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

by John Sutherland

  Wallace, still slaving as a hack and a racing tipster (his preferred occupation), picked a winner in 1911 with his next serious foray into fiction, Sanders of the River (the first of eleven books of stories). Before being sacked by Northcliffe (furious at the never-ending libel suits his star reporter incited), he had been dispatched to the Belgian Congo – the heart of darkness. He spun out of this experience a series of adventure tales, chronicling Mr Commissioner Sanders’ mission to bring ‘civilisation’ to ‘half a million cannibal folk’ with his Maxim machine gun and Houssa storm-troopers. Conrad’s Kurtz would have approved.

  Wallace, now divorced, remarried in 1927 (to one of his secretaries, twenty years his junior) and middle-aged, came into his own as a mass producer of fiction in 1920. His agent, A. P. Watt, negotiated a sweet deal with Hodder and Stoughton for what was, effectively, a fiction assembly line. H&S would pay him £250 advance for any and every title. Wallace rose to the challenge, with 150 novels over the next twenty-five years. All he needed was his Dictaphone (he hated the labour of actually writing), pyjamas, a freshly brewed pot of tea every half hour (heavily sugared), and his cigarette holder, nearly a foot long, to keep the smoke from his eighty-odd cigarettes a day, out of his eyes. He boasted he never walked more than four miles a year (and then only between bookies at the track). He feared draughts and went to extreme measures to protect himself against them. He travelled habitually in a closed yellow Rolls-Royce; his windows were kept shut in all but the warmest weather, and he wore two sets of underwear.

  In financial difficulty, despite his vast income (he had a theatrical success with The Ringer (1929), starring Gerald du Maurier, and was chairman of the British Lion Film Corporation), Wallace accepted Hollywood’s lucre in 1932. RKO loved him. A new career, even more splendid, was in prospect. But the oceans of over-sweetened tea he had swallowed over the years caught up with him. As he waited, impatiently, for the Hollywood starlet who would warm his bed that night, he fell into a terminal diabetic coma. It was a teetotal tragedy, unique in a location where innumerable of his profession had drunk themselves to early death (Wallace was only fifty-eight), but all with stronger brew than Mr Lipton supplied. He left huge debts, and some grieving turf-accountants. The bells tolled and flags in Fleet Street were lowered when his body returned. As his memorial in Ludgate Circus testifies, he had given literature his brain, but his heart was in the daily newspaper – like fish and chips.

  How good a writer was he? Orwell, unfairly, labelled him proto-fascist, a ‘bully worshipper’. But Orwell would have thought a Belisha beacon fascist. Politically Wallace was proletarian-liberal – a man of the people. And he knew precisely what fiction the people wanted.

  FN

  Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (born Richards, brought up in youth as ‘Richard Freeman’)

  MRT

  The Four Just Men

  Biog

  M. Lane, Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon (2nd edn, 1964)

  123. Jack London 1876–1916

  Sailor on horseback

  Born into an irregular marriage, the bastard son of a vagabond astrologer and a failed boarding-house keeper, Jack London was the main support of his family at ten years old – a ‘work beast’ before he was even a man, rising at three in the morning to deliver newspapers in Oakland, California. He left school at fourteen, having derived most of his education from Oakland Public Library, its librarian Ina Coolbrith, and a mutilated copy of Ouida’s novel Signa. By fifteen he was the ‘Prince of the Oyster Pirates’, poaching molluscs in the shallow waters off San Mateo. ‘Dreadful trade’, as Shakespeare’s Edgar would say.

