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

by John Sutherland

  It had begun as a story told to his own children. Oz (the name was probably taken from Baum’s office filing cabinet, containing his papers ‘O–Z’) would become, along with Neverland, Wonderland, Narnia and Hogwarts, one of juvenile fiction’s most visited territories. The fable, and its successors, made the Baums rich again. On finishing the work (originally called ‘The Emerald City’), Baum knew instinctively that he had done something special. He had his pencil framed and placed over his desk under the inscription: ‘With this pencil I wrote the manuscript of “The Emerald City”.’

  Two years later, an ‘adultized’ stage version came out. Both book and play were sensationally popular. Baum spun off a series of numberless ‘Oz’ sequels over the following years and was one of the first generation of American writers to adapt his work for the screen, moving himself and his family to Hollywood to do so. In 1914, he founded the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, which was later taken over by Universal Studios. (In Southern California where the family settled, Baum made another name for himself as a grower of prize dahlias.) He died, America’s most loved story-teller, after a lingering illness in 1919. His last book, Glinda of Oz, came out posthumously.

  More people, over the years, have ‘seen’ The Wizard of Oz than have read it – and most have seen it in the MGM 1939 movie version (the eighth) starring Judy Garland. The outline is fairly faithful to what Baum wrote and Denslow pictured. The book was conceived and published during one of the recurrent depressions in American commercial life: one of the points that Baum makes in his 1900 preface is that his story is ‘modernized’ – set in the uncomfortable present. This realism at the heart of the fantasy is something that makes it an innovative ‘fairy story’. The narrative opens on an impoverished Kansas farm, in a bleak landscape. An orphan, Dorothy is cared for by her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. Her guardians are not unkind but their life is hard. Dorothy’s bosom friend – her only friend – is her dog Toto. The bleak Kansas sharecropper landscape of the opening scenes in the film was done in black and white, and Dorothy’s dream in blazing Technicolor. The film, released in the same year as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, has the same background of hardship among farming folk on the plains of America.

  Over the last half century, in which The Wizard of Oz has become one of the best-known fairy stories in the world, ‘deep readers’ have got to work on it, with some justification. Baum had been very impressed, in 1894, by a hunger march on the White House organised by the political activist, Jacob Coxey. The unemployed, in their thousands, marched across America to the capital. Eventually ‘Coxey’s Army’ was broken up in Washington and the leaders arrested on charges of ‘trespassing on the White House lawn’. The phoney Wizard of Oz has been read as representing the President of America – all talk and no action (in 1900 the President was William McKinley, who was assassinated a year after the publication of The Wizard of Oz). On their epic march up the yellow brick road (taken to be an allusion to the gold standard, which Coxey and other populists wanted to get rid of), Dorothy, the farm girl, represents the decent working classes, while the Scarecrow represents the rural poor. The Tin Man represents the toiling masses in the factories. Whatever its political subtexts, Oz, particularly after Baum’s work came out of copyright in 1969, holds its place as one of the richer franchises in American light entertainment.

  FN

  Lyman Frank Baum

  MRT

  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

  Biog

  F. J. Baum, To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum (1961)

  84. H. Rider Haggard 1856–1925

  Mr E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. V. S. Pritchett

  Henry Rider Haggard was born at West Bradenham Hall, Norfolk, the sixth son of William Meybohm Haggard, a local squire. His mother was an heiress, enriched with East India Company money. In the distant family background there were dashes of Jewish and Indian blood – this has interested modern commentators more than it ever did Haggard. His father ran his estate in feudal not to say tyrannic style and Haggard’s later fascination with brutal African chiefs – Twala, Chaka, Dingaan – is easily connected with his childhood servitude. Arriving so late in family life, in a culture dominated by primogeniture, he was less important than brothers who were bought commissions. He was judged stupid and unworthy of the expense of public school: his destiny, his father cruelly observed, was to be a ‘greengrocer’. Happily the old brute lived long enough (1893) to see his son the richer man.

  When Henry was nineteen, his father pulled strings to enable him to go to South Africa as secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer. Around this time he had fallen madly in love, but his father was not having any imprudent matches. The young fool, it was sternly decreed, could not marry until he had made his way in the world. They were exciting times and South Africa was an exciting place to make his mark. Britain was about to annex the Transvaal from the Boers and the Zulu Wars were raging. Haggard, like the whole nation, was entranced by British gallantry at Rorke’s Drift in 1879, and the eleven Victoria Crosses the Queen was pleased to award to her soldiers. It pained the young man that he was a mere pen-pusher in this stirring time, but it made him proud to be an Englishman.

  Initially he did very well in Africa. At an unprecedentedly young age he was appointed Master of the High Court in the Traansval. He lived well and took down his share of big game, but in other ways things did not go so smoothly. He rashly gave up his civil service position for ostrich farming and failed to get rich. There were injudicious love affairs, an illegitimate child, and dissipation – he is suspected to have taken African mistresses. There are oblique hints in the fiction – in the dusky beauty Foulata, for example, who, having given her all to her ‘lord’ (i.e. the Saxon Captain John Good), goes meekly to her death with the universal truth: ‘the sun may not mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black.’ Not quite true. Mating is one thing, marriage another.

