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

by John Sutherland

  Henry’s upbringing was richly nomadic – a succession of American schools and instructors, fruitfully interrupted by years in Europe. European museums made an indelible impression. His father’s comment that he was a ‘devourer of libraries’ is much quoted and is, manifestly, no exaggeration. He is recorded as already writing stories ‘mainly of a romantic kind’ in his early teens.

  James made an abortive start in law at Harvard in 1862. The Civil War had broken out and two of his brothers took up arms, while he was exempted on grounds of disability. He described how that disability happened in his late memoir, Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). He was eighteen and serving as a volunteer fireman. Fighting a fire in a stable, he found himself ‘Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences, where the rhythmic play of my arms, in tune with that of several other pairs, but at a dire disadvantage of position, induced a rural, a rusty, a quasi-extemporised old engine to work and a saving stream to flow, I had done myself, in face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an obscure hurt.’ The horrid obscure hurt has been interpreted as everything from castration to lumbago.

  James published his first stories and critical pieces during a war they in no way reflected and by his early twenties was recognised as a rising author. He made literary friends easily throughout the whole of his life. His conversational charm was legendary and he developed table-talk into an art form. It is recalled vividly by Ezra Pound: ‘The massive head, the slow uplift of the hand, gli occhi onesti e tardi, the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture … I had heard it but seldom, yet it is all unforgettable.’ One can only wish that Thomas Edison had come along with his great invention fifty years earlier.

  In 1864 the James family moved to Boston, whose literary milieu was, if anything, richer than New York’s. The Boston publisher, James T. Fields, and his Atlantic Monthly, were particularly supportive. James was all the while immersing himself in English and French literature and developing his own theories as to how the art of fiction might be just that – an ‘art’. In 1868 he published six stories and fifteen critical pieces, chewing away at the problem. He went to England the following year and was taken up by London literary society, though it was not an unmitigatedly happy period. Letters to his brother dwell on the private agonies of constipation – acute at this period and chronic throughout his life (ingenious links have been made with the tortured motions of his prose style).

  It was while in England in 1870 that he learned of the death of his cousin, Mary (‘Minny’) Temple, from tuberculosis. Immortalised as Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902), he was plausibly in love with her. It is recorded that in late life, ‘Locked in a drawer in Lamb House, wrapped in silver paper, James kept a photograph of a young woman. Once when Violet Hunt came to visit, James unlocked his treasure and carefully unwrapped it. He touched it as though it were sacred.’ There are those who believe his love for woman died with Minny. What seems clear, from fictions such as ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1888), is that James thought marriage, and what came with it, deflected the artist. It took the mind off art as it would have taken a monk’s mind off God.

  He returned to America on Minny’s death, mournfully informing a friend, ‘It’s a good deal like dying.’ He came back to England two years later for what would be residence rather than an extended visit. Henceforth he would be, as he told his brother William, ‘ambiguous’ nationally. Fiction was above nation. The English novel was paralysed, as a genre, in high-Victorian provincialism, and sadly needed its Flaubert. James, as much at home in Paris as London, would supply it. At this period, he produced his first novels with his hallmark ‘international theme’, Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1876–7), The Europeans (1878). The ‘innocent abroad’ comedy, Daisy Miller (1879) reveals a lighter comic touch but a vein of anti-Americanism which displeased some transatlantic readers.

  As the decade ended, he was creating his most ambitious work to date, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) – the James novel about whose achievement there is least critical dispute. Whether he ever achieved as satisfactory a portrait of a man remains a matter of dispute. The novel was well received but a fluent stream of journalism and travel writing still supplied his main literary income. The English and American reading publics were not, en masse, ready for his novels, and this irked him. Already, authoritative commentators like William Dean Howells were hailing him as a ‘master’ – the hope of the Anglo-American novel. Why could he not bring in enough money to carry that mission through? His friend George du Maurier, before writing it himself, offered him the plot of Trilby, which James declined. He was not that desperate. None the less he looked enviously at the thousands Svengali brought its ‘inartistic’ creator, and the tens of thousands Robert Elsmere brought his humble devotee, Mrs Humphry Ward.