  Before he was eighteen, Jack had sailed the Siberian waters as a seaman on a seal-hunter. Two years later, a befurred London plodded over the Klondike snows, as a gold-miner. In the interim he was one of the enlisted unemployed in Jacob S. Coxey’s ‘army’ as it marched bravely on Washington, demanding a new deal for the American worker. They were brutally disbanded by the DC police and charged with trespassing on the White House Lawn. He deserted from Coxey’s ranks to ride the rods, hop freight cars and generally hobo all over the North American continent. He served time for vagrancy in Erie County Penitentiary (he had been to see the Niagara Falls by moonlight – the true London touch), then returned to enrol in high school. Two years later he entered Berkeley from where, anticipating his hippy successors, he dropped out after a semester. He then worked ten-hour days at 10 cents an hour, shovelling coal, in waterfront jute mills.

  But it was not all harpoon, ice-axe and shovel. Before he was thirty, London had made a reputation as an intrepid journalist, reporting to the American people from the ‘abyss’ of London’s East End slums and the trenches of the Russo-Japanese war. Lesser men would have paused their career at any one of these points. But for London it was ever onward on what he called the ‘Adventure Path’ of life, and he seems always to have anticipated his premature death. Adventurers are not good insurance risks. Since selling his first story (‘To the Man on Trail’) in 1899, London had written as energetically as he did everything. Those writings are mirror reflections of his life experience – most comprehensively the autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909). The Road (1907) records his Coxey experience. The Call of the Wild (1903) recalls his expedition to the frozen north and the volume of Darwin he took in his back-pack. The Sea-Wolf (1904) recalls his seal-hunting voyage across the Pacific. Everything with Jack London’s name on it sold bestsellingly. He could even sell socialism – as in the dystopian The Iron Heel (1908). (Jack did, however, make the radically qualifying point that his was ‘the socialism of the caveman’.)

  In his last years he was earning around $75,000 annually. No author in the annals of American literature had ever made it so big. He married twice; the first marriage broke down in 1903. In 1905 he took to himself a new ‘mate woman’, Charmian Kittredge. Neither union gave him the Jack London Jr he craved, but the second lasted. In the same year, 1905, he bought a 1,000-acre property in California’s Sonoma County, which he would later cultivate as his ‘Beauty Ranch’ – it is depicted, idyllically, in The Valley of the Moon (1913). At its centre he began erecting a mansion to be called ‘Wolf House’: a fitting habitation for one who had shown himself so indisputably a leader of the human pack. Ominously, it burned down on the day he and Charmian were to move in.

  To his millions of admiring contemporaries, Jack London, as he approached his fortieth year – with the prospect of decades ahead of him – embodied the bounding energy of his still young nation. He was Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism incarnate, an overman, a Carlylean hero, a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story, a champ. Why, then, did he commit suicide – as it seems probable that he did – in 1916? On the night of 22 November, Jack London injected into himself a lethal overdose of morphine. Apologists have claimed that it was accidental: or that it was something organic (kidneys, perhaps) that killed him. The suicide thesis is, however, supported by its omnipresence as a theme in his work. London had, as his ‘alcoholic memoir’ John Barleycorn (1913) records, attempted to drown himself, aged sixteen. The event furnishes the climax of Martin Eden, and its last paragraph:

  His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and feebly. But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them beat and churn. He was too deep down … There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.

  There was a Jack London who was the embodiment of American manhood, a London who joyed in the glory of his body, with as much energy surging in him as a one-man Olympic team: ‘I boxed and fenced, walked on my hands, jumped high and broad, put the shot, and tossed the caber, and went swimming.’ (The ‘caber’, like Niagara by moonlight, is another true London touch.) But there was another Jack London who saw, only too clearly, the skull beneath the skin, who w
as fascinated by easeful death, and could write: ‘I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton, that under the rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death’s head.’ It was that Jack London, one suspects, who reached for the hypodermic syringe, not the dumb-bell, in the dark watches of 22 November 1916.