  On his return to England in 1879, having given up on Africa, Haggard promptly married a Norfolk heiress, Louisa Margitson. But she was not the woman he wanted. That young woman, Mary Elizabeth ‘Lilly’ Jackson, who had been the cause of his going to Africa in the first place, had not – to his chagrin – been prepared to wait and had married a banker. Love denied union is a plot situation which would come up frequently in Haggard’s subsequent fiction, most poignantly in Nada the Lily (1892), where the heroine dies immured in a cave, her tiny hand – pushed through a crevice – held by a wounded Umslopogaas, unable to free her.

  The newly married Haggards returned to South Africa and ostrich farming but the reacquisition of the Transvaal by the Boers forced their departure. Haggard had little time for Dutch settlers, although he liked Zulus. He made the point in his first, stillborn, book, Cetywayo and his White Neighbours (1882). The couple had a son, who died aged ten, and three daughters. Haggard was still young and could foresee a costly life ahead of him and no legacy coming his way. Subsequently he trained for the Bar and, although he qualified, never practised. The work, he discovered, did not suit him – nor did London. Two pursuits would preoccupy the second half of his life: writing romance and farming the land – in that order.

  Spurred by the ambition to emulate Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), he wrote – in six weeks – King Solomon’s Mines (1885), which was an immediate hit. Adventure was highly saleable in the mid-80s. A vast generation of keen young readers had been released into literacy by the 1870 Universal Education Act. They gobbled up Haggard’s rattling tales insatiably. It wasn’t just the adventure. As enticing an aspect of the book is indicated by one of the publishers who turned the manuscript down, in disgust: ‘Never has it been our fate to wade through such a farrago of obscene witlessness … Nothing is likely in the hands of the young to do so much injury as this recklessly immoral book.’ The nipples on the Breasts of Sheba and the omnipresent topless Zulu maidens decorating the action strike the mode
rn reader as quaint rather than erotic, whereas in the 1880s they were sexual dynamite. Even more so was the voluptuous Ayesha: Haggard was particularly proud of the ageless ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’. He proudly recalled going to his literary agent and slapping down the manuscript of She: A History of Adventure (1887) – another six weeks’ labour – with the boast: ‘There is what I shall be remembered by.’

  Facile with his pen, Haggard turned out fiction by the torrent and everything with his name on it sold. His themes and subject matter varied, moving between gothic, mystic and science-fiction subject matter (in the last of the Quatermain series the hero is a time-traveller, having exhausted Africa’s possibilities). He explored other colonialisms, as in Montezuma’s Daughter (1893). His servitude in law produced the highly readable Mr Meeson’s Will (1888) where a publisher’s last will and testament is tattooed on the heroine’s back. Will it stand up in court?

  In the years of his fame, the jilt Lilly came back into his life. Her ‘prudent’ marriage had gone horribly wrong: her husband turned out a cad who infected her with venereal disease, before dying of it and leaving her penniless. Haggard took over the care of her and her family. Out of love? He had always been fascinated by women’s fading beauty. It prompts an odd footnote by Horace Holly in She. The most beautiful of women on the face of the earth (for 2,000 years!) has suddenly decayed into a ‘hideous little monkey frame, covered with crinkled yellow parchment’. Holly, jilted in youth by the only woman he has ever loved because he had no money, muses:

  What a terrifying reflection it is, by the way, that nearly all our deep love for women who are not our kindred depends – at any rate, in the first instance – upon their personal appearance. If we lost them, and found them again dreadful to look on, though otherwise they were the very same, should we still love them?

  Did Rider still love the syphilitic Lilly?

  Enriched by his books, the Haggards left London for comfortable country life in Norfolk. There he made himself an authority on English agriculture, producing a two-volume survey of Rural England in 1902. His political aspirations were foiled when he failed to win East Norfolk for the Unionists in 1895 (like all his class he regarded Ireland as a colonial possession). In the twentieth century he undertook various government missions and was knighted for public service in 1912. Always popular in America (George Lucas would make a fortune out of recycled Haggard in his Indiana Jones series), his romances were the favourite reading of President Theodore Roosevelt. He was awarded a KBE in 1919 in recognition of his war work.

  He continued writing vivid romances up to his death, elaborating the long-running She and Quatermain sagas interminably. The last spawned no less than fifteen titles (Allan Quatermain, in his mid-fifties in the first of the series must, one suspects, have dipped a toe in Ayesha’s immortalizing Pillar of Fire to have made it to 1927). Haggard was an early exponent of the dictation, secretary and typewriter mode of composition. In his later years he became obnoxiously racist and anti-Semitic, a vein of the prejudice can be traced back to rabbi-hating She. He died firmly believing that ‘great ultimate war … will be that between the white and coloured races’. Where are Sir Henry Curtis, Captain Jack Good, and Quatermain the Hunter when we need them?