  Disastrously, he decided to try the stage where novelists like J. M. Barrie were coining it. This effort culminated in the greatest humiliation of his career at the opening night in London’s West End of Guy Domville in 1895. He misheard the sarcastic hoots from the auditorium and came on stage to render himself a figure of public ridicule. The exquisite humiliation forms the central episode in David Lodge’s 2004 novel, Author, Author. The spectacular failure of Domville marked what Philip Horne calls ‘the return to fiction’ and James’s ‘major phase’. He regrouped energetically. He bought and used a bicycle, employed secretaries (the redoubtably named Mary Weld and Theodora Bosanquet), switched to a more aggressive literary agent, and took up permanent residence at Lamb House, in Rye. When in London, he would stay at the Reform Club (whose politics were close to his own). In 1898 he published what is his most-read work today, The Turn of the Screw. A ghost story for the Christmas fireside, it demonstrates James’s guiding principle that it is not what is narrated, but how it is narrated which creates effect. This thesis is raised to its highest refinement in What Maisie Knew (1897).

  As the new century opened, he shaved off his beard – creating an anachronistically youthful look – and set to with his most ambitious fiction: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). This last, he told his American publisher, was ‘the most done of my productions – the most composed and constructed and completed’. Having demonstrated in these novels what fiction should be, he defined the topic in the hugely innovative ‘New York Edition’ of his works, whose prefaces constitute a critical statement of Johnsonian authority.

  This Edwardian era is the highpoint of James’s literary career. Thereafter deteriorating health brought him down. His last years were loaded with honours: an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1912, an Order of Merit in 1916. He was roused into patriotic fury by the Great War and took British citizenship in July 1915, largely as a protest against America’s remaining neutral as European civilisation went under. In late 1915 he suffered a stroke, greeting ‘the distinguished thing’, imminent death, with a typically stylish phrase. He died a few months later and, at his own request, was cremated at Golders Green. The family smuggled his ashes back to America. He left less than £9,000.

  Over the last few decades, Henry James’s sex life has been a topic of intense academic speculation. The most solidly supported thesis is that drawn by the authoritative (but nowadays much controverted) biographer, Leon Edel. In 1905, a doctor recorded, privately, that James had a ‘low amatory coefficient’. This odd locution has been glossed as referring, delicately, to the size of the master’s membrum virile; or, perhaps, his low, or non-existent, sex drive. That minimal drive, Edel grants, may have been directed to his own sex – but was sternly unconsummated. Whether he was a ‘queer monster’ or not remains a moot point and probably forever will be.

  FN

  Henry James

  MRT

  The Portrait of a Lady

  Biog

  L. Edel, Henry James: A Life (1985); Philip Horne, Henry James: a Life in Letters (1999)


  72. Bram Stoker 1847–1912

  I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome …

  Little of interest is to be found in the first thirty years of Stoker’s life. He was born the middle child of seven in Dublin. His father was a civil servant at the ‘Castle’ – the HQ of Irish colonial administration. Bram’s birth coincided with the ‘Great Hunger’ and mass emigration from Ireland – themes which ingenious critics have woven into Dracula. The Protestant middle classes, for whom the potato was a side-dish, were insulated from the peasants’ suffering. Bram’s father was twenty years older than his wife Charlotte, and it was she who sowed the seed of literature in her son. She had ample time to do so. Little ‘Bram’ (so nicknamed to distinguish him from his namesake father) was bedridden with a mysterious ailment for the first seven years of his life. Put another way, he was longer than most children sucking at the mother’s breast. Thereafter, he grew strong, shining at Trinity College, Dublin, in the debating hall, classroom, and on the sports field. On graduation, Bram followed his father into the Castle. His career there was rapid: by 1877 young Stoker had risen to the post of Inspector of Petty Sessions. He could think of no young man, Abraham Stoker Sr complacently noted, who had risen so fast.

