Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  What is his legacy? Dark clothes (Reservoir Dogs would not have been Reservoir Dogs without Pelham) is one. Another is the annual, widely publicised, competition sponsored by the English Department of San Jose University for the worst opening sentence to a novel, something, that is, as hilariously bad as Paul Clifford’s:

  It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

  A third is Knebworth House which, as horrifically ‘restored’ by Bulwer, will be familiar as the ultra-gothic setting to films such as The Omen and Eyes Wide Open, while Knebworth’s rolling grounds have hosted England’s biggest open air pop concerts. Lytton’s ghost, those who have slept in his house testify, ‘walks’. It is nice to think how annoyed he would be by the Rolling Stones strutting around his estate.

  FN

  Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton (later Lord Lytton); Rosina Bulwer-Lytton (Anne Doyle, née Wheeler)

  MRT

  Pelham, Cheveley

  Biog

  ODNB (Andrew Brown)

  28. Benjamin Disraeli 1804–1881

  When I want to read a novel, I write one.

  There is a sense in which Benjamin Disraeli was always young, just as his great opposite, William Ewart Gladstone (who formed his last Cabinet at the age of eighty-three), was always old. Between them, these colossi of Victorian Westminster epitomise a perennial contradiction in British and American politics: we want our leaders to have the energy of youth, but we also want them to have the gravitas of age.

  Among his minor achievements, Disraeli was the first politician to introduce hairstyle into politics – something which Byron and Bulwer-Lytton had done for literature a few years earlier. His mop of oiled, jet-black ringlets remained the delight of cartoonists throughout his long career. His hair proclaimed his youth, even in age.

  Disraeli’s is a wonderful career. The grandson of a humble Jewish immigrant, he clambered up the slippery pole (his term) of politics to the very top. It is a tribute not merely to him but to the openness of what seems at first glance the most closed of political institutions – the British Conservative Party. He had, it must be said, assistance. Benjamin’s father, the reclusive scholar Isaac D’Israeli, a non-practising Jew, had his newborn son circumcised according to Jewish rites. But, prudently, he also had the boy baptised in the Church of England at the age of thirteen.

  This dual allegiance inspired in Disraeli what one of his biographers, Jane Ridley, terms the ‘Marrano mentalité’ of the covert Jew. That mental facility aided him in the fluidly strategic shifts of his early party affiliations. In the course of eight years, the young Disraeli was by turns radical, Tory, loyal supporter of his party leader, rebel, and – arguably – back-stabbing traitor. Did Disraeli actually believe in the protectionist arguments he used to bring down his leader in 1846, thus clearing a necessary space for himself at the top? One doesn’t know, but tactical treachery would have been quite in character.

  As with party, so with sex. The young Disraeli was a gigolo, prepared to sacrifice any woman to the needs of his career (or any man – he may, it is speculated, have had homosexual moments in his youth). He discarded his first mistress, Henrietta Sykes, when she became an embarrassment. He proposed to the widow of his patron Wyndham Lewis, a less than dazzlingly beautiful woman twelve years older than he was – allegedly, according to his opponents, while the coroner was still clumping around in the house. It was Mary Anne’s jointure he needed. His debts were such that, were it not for the immunity from arrest for debt given to Members of Parliament, Disraeli would surely have found himself in the clink. By the early 1840s, he owed thousands.

  His debut in fiction, the ‘silver fork’ novel of high life, Vivian Grey, was published in 1827 to pay off some earlier vexatious debts. There was uproar when the anonymous novelist – presumed to be someone of importance – was revealed to be a nobody ‘and a Jew!’ Similarly flashy-trashy-but-very-clever works followed: The Young Duke (1831), Contarini Fleming (1832) and Alroy (1833). These extravaganzas brought in welcome cash for the author and even more for his unscrupulous publisher, Henry Colburn. They established Disraeli as a leader of the ‘fashnabble’ novelists (as a contemptuous, but not yet so successful, Thackeray labelled them).

  This first career in fiction ended in 1837 when, after three attempts, Disraeli finally made it into Parliament as Tory member for Maidstone. His second career was launched in the early 1840s. He had by now put himself at the head of the reformist ‘Young England’ clique which was at odds with the party leader, Robert Peel. To promote his Conservative cause Disraeli published (with Colburn again) a trilogy of powerful political novels: Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847). In them he outlined his creed: an amalgam of neo-feudalist nostalgia, a disdain for the bourgeois (‘Dutch’) so-called ‘revolution’ of 1688, high Anglicanism, and ‘one nation’ utopianism. Tancred asserts his favourite religious proposition, that Christianity is merely the ‘completion’ of Judaism and as dependent upon it as a house on its foundations. But no words from any novel have reverberated so much through the discourse of British politics as the famous remark of the working-class aristocrat Stephen Morley in Sybil to the blue-blood friend of the people, Egremont, in the ruins of an abbey, symbolising old England:

  ‘Well, society may be in its infancy,’ said Egremont slightly smiling; ‘but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.’

  ‘Which nation?’ asked the younger stranger, ‘for she reigns over two.’

