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

by John Sutherland

  ‘The Dead’ centres on Conroy’s discovery that his wife had had, before he knew her, a young lover who ‘died for love of her.’ His obsessive investigation into his wife’s inner mind, fuelled by his jealousy, led to the finest achievement of Ulysses, ‘Penelope’. In this final section, as she falls asleep, all of Molly Bloom’s life comes crowding in, culminating in a re-enactment of the orgasm that Leopold could never give her:

  I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

  Nora claimed to have read none of her husband’s books – even those that wrote about her. In 1906 Nora was pregnant again with a daughter, Lucia, born to be doomed. As he approached thirty, Joyce published his first book, a volume of poetry, Chamber Music (1907). The poems are charming but – for this writer – strangely antique. For example xxxii, which opens:

  Rain has fallen all the day.

  O come among the laden trees:

  The leaves lie thick upon the way

  Of memories.

  There was no money in poetry. Joyce then ventured on a madcap scheme to open a cinema in Dublin, managed from Trieste. It came to nothing, as did the most recent attempt to publish Dubliners, which ended with a thousand copies destroyed before sale. It was Ezra Pound who at this point took charge of Joyce’s career, arranging for the serial publications of Portrait (it came out whole in London in 1917) and, later, Ulysses. It was Pound, too, who agitated to get Joyce handouts from the Civil List and the Society of Authors. Most importantly, Pound put him in touch with the woman who would be his principal patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who took the Irish author (whom she had never met) as her pensioner. Ulysses is routinely acclaimed as the greatest novel of the century. It is as much the product of cultural philanthropy (Weaver) and literary agency (Pound) as modernism.

  It was at this relatively stable point in his writing career that Joyce began serious work on Ulysses. As with everything in his life, it did not go smoothly. World war meant the family moving to Zurich in 1915. What would be chronic, and eventually blinding, eye problems had set in. Joyce’s drinking was periodically pathological; he smoked heavily and he was sedentary by nature. Every room, he believed, should have a bed in it. The furore over Lawrence’s The Rainbow meant that no British publisher would take an unexpurgated text which contained the word ‘fuck’. And Joyce would never expurgate. The novel – if one calls it that – was marginally less objectionable in the US and most acceptable in Paris, after the war, where it was put out, in full, by the expatriate American bookseller, Sylvia Beach.

  Ulysses, once published, was universally notorious but rarely read throughout, even by its most ferocious opponents and warmest advocates. It was the more difficult for the average reader by virtue of each section of narrative inventing a separate technique. It was an ‘encyclopaedia’, as Joyce called it, which changed its form as its content changed. The public was not used to such things. Nor were the authorities indulgent. The first volume edition of Ulysses published in London was widely confiscated and banned, despite a dauntingly impressive subscription list. It would not be until 1934 that an enlightened court case in the US acquitted Ulysses. The Bodley Head edition came out two years later in the UK – but not in Ireland.

  By now, the family of four had moved to Paris – the only place for a modernist to live, Pound urged – but Joyce’s health was precarious. All his teeth had been extracted, he was virtually blind in one eye, and prone to crippling depression. But he forged ahead with his most ambitious work Finnegans Wake. This, and the dire condition of his daughter Lucia, would be his main preoccupations over the years that remained to him. A gifted artist, Lucia conceived a hopeless, and utterly rejected, infatuation for Samuel Beckett – whose only interest was her father. She sank into a state diagnosed as schizophrenic – although the diagnosis has been much debated, as is the possibility of incest within the family. She was eventually institutionalised.

  Joyce finished Finnegans Wake in 1939 as war, once again, consumed Europe and enforced flight. Once again Switzerland was their refuge. In this last work, in his last years, Joyce had brought fiction ‘to the end of English’. The title alludes to a folk ballad about a drunken bricklayer, thought dead, who is resurrected (he wakes at his wake) when whisky is accidentally sprinkled in his coffin. The first line is one of the most famous in literature:

  riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

  Very few readers make it to the last line:

  A way a lone a last a loved a long the

  PARIS, 1922–1939.

  Joyce died in Switzerland of complications arising from stomach ulcers.

  FN

  James Augustine Aloysius Joyce

  MRT

  Ulysses

  Biog

  R. Ellmann, James Joyce (revd edn, 1983)

  132. Virginia Woolf 1882–1941

  Virginia Woolf was a sane woman who had an illness. Hermione Lee

  Hermione Lee’s life of the novelist opens with a shriek of scholarly pain: ‘My God how does one write a biography?’ A principal embarrassment is Woolf’s own fragmentary attempts at autobiography. They have had as disturbing an effect for the would-be life writer as the clandestine ‘fragment’ Dickens slipped into Forster’s hand, divulging his hitherto suppressed childhood experiences in the blacking factory. The poison pill in Woolf’s life also involves childhood trauma. At the ‘Memoir Club’ (a Bloomsbury outfit, as self-regardingly exclusive as the Cambridge Apostles), the forty-something Woolf delivered a couple of papers recalling her troubled adolescence. The first, entitled ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ (the family address in her teens), was given in November 1920. Both of Virginia’s parents had passed through earlier marriages. Her mother Julia brought to her second union with Leslie Stephen two sons (he brought a mentally disabled daughter, Laura), George and Gerald, both much older than Virginia, the second youngest of eight children in the house, and her slightly older sister Vanessa.