  Photographs confirm Bram to have been strikingly handsome; the epitome of the manly ‘red Irishman’. Two events transformed his life in 1878. He married the wispily beautiful Florence Balcombe in that year, winning her hand from a mortified Oscar Wilde. It may be that Bram had the more winning smile: his rival had what Florence saw as ‘curly teeth’. The other event involved the theatre. From childhood, Bram had been stage-struck. Henry Irving’s touring company played Dublin regularly in the mid-1870s. Stoker, a confirmed Irvingite, wrote an admiring review of the actor’s Hamlet, in 1878. It was well received. The young civil servant was summoned to Irving’s suite at the Shelbourne where the two men talked until daybreak. The next evening, Stoker was informed that the Great Man had a ‘special gift’ for him. It turned out to be a recitation of Thomas Hood’s melodramatic poem ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. At the end of his performance, Irving tore off his necktie and collapsed in a swoon. ‘The recitation was different, both in kind and degree, from anything I ever heard,’ Stoker recalled. His own response he described as ‘hysterical’.

  Irving impulsively invited Stoker to be his ‘stage manager’ (his Renfield, as commentators like to jest – or, perhaps, his Harker?). Bram’s father was horrified. Was there, commentators have wondered, physical seduction? Stoker was a confessed Whitmanite. On American theatrical tours, he made a point of throwing himself at the feet of the great poet. Whitman’s ‘inversion’ was an open secret. We may ask but will never know: Stoker’s private life is a locked cabinet. One biographer, Daniel Farson, a remote descendant, plausibly deduces that after the birth of one child, Irving Noel, Florence withdrew conjugal access, protecting the Dresden-china looks which, even ten years later, led George du Maurier to rank her as one of the three most beautiful women in London. Farson believes that Stoker resorted to actresses and prostitutes and contracted syphilis; something that speculation can link with the infectious vampiric kiss.

  The fact is, there is a tantalising blankness in the twenty years of Stoker’s manly (but what kind of manly?) prime. Either the cabinet is empty, or – as a trained keeper of documents – he expertly covered his tracks. What does survive is the record of his efficient factotum service to Irving. The Lyceum would never have dominated the London theatrical world as it did without Stoker behind the scenes. As Irving’s particular friend, Stoker dined and hobnobbed with the age’s celebrities: Wilde (who forgave him Florence), Ellen Terry, Whistler, Conan Doyle and Hall Caine (the beloved ‘Hommy-Beg’, to whom Dracula would be dedicated). And for six years in the 1890s, he worked and researched a work provisionally entitled ‘The Un-Dead’. Eventually he came round to the Wallachian word for ‘devil’, Dracula.

  Stoker boned up on Transylvania in the British Museum. Other sources of the novel were nearer to hand, notably fellow Irishman Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). What Stoker brought to vampirology was the frisson of his ‘master’ Irving’s hypnotic stage presence, most spectacularly displayed in his performance as Mephistopheles in Faust. Du Maurier’s sinister Svengali is also there somewhere. Stoker himself nodded towards Jack the Ripper as a topical inspiration. The fact is, so opaque are Dracula’s symbolisms, that one can read virtually anything into them – and critics have.

  Two events combined to alter the course of Stoker’s life in 1897. One was the completion of Dracula; the other the burning down of the Lyceum warehouse, with all the company’s props and wardrobe. Irving refused to stage, or even read, the dramatic adaptation of Dracula which Stoker had prepared (for copyright reasons). He affected to think poorly of his protégé’s novel. It was wounding. The novel was in the event not an overwhelming sales success and would not take off as an international bestseller until the 1930 screen version, Nosferatu, made it a goldmine – though not for Irving, nor for Stoker’s widow, Florence, who survived him by twenty-five years, most of them tormented by Dracula copyright squabbles.