  The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.

  ‘Yes,’ resumed the younger stranger after a moment’s interval. ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’

  ‘You speak of –’ said Egremont, hesitatingly.

  ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’

  ‘Young England’ was, as its slogan-name asserts, an intellectually youthful creed (although Disraeli was well into his forties when he expounded it). All three novels express the optimistic belief that ‘the Youth of the Nation are the trustees of Posterity’ and that the world is their oyster, which they with sword will open. Romantic as the novels are, Sybil contains the most graphic depictions of working-class wretchedness to be found in Victorian fiction. Disraeli had, by the 1840s, come a long way from silver-forkery. The Young England trilogy represents the most effective use of fiction by a politician on record in English politics.

  For the next two decades Disraeli was preoccupied either with high office, or achieving it. His resignation from the premiership in 1868 (having got the second Reform Bill enacted) allowed him time to embark on a third career in fiction. Now a Longmans, Green author, he wrote the political Bildungsroman, Lothair (1870) and, at the end of his phenomenally full life (and yet another term as Prime Minister) the narcissistic autobiographical romance, Endymion (1880). For this last work Disraeli received the then record sum of £10,000 from Longman. He had ascended to the top of yet another slippery pole. England remains two nations.

  FN

  Benjamin Disraeli (born D’Israeli, later Earl of Beaconsfield)

  MRT

  Sybil, or, The Two Nations

  Biog

  J. Ridley, The Young Disraeli (1995)

  29. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864

  That blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise. D. H. Lawrence

  Nathaniel Hawthorne was four years old when his mariner fa
ther died of fever in the Dutch colony of Surinam (the same fever-pit where, one recalls, Aphra Behn sets Oroonoko, and where her father died). It meant that Nathaniel grew up emotionally close to his sister, Elizabeth (‘Ebe’). The two children learned to read together and shared their thoughts. Closeness was further fostered by an obscure injury to his foot which Nathaniel incurred at the age of thirteen playing cricket – this may have been psychosomatic but none the less kept him mooning about at home for a year.

  Elizabeth was a strong-minded, highly literate child – she herself had pretensions to authorship – who grew up into a fine-looking, dark-haired, fiercely independent woman. The Hawthornes were the product of two distinguished family lines: the ‘Hathornes’, who could trace their pedigree back to the original Puritan settlers, and the Mannings on his mother’s side – more commercially minded than the Hathornes, who were governors by nature. Nathaniel added the ‘w’ in young manhood to distance himself, it is presumed, from the Salem witch-trials, in which his ancestor, John Hathorne, had been a judge. He was never easy with that heritage.

  On being widowed, Nathaniel’s mother moved to her parents’ house only a few streets away in Salem, the children’s birthplace. The Hathornes later moved to family property in Raymond, Maine, where Nathaniel and Ebe would spend their childhood years – he returning to Salem more often than she.

  On Nathaniel’s leaving school, their adult paths necessarily separated. He enrolled at Bowdoin College and on graduation, with high, but not class-topping, honours in 1824, he embarked, for over a decade, on his ‘attic years’. The Hathornes were now living in Salem again, his mother having returned from Raymond and taken up her abode in her deceased father’s house, ‘a tall, ugly, old grayish building’. Here Nathaniel secluded himself in his ‘haunted chamber’. As he recalled in a memoir twenty years later, ‘I scarcely held intercourse outside of my own family; seldom going out except at twilight, or only to take the nearest way to the most convenient solitude.’ Ebe was to him, over this period, more than a sister, but less than a wife. It was she, it is recorded, who fetched the books he needed from the Salem public library.

  What was going through Hawthorne’s mind and soul at this period will never be fully known. He was writing the stories – typically dark in tone – later collected as Twice-Told Tales, which brought him some reputation. Full recognition of his genius would await the publication of his major novels, ten years later. It was during these attic years that he wrote one of his darkest meditations on human sin. But what sin? In ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’, a nameless ‘secret sin’ leads the hero, as a young clergyman, to appear everywhere with his face covered. He obstinately refuses to have it removed, even on his deathbed. In his stories of this period, Hawthorne is given to such resonantly ominous, but vague, statements as that in ‘The Haunted Mind’: ‘In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon.’ What is Hawthorne alluding to?

  Of specific interest, it is suggested, is an early work called ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’. It is, by Hawthorne’s standards, poorly constructed, which might explain why he was reluctant to have it reprinted after first publication, anonymously, in 1835. It was Ebe, interestingly enough, after Nathaniel’s death, who arranged for ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’ to be brought back to print. The Doane children, we learn, were orphaned in infancy by a savage Indian attack on their homestead. Leonard and his sister Alice have been brought up together, in Salem. Their ‘tie’ is of the ‘closest’ and marked by a ‘concentrated fervour of affection’. Enter a stranger, Walter Brome, from the ‘Old World’ – the snake in the Doanes’ garden. ‘Evil’ by nature, Walter seduces Alice. Strangely, he has strong physical resemblances to Leonard, who senses a horrible ‘sympathy’ with someone whom he hates. Walter is, it finally emerges, Leonard’s twin and – more horribly – brother to Alice. Was he aware of the incestuous implications? The story is maddeningly vague on the matter, as it is on why it was that Walter’s existence is unknown, and how he happened to be raised – with a different identity – three thousand miles away.