  FN

  Jack London (John Griffith London; surname ‘Chaney’ on his birth certificate)

  MRT

  Martin Eden

  Biog

  R. Kingman, A Pictorial Life of Jack London (1979)

  124. Rex Beach 1877–1949

  A true pardnership is the sanctifiedest relation that grows. From Beach’s novel, Pardners

  A ‘he-man’ novelist, sometimes labelled the poor man’s Jack London, Beach specialised in tales of the Yukon, celebrating, in all its husky glory, manly comradeship in the frozen North. His forte as a novelist were fight scenes featuring graphically described bone-breaking, eye-gouging and groin-kicking – all rather ‘advanced’ at the time. Beach was born in Michigan, in a log house as he liked to recall in later life, somewhat exaggeratedly. His father in fact ran a fruit farm – a line of work which Rex took up himself in late life. The family moved to Florida in 1886. After a brief spell at Rollins College, Rex spent a year studying law in Chicago, before throwing it up to play professional football. Athletic, and yearning for the outdoor life, Beach joined the gold rush to the Klondike (like Jack London) in 1900 where (like Jack London) he spectacularly did not make his fortune – failing even to reach the minefields (Jack London did, but never struck it rich).

  Denied gold, Rex won silver representing his country in water polo in the 1904 Olympic Games, in St Louis. The next year, he took up writing. His first novel, The Spoilers (1905, love and pick-axes in the Yukon) laid the way for a string of bestselling ‘Alaskan Adventures’. The Spoilers made the bestseller lists in 1906, as did The Barrier (1908), a story of half-breeds in Alaska; and The Silver Horde (1909), a novel about salmon and the romance of canning them. Beach had married in 1907 and taken up residence in New York state, moving later to Florida with his wife Greta; the couple were childless. Beach committed suicide by shotgun in 1949, having suffered for two years from cancer of the throat and been recently widowed (in a number of ways, Rex Beach anticipates the career and death of Ernest Hemingway).

  Beach was notable for the pioneer canniness with which he cultivated and exploited film rights to his literary property. He was the first American author routinely to insert a clause about movie adaptation into his book contracts. This foresight paid off: The Spoilers was filmed at least five times, on each occasion earning fresh revenue for its author (the novel was also adapted into a long-running stage play). Beach supervised a six-reel 1916 movie version, in which he himself appears. In 1930 Paramount brought out a version starring Gary Cooper. Most famously, in 1942, John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich starred in a Universal Studios version. It is not fanciful to trace a line from Beach to Duke’s tough-guy film persona.

  He made a third fortune in later life from flower and vegetable growing and scientific farming, exploiting skills he had inherited from his father. Canny to the end, one of his last acts was to secure a then (1948) record-breaking $100,000 film-rights payment for his last novel, Woman in Ambush (published posthumously, in 1951 – never filmed).

  FN

  Rex Ellingwood Beach

  MRT

  The Spoilers

  Biog

  A. R. Ravitz, Rex Beach (1994)

  125. Warwick Deeping 1877–1950

  Deeping was by no means without talent. The Times obituary

  Warwick Deeping was, for a few years, the most read novelist in the English-speaking world. He could also, despite his popularity in America, claim to be among the most tweedily English. Born in Southend, Essex, he was the son and grandson (on both sides) of Southend doctors, successful and highly respected citizens in their line of work. The only boy in his family, on leaving the Merchant Taylors’ boarding school in London, Warwick progressed to Cambridge, to read science and medicine, graduating with his MB in 1902. He trained for some time in London hospitals with a view to following the family profession, but the details of his life at this period are hazy, and suggest profound career uncertainties.

  Some of his experience may be reflected in that of Kit in Sorrell and Son – also an only son and a clever young doctor. Like Kit, Deeping married early, to Maude Phyllis Merrill, in 1904. He could not, one imagines, have done so without financial support from his family (fathers enjoy a notably warm image in Deeping’s fiction). The marriage was to be lifelong, happy, but childless. The couple lived after marriage in Battle, near Hastings, where Deeping’s father and family had retired in 1900. From 1911 until 1919, they lived in a house they had themselves built. His father’s death, in 1909, may have furnished Deeping with sufficient legacy for him to further explore what to do with his life.