  George Duckworth (‘my incestuous brother’), Virginia told the Memoir Club, had molested her, around the time of her puberty. The molestation was related in a mock-gothic style, verging on pastiche of the kind of fiction Woolf habitually mocked: ‘Sleep had almost come to me. The room was dark. The house silent. Then, creaking stealthily, the door opened; treading gingerly, someone entered. “Who?” I cried. “Don’t be frightened”, George whispered. “And don’t turn on the light, oh beloved. Beloved –” and he flung himself on my bed, and took me in his arms.’ The ‘old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia’, she added, never knew that George Duckworth was the lover, as well as the brother, to ‘those poor Stephen girls’. She repeated a version of the story in a second address to the club, in which George again appears as the ravishing Tarquin.

  As Lee reminds us, although Bloomsbury talked daring sex, their performance between the sheets was often less impressive. There is, Lee detects, ‘something inconclusive’ in Woolf’s account: George was still living and the Duckworth Press published her early books. Her relationship with her bumbling half-brother in later life was mildly contemptuous but generally good-natured and she wrote affectionately about him when he died some years before her. If they occurred, his abuses may have been ‘more emotional than penetrative’, Lee concludes and goes on to declare, with a bluntness of phrase designed to blow away the fogs of feminist mystification which swirl around the Woolf abuse/rape/incest hypotheses, ‘There is no way of knowing whether the teenage Virginia Stephen was fucked or forced to have oral sex or buggered.’

  Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941 (no
doubt about that), fearing the onset of another of her horrific attacks of madness and possibly alarmed – as was most of Britain at the time – by the prospect of German invasion. As the wife of a leftist intellectual Jew, she had every right to feel apprehensive. Anxiety is something discernible in her last novel, published at this period, Between the Acts (1941). In the period leading up to her last, fatal act, she was also jotting down notes for an autobiography, with an essay provisionally entitled ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939). She was, at the time, much taken with Freud (the Hogarth Press, which she and her husband Leonard ran, was Freud’s authorised English publisher – something else Heinrich Himmler would not have liked) and what she called ‘autoanalysis’. Childhood sexual experience was, according to Freudian doctrine, formative.

  In her autoanalytic explorations she evidently trawled up a traumatic ‘recovered memory’. It is not found anywhere else in her voluminous private journals and correspondence. Why, she mused, did she so fear mirrors and reflections of herself in them?

  I thus detect another element in the shame which I had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall. I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this. There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it – what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it.

  She returned to the event in a letter to her friend, Ethel Smyth, a few weeks before her suicide. How could one write an honest autobiography, she asked, unless one came clean about such essentially dirty things?

  In the next two decades, along with the whole company of ‘Bloomsberries’, Woolf’s star sank – mainly under the sneering assaults of the new critical puritans (the ‘Leavisites’) at Cambridge. The first authoritative biography, by Virginia’s nephew Quentin Bell, in 1972, glossed over the ‘abuse’ episodes as part of the rough and tumble of an otherwise extraordinary family life – if anything Bell seemed sympathetic to the Duckworth lads. The emergence in the mid-1960s of the women’s and gay liberation movements, and their impact on academic scholarship, elevated Woolf to canonical status. Doctoral dissertations, monographs, learned articles, popular spin-off pieces, and whole journals dedicated themselves to her life, her works and the importance of a ‘room of one’s own’. The ‘abuse’ moments were seen as centrally significant to understanding Virginia Woolf and she herself was now a writer of near-Shakespearian importance to English literature.

  Tendentious, but typical, was Louise A. DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989), which opened with the uncompromising declaration: ‘Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child; she was an incest survivor.’ Lee, coming rather later into the biographical game in the mid-1990s, handles the abuse material more judiciously. She is disinclined to see the Duckworths as conspiratorial rapists. She opposes the idea that molestation ‘can be made to explain all of Virginia Woolf’s mental history’. There were other, quite as damaging, psychic injuries. In her ‘Sketch’, for example, Woolf herself lays heavier stress on the death of her mother, in 1890, when she was thirteen: ‘This brought on, naturally, my first “breakdown” … I was terrified of people … For two years I never wrote. The desire left me, which I have had all my life, with that two years break.’ None the less Lee allows that there are, arguably, traces detectable in the fiction. Why, she asks, is there just one kiss described in all of Woolf’s work (in Mrs Dalloway)?