  Leonard kills Walter, and half-buries his body in the winter ice, though it will, of course, rise again. There is a bizarre Walpurgisnacht episode in which the dead rise from the Salem graveyard. All those once thought respectable citizens proclaim their secret sins. All are guilty. The story ends with suggestive, but imprecise, phraseology, hinting at things not clearly said:

  We build the memorial column on the height which our fathers made sacred with their blood, poured out in a holy cause. And here, in dark, funereal stone, should rise another monument, sadly commemorative of the errors of an earlier race, and not to be cast down, while the human heart has one infirmity that may result in crime.

  What crime? There is other grist in Hawthorne’s life for the psychobiographer’s mill. Why did he emerge from his ‘haunted chamber’ in 1835, enter the world of books, become a minor Massachusetts ‘Custom House’ functionary, and marry in 1841? Why, on his mother’s death in 1849, did he embark on that astonishing burst of creativity which, in three years, produced The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852)? The most sensational investigations focus on Hawthorne’s relationship with Ebe. She never married and loathed her brother’s blameless wife, Sophia, whom he had married, on the verge of middle age, after a sibling relationship of thirty-eight years. Ebe did everything she could to frustrate the match and never formed a civil relationship with her sister-in-law.

  The outright allegation of incest between Nathaniel and Ebe was delivered by two books, published within months of each other, in 1984: Philip Young’s Hawthorne’s Secret: An Untold Tale and, less aggressively, Gloria C. Erlich’s Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web. The incest hypothesis was fanned to the pitch of critical furore, following a review of Young’s book in the New York Review of Books by Leo Marx. A venerable critic of American literature, Marx seemed to give some provisional assent to the idea that there may have been something of the like between Nathaniel and Ebe, and it could indeed explain things.

  The incest hypothesis depends on thematic deductions from texts of the fiction, bolstered by dark hints by friends such as Herman Melville, who detected ‘a blackness, ten times black’ shrouding Hawthorne’s soul. He believed, said Melville, that all his life Hawthorne had ‘concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries in his career’. Young and Erlich presumed to have found the source of that ‘great secret’ buried in distant Manning family history. The documentary source (a ‘smoking gun’) was Joseph B. Felt’s Annals of Salem, a volume which Hawthorne is known to have borrowed from the Salem Library and which Ebe almost certainly also read (she may even have taken it out for her brother). In 1681, the Annals record that Nicholas Manning was, at his enraged wife’s complaint, found guilty of incest with his two sisters. This skeleton in the Manning-Hathorne closet had escaped critical notice for 150 years because the Annals recorded the event anonymously. As was usual, it was the women who bore the brunt of the public humiliation and punishment in 1681. They were sentenced to a night in prison, to be whipped publicly on their naked bodies (or pay a fine) and to sit on a high stool in the aisle of the Salem meeting house with a paper on their heads inscribed: ‘This is for whorish carriage with my naturall Brother.’

  The connection with the opening scenes of The Scarlet Letter are manifest. Hester Prynne emerges into the marketplace at Salem, with the letter of her sin inscribed on her breast:

  Her attire, which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer – so that both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time – was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroider
ed and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

  Hester’s physical appearance, notably her ‘dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam’ plausibly recalls Ebe’s crowning glory. And, arguably (very arguably), Hawthorne is recalling ‘whorish carriage’ between himself and his sister. It’s exciting stuff. But Philip Roth – abhorrer of biographers – pours cold water on it by noting, with much sarcasm, in Exit Ghost, that novelists do not use novels to confess their sins. It would be like inscribing love letters on lavatory walls.

  FN

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Hathorne)

  MRT

  The Scarlet Letter

  Biog

  P. Young, Hawthorne’s Secret: An Untold Tale (1984); G. C. Erlich, Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web (1984)

  30. Harrison Ainsworth 1805–1882

  I consider myself very like Lord Byron. Harrison Ainsworth in a letter to the Edinburgh Review, aged sixteen

  For Victorian novelists, historical romance was the bow of Ulysses. The greatest practitioners (Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Hardy, Charlotte Brontë, Bulwer-Lytton) wrote at least one – and of none of them can it be said it was their best work. For every disappointed modern reader of Romola, there are ten thousand satisfied readers of Middlemarch. No one, it seemed, could emulate the author of Waverley. Harrison Ainsworth qualifies as the most consistently successful. He was born in Manchester, the son of a solicitor with a distinguished Lancashire pedigree. He enjoyed the benefit of a grammar-school education: then, as now, Manchester’s was the best in the country. At sixteen, having penned some appalling ‘Lines on Leaving Manchester School’, he was articled to his father’s profession (just as Scott had been). No pettifogger, he affected Byronic airs and a taste for antiquarianism from his youth onwards. He was indoctrinated with Jacobite and Tory beliefs which would remain with him throughout his writing career.