  He had published his first novel, Uther and Igraine, in 1903. The Arthurian historical romance was well received. It, and a couple of similar modishly William Morris efforts, induced the author to give up his medical practice in Hastings altogether and try for literary fame. Later, the Great War introduced grimmer conflict than that of the Round Table: somewhat too old to carry a rifle in 1914 (he was thirty-seven) Deeping served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, Belgium, Gallipoli and Egypt. The RAMC typically took heavy casualties and he evidently saw frontline action. On demobilisation in 1919, Warwick and Maude moved to a new house in rural Surrey, where, despite his wealth, they would remain for the rest of their lives.

  After the war he returned to fiction – but of a harder kind than earlier. In his new mode, Deeping enjoyed a sensational success with his ‘ex-serviceman’ novel, Sorrell and Son (1925), which went through forty British editions in the next fifty years, topped the American bestseller list and inspired two movies – one silent, one ‘talkie’. It is the story of ‘Captain Sorrell’, a decorated frontline officer and single father (divorced – he is the innocent party), who loses caste after the war and is obliged to work as a hotel porter – but suffers all for the sake of his son Kit. The novel is less bitter than A. S. M. Hutchinson’s even better selling ex-serviceman novel, If Winter Comes (1921). None the less it insists on old class hierarchies (Kit, for instance, habitually addresses his father as ‘pater’ – Americans loved that kind of thing). Unlike Hutchinson’s bleak chronicle, or Richard Aldington’s even bleaker Death of a Hero (1929), Sorrell and Son ends upliftingly. Sorrell Sr is returned to the gentleman class before dying, gallantly, of cancer: Kit becomes a leading London surgeon.

  Deeping’s novels lorded it over the American bestseller lists in the 1920s and early 1930s. Doomsday (1927) caught on to the rural, ‘mud and blood’ theme found in Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. Old Pybus (1928) has as its hero a father whose sons show the white feather. Roper’s Row (1929) is a doctor’s tale, of the kind later popularised by A. J. Cronin and Lloyd C. Douglas. Exiles (1930) takes as its setting a community of Britons living on private incomes abroad. The Road (1931) is a wartime novel, as is Old Wine and New (1932). These were Deeping’s glory years, and his bestsellers made a mint of money for him. They seem not to have altered materially the quiet life he and his wife chose to lead. His Who’s Who entry lists his mild recreations as tennis, golf, motoring, gardening and carpentry. Cassell’s publicity photos (he was loyal to the one publisher throughout his career) portray a tweedy, pipe-smoking gentleman of the old school. By the mid-1930s, Deeping’s massive popularity had begun to wane, but he continued to write fiction up to his death, and posthumous works appeared for seven years after. He left £33,000 – a fortune in 1950. His wife survived him by twenty-one years.

  Warwick Deeping, the novelist, is little revisited nowadays. But he gave his name to an anti-submarine vessel (commissioned in 1934) which was sunk by German torpedo boats, in relatively shallow waters, off the Isle of Wight in 1940. It has become a
favourite wreck among the recreational diving community and keeps the Deeping name alive.

  FN

  George Warwick Deeping

  MRT

  Sorrell and Son

  Biog

  ODNB (Jennifer Butler)

  126. Jeffery Farnol 1878–1952

  Novelist, Landscape Painter, Wood Carver, Boxer, Master of Fence and Athlete. Edward Farnol’s description of his brother, Jeffery

  Farnol was born in Birmingham, the son of a factory-employed brass-founder. One of the appreciation societies which, to this day, hold him in affection, records Jeffery’s seed-time as a romantic novelist:

  His father, Henry, nightly read aloud to his wife as she sat sewing, after the boys had been put to bed. But Jeffery & his younger brother Ewart would creep silently down the stairs in their nightshirts & sit outside their parents’ door listening to their father’s beautiful, sonorous voice enacting all the characters while reading Alexandre Dumas, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens or Sir Walter Scott.