  Other critics have been more single-minded on the matter. That Virginia was ‘incested’ is ubiquitous orthodoxy and, like Dickens’s blacking factory trauma, the royal road to understanding her tormented genius. A main element in this new orthodoxy is the contention that Woolf’s work and life is founded on a principled recoil from the ‘male-made mess’ of the world (the First World War she saw, in some moments, as a ‘preposterous masculine fiction’). It is taken for granted that she was sexually frigid with men, but joyously liberated in her ‘sapphic’ relationship, in her mature years, with Vita Sackville-West (who, none the less, like Leonard, was ‘scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her because of the madness’). A complicating factor is the well-recorded fact that at the time of her marriage to Leonard Woolf, in August 1912, Virginia genuinely wanted children (‘brats’, as she fondly called them). Leonard, however, feared the ‘excitement’ of pregnancy would trigger catastrophic mental breakdown. It may be, too, that impregnation would not have been easy. Clive Bell confided to Mary Hutchinson (his mistress) that ‘Woolf fucks her once a week but has not yet succeeded in breaking her maidenhead.’ As late as 1933, Virginia herself was jesting on the subject, suggesting that she and a friend might have ‘the operation’ (surgical rupturing of the hymen) done side by side in a Bond Street clinic.

  By the early 1920s, the marriage, both partners confided to different friends, was ‘chaste’. Neither party was unfaithful to the other. It was merely that sex had been turned off, like some irritatingly dripping tap. Leonard seems to have been the dominant partner in this suspension of full marital intimacy, supported by medical advice. After menopause, Virginia told a friend she regretted not having forced Leonard to take the risk, ‘in spite of doctors’. The unborn children made her ‘wretched in the early hours’. Whether children actually crying, night after night, would have been fulfilling who can say? Put another way, could Mrs Ramsay, with those ‘brats’ around her ankles and at her breast, have written To the Lighthouse?

  FN

  Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen)

  MRT

  To the Lighthouse

  Biog

  H. Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996)

  133. Sax Rohmer 1883–1959

  Dr. Fu-Manchu – the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

  Sax Rohmer was born ‘Arthur Ward’ in Birmingham, the only child of Irish immigrants. His father was a clerk; his mother is recorded as alcoholic. The family moved to London when Arthur was an infant and his school education was intermittent, although he picked up an impressive literacy from his father. It is likely, given his later fascination with xenophobia, that he suffered prejudice (‘bog-trotter!’) in his early years. The lifelong flight from his birth-name suggests this as does his posturing for publicity photographs, in later life, in silk kimono and pigtail, looking sinister, wholly un-Irish and more ridiculous than even Peter Sellers could ever do justice to.

  He later took on the surname ‘Sarsfield’ because, allegedly, his mother misinformed him that they were descended from the seventeenth-century General of that name. ‘Sax’ was good old-fashioned ‘Sax[on]’ and ‘Rohmer’, sometimes with an umlaut, was Nordic enough to pass a Sturmabteilung name check.

  Little is known about Rohmer’s life and he obfuscated what details are known outrageously. He briefly followed his father into clerking before drifting into Grub Street. He was fascinated by ancient Egypt and his first recorded fiction is the short story ‘The Mysterious Mummy’, for Pearson’s Magazine, in 1903 (the plot involves a thief hiding in a sarcophagus to steal a priceless vase).

  Rohmer loved the Edwardian music hall. He wrote sketches and songs and his first published book was a ghosted autobiography of the famous comedian ‘Little Tich’ (Harry Relph). In 1909 he married Rose Elizabeth Knox, the daughter of another, less famous, comedian, who was herself a performer in a juggling act. Rose was also a clairvoyant and supposedly the young Sax asked her how he could make his fortune. Her Ouija board responded: C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N. Rohmer would later create the series hero, Morris Klaw, an ‘occult detective’ who solves crimes by dreams and ESP. And
the Chinaman clue proved prescient because Rohmer’s breakthrough bestseller was The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, published by Methuen in 1913. It draws, rather too obviously, on Guy Boothby’s magnificent arch-criminal in Dr Nikola (1896) and Rohmer lifts a number of actual scenes from the other novelist. He had clearly also taken on board M. P. Shiel’s bestseller The Yellow Danger (1898). A perplexed Colin Watson notes, ‘The plots of the Fu-Manchu novels, such as they are, would be quite meaningless in paraphrase. They are a jumble of incredible encounters, pursuits, traps and escapes. Who is trying to accomplish what, and why – this is never explained. All that seems certain is that a titanic struggle is being waged by a man called Nayland Smith to thwart the designs of Fu-Manchu.’ True enough, but they were read; and as film adaptations, watched by millions for the best part of half a century.

  The narrative of the first in the series (of fifteen eventually) opens with Sir Denis Nayland Smith, a British government official in Burma, making a surprise call on his old London friend Dr Petrie (Smith’s Dr Watson, as he is to be). Smith is enjoying a spot of leave during which he intends to save the ‘White Race’ from the fiendish plots of Dr Fu-Manchu. ‘He is no ordinary criminal,’ Smith informs an appalled Petrie: ‘He is the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on earth for centuries. He has the backing of a political group whose wealth is enormous and his mission in Europe is to pave the way! Do you follow me? He is the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making that not one Britisher, and not one American, in fifty thousand has ever dreamed of it.’ Except, that is, Sax Rohmer and his legions of readers.