  Stoker was no longer necessary to Irving after the Lyceum closed in 1902. The actor, disabled by a series of strokes, died three years later. Whether it was syphilis or not, Stoker’s last ten years were difficult. He too suffered strokes and chronic poor health but, none the less, forced himself to turn out six ‘shockers’, none of them in the same class as Dracula. Everyone, it is said, has one novel inside them. Would they were all as good as Stoker’s.

  FN

  Abraham Stoker (‘Bram’)

  MRT

  Dracula

  Biog

  B. Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of ‘Dracula’ (1996)

  73. Grant Allen 1848–1899

  Don’t take to literature if you’ve capital enough in hand to buy a good broom.

  Grant Allen was born in Ontario, Canada, where his father was a clergyman of the Irish Church, who had emigrated in 1840. His mother was Scottish. In 1861, the family moved to Connecticut, in the USA, where the sons were taught by a tutor from Yale. It was in the bitter North American winter that Allen had an experience which, he later claimed, shaped his view of the human condition. Skating on a frozen pond, the ice cracked and he was trapped beneath its translucent shelf: he ‘died’ and was resuscitated. Thereafter, when the question of death came up, Allen would say, ‘I have been there’, explaining, bleakly, ‘there is nothing there’.

  After a year broadening his mind in France, Allen went as a prize scholar to Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 1871. Here he became an ‘evolutionist’ – Darwin filled the hole where his father’s God had once been. Allen then made the mistake of marrying early and for love, which prevented any Oxbridge career. When his wife died prematurely, he turned to school-teaching and in 1873 he took up a chair of philosophy at a newly founded Government College in Jamaica, intended to provide higher education for West Indian blacks. The scheme failed.

  On returning to England in 1876, Allen made writing his profession – principally on science, evolution and the teachings of Herbert Spencer. In 1884 he gathered into a volume several ‘Strange Stories’ casually contributed to magazines under the pseudonym ‘J. Arbuthnot Wilson’. A preface relates how the author ‘by trade a psychologist and scientific journeyman’ had strayed into the ‘flowery fields of pure fiction’. The flowers pleased. Allen turned to and produced some thirty novels in various genres (science fiction, detective novels, sensation novels) over the next fifteen years, under his own name and using a battery of pseudonyms. The novels were remunerative, but he never thought much of them. His story What’s Bred in the Bone (1891) won a £1,000 prize from Tit-Bits, in 1891, which was the largest windfall of its kind received by any Victorian fiction writer.

  Allen, whose brain never stopped fizzing, contributed to the evolution of the detective story and was also among the first writers to create female detectives, with his stories centr
ed on the Girton girl, Miss Cayley, and the nurse-detective, Hilda Wade. But the most spectacularly popular of Allen’s titles was the ‘New Woman’ novel-with-a-purpose, The Woman Who Did (1895), whose massive sales helped set up the firm of John Lane, which later evolved into Penguin Books. The ‘woman who did’ is Herminia Barton, who declines to marry, on ethical principles, and nobly lives in flagrant sin. She comes to a tragic (but ‘stainless’) end. The novel offended both middle-class readers and, emanating as it did from a male hand, rather confused chauvinistic feminists.

  Allen died of malarial complications – perhaps picked up in the Caribbean. On his deathbed, he dictated a last Hilda Wade episode to his friend and physician, Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Holmes and a firm believer in communication beyond the veil with the somewhere-still-living dead. His death, Allen once said, was of ‘utter physical indifference to him’. He had, as he said, already been there and experienced its nothingness. He did not anticipate continuing any relationship with his friend. Mr Doyle would rap on the table in vain as far as Mr Allen was concerned.

  FN

  Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen

  MRT

  The Woman Who Did

  Biog

  P. Morton, ‘The busiest man in England’: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900 (2005)

  74. Richard Jefferies 1848–1887