  FN

  (‘Sir’) Henry Rider Haggard

  MRT

  King Solomon’s Mines

  Biog

  D. S. Higgins, Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller (1981)

  85. Joseph Conrad 1857–1924

  I think every Conrad story is a movie. Orson Welles

  Conrad’s reputation has passed through three distinct phases since his death. The first – and most vexatious to him (he was easily vexed) was Conrad the bluff nautical yarn spinner. Texts such as Youth, Typhoon and The Shadow Line were exalted. He was thought good for schoolboys. The second phase came with F. R. Leavis’s including him in the ‘Great Tradition’ of English fiction, between Henry James and D. H. Lawrence. It refocused attention on the densely notated moral complexities of the narratives. Leavis particularly valued Nostromo and Victory. With postwar global decolonisation, Heart of Darkness was widely prescribed in schools and universities as an enlightening text on the iniquities of imperialism. Conrad’s posthumous sales soared, as did a sense of pedagogic self-righteousness. This was reversed with Chinua Achebe’s denunciation of the novella in 1973 as the bigoted effusion of a ‘bloody racist’. Conrad’s reputation plunged. It would be a brave professor in the current climate who would set The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ for study.

  The philosopher closest to Conrad’s heart was Schopenhauer. Life, as the grim German philosopher saw it, is a constant struggle between the mind, which perceives life’s pointlessness, and the will, which declines to surrender to that perception. This Schopenhauerian strife explains the otherwise baffling tribute by Marlow to the criminally insane Kurtz, the man who has slaughtered, raped and plundered his way across Africa, making it darker than before: ‘It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!’

  The most haunting image of Conrad’s heroic type is the ‘Professor’ in The Secret Agent, his hand forever grasped around the rubber bulb in his pocket. If he presses it, he will blow himself, and all around him, to smithereens:

  He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable – and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.

  So the novel ends. Alongside Conrad, even the arch pessimist Schopenhauer might seem a trifle Panglossian.

  The source of Conradian gloom can be plausibly tracked back to his earliest years. He was born in what is now Ukraine. Poland had been sliced into nonentity by imperial neighbours – Prussia, Austro-Hungary, and, most hatedly, Russia. The country survived only as a romantic cause. Teodor was the only child of Polish patriots of noble descent who sacrificed their lives for that hopeless cause. His father Apollo Korzeniowski (1820–69), a member of the Polish resistance, was arrested in 1862 and deported with his family to exile in the bleak hinterland of Russia. It killed Conrad’s mother in three years and his father in seven. ‘Consumption’ was on the death certificates: it should have been ‘Russia’. Apollo – aptly named – died a hero but had achieved nothing – heroically. The first words five-year-old Teodor is known to have written are an inscription on the back of a photograph describing his father as ‘a Pole, a Catholic, a nobleman’.

  Thus began the strange concoction of a patriotic Slav who became a loyal Englishman: a master of the English language who thought most readily in French but in the delirium of fever babbled wildly in his natal Polish (something recorded vividly in his short story, ‘Amy Foster’); a writer who changed his name to ‘Conrad’ for its English resonance – that being the name of Byron’s corsair hero – but which had a private resonance. ‘Konrad’ was his father’s favourite name for him. Orphaned at eleven, Conrad was taken under the wing of a wealthy and indulgent uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski. From his earliest teens he wanted to go to sea and would not be talked out of this ‘Quixotic’ ambition, as his displeased guardian thought it. Poland had scarcely more naval tradition than Switzerland. The English nautical novelist Frederick Marryat, mixed with a congenital romanticism, seem to have been responsible for the young man’s infatuation with salt water.

  At sixteen he left for Marseilles, where he would stay four years picking up whatever maritime jobs came his way. He was a lowly steward, a seaman and, by his own account, a gun-runner. The exact details of this formative period are wholly obscure. But it is recorded that he attempted suicide in 1878 after running up gambling losses in Monte Carlo. He fired at his heart; the bullet went ‘through and through’, but missed. He would never be good with money. If women came into it, posterity will never know.

&nbs
p; The French authorities were sticklers about marine qualifications, but Britain was less strict about who sailed under the Red Duster. Conrad, moreover, saw England as the only country in the world whose flag offered ‘true liberty’. Over the following sixteen years he worked his way up through the ranks of the British merchant marine until he gained his first command in 1886, at which point he also took British citizenship. Over these adventuring years he saw the world, most of it under canvas, and crossed what he called the ‘shadow line’ from youthful idealism to maturity. However, he saw less of South America than Nostromo suggests, while the Malay Peninsula and Borneo he came to know intimately – Lord Jim is soundly based, as is the novel’s central event, the desertion of a pilgrim ship by its cowardly officers: something that actually happened. Momentously, he paddled up the Congo River in 1890 as skipper of a decrepit steamer to the inland station of the iniquitous Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, run by a dying manager called ‘Klein’ (renamed, not very obscuringly, ‘Kurtz’ in Heart of Darkness). ‘Before the Congo I was a mere animal,’ Joseph Conrad later wrote. Like Marlow, it was there he looked over the edge of the abyss into the black nothingness which is human life.