated by a downstairs jakes. His will instructs that his cremated
remains be flushed down the loo of the Abbey Theatre.
Murphy
was the first of his novels to be bilingualised into French by Beckett himself. It was rejected by close on fifty publishers, well reviewed on its eventual publication in 1938 by discriminating critics, and sold abysmally.

In 1938 Beckett was stabbed – nearly fatally – in the Parisian streets by a pimp, having refused the services of a ‘lady of the evening’. He was lucky not to die. When he found himself in the courts of justice alongside his assailant, he asked him why he had done it. ‘I don’t know,’ was the reply. The remark had significance for Beckett. He had by now firmly resolved that ‘I didn’t like living in Ireland’ and he chose to remain in France after the outbreak of war in 1939. During the German Occupation, as an Irishman, he was technically neutral but he involved himself, at great peril, with the French Resistance. After being betrayed, he spent two years underground (for a while in the cellar of the novelist, Nathalie Sarraute) and won a post-war Croix de Guerre. He had undertaken this life-threatening work, he said, for personal reasons, not for the French nation: ‘I was outraged by the Nazis, particularly by their treatment of the Jews.’ It was in the Resistance that Beckett formed what would be a lifelong attachment to Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (though they did not marry until 1961).

During the war he suffered intolerable nervous stress, something that feeds into the novel he wrote during these years,
Watt
(1953) – the punning title is arch-Beckett. The hero is a servant, embarking on the service of a Mr Knott (another pun). It removes to a lunatic asylum where a character ‘Sam’ appears. The novel ends with the now familiar mental dissolutions. Beckett, in his mid-life forties, saw himself principally as a novelist – writing in both French and English. Once asked was he English, Beckett replied ‘
au contraire
’. He would have so replied had he been asked if he was French, and – conceivably – if he was Irish. He was forever contrary.
Watt
was followed by
Mercier et Camier
(1946),
Molloy
(1951),
Malone Dies
(1951) and
The Unnamable
(1953). All ponder cosmic loneliness, all are ruminative in form (there is a famous scene in
Molloy
in which the hero returns to the seaside, with his sixteen ‘sucking stones’ – can you, the novel ponders, squeeze the past out of a stone?) All his work poses the large question, why live? Typically the hero, like Malone, is stripped as naked as Lear on the heath. Malone’s only contact, as he lies, man alone, interminably dying, is an old lady who brings him a daily dish and a clean chamberpot.

By the 1950s Beckett had recognition among advanced literary circles as an experimental, but crotchety, writer. World fame came to him as a dramatist with the absurdist play,
Waiting for Godot
(1953), particularly after its sensational 1956 launch on the London stage.
Godot
ushered in the theatre of the absurd as a
dominant style: it revolutionised drama and cinema. His later career saw the award of many prizes, crowned by the Nobel in 1969. He wrote some minimalist fiction in his last years, e.g.
Worstward Ho
(1983), gnawing the same old bones into ever more boniness.

He is the acknowledged master of that classic rarity, the tale of detection in which detection is seen to take place, the clues really are shared with the reader, and crimes of majestic and multifarious impossibility are shown at last to have been possible after all, if not always very plausible.
Kingsley Amis on Carr

One of the leading writers of detective fiction in the twentieth century, Carr was unusual in having equal appeal to British and American reading publics and being in himself bi-national. He was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a lawyer, later a congressman. He was educated at Haverford College – then, as now, an exclusive private institution – and in 1928 studied for a year at the Sorbonne. By his own account, Carr rebelled against the script written for him by his father: ‘They sent me to a school and university with the idea of turning me into a barrister like my father. But I wanted to write detective stories. I don’t mean that I wanted to write great novels, or any nonsense like that! I mean that I simply damn well wanted to write detective stories.’

Carr’s first novel,
It Walks by Night,
a Poe-like mystery, strongly reminiscent of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, based on the exploits of the Paris detective Henri Bencolin (a character clearly based on Poe’s Dupin), was published in 1930. In 1932 Carr married an Englishwoman, Clarice Cleaves (they met, appropriately enough, on a transatlantic liner), and moved to England. Over the next ten years he published an average of four novels a year, many under such easily penetrable pseudonyms as ‘Carr Dickson’. Over these years he also worked for the BBC, and established himself as a well-known figure on the cultural landscape. He came to my knowledge when I was a schoolboy, with his BBC radio dramatisations,
Appointment with Fear
, narrated by the creepily voiced ‘Valentine Dyall’. The Carrs had three children. He was not, his biographer discloses, a faithful husband.