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

by John Sutherland

  As the 1920s drew on, Agatha was the main earner in the Christie household. Money, not art, was always a main concern for her – and often a murder motive in her fiction. The year 1926 was the critical one in her life: her mother died and her marriage broke down. Archie, she learned, had been unfaithful. On 6 December 1926 British newspapers carried front-page headlines about Mrs Christie’s mysterious disappearance. A car with articles of her clothing was found abandoned. A huge woman hunt was mounted. Eleven days later she was discovered in a hotel at Harrogate, registered under the name of Archie’s mistress. The unconvincing explanation given out to the world was that she had suffered an attack of ‘amnesia’.

  After divorce in 1928, with her daughter now at boarding school, Christie consoled herself with travel. A trip by train to the Middle East inspired her most famous novel, Murder on the Orient Express (1934), and at the site of the ancient city of Ur she visited a dig in 1928 and met the archaeologist Max Mallowan. They married in 1930: he was fourteen years younger than her and a Roman Catholic. The marriage lasted forty-five years and both partners continued their careers successfully – Mallowan being knighted for his services to archaeology in 1968. Christie would, somewhat later, earn her own title, for services to popular literature. She was now producing two to three novels a year. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) had introduced her other great series hero, Miss Jane Marple, the genteel spinster sleuth from St Mary Mead. In her fiction of this period Christie also introduces a mocking self-portrait, in the form of the muddle-headed writer of mysteries, Ariadne Oliver.

  Christie had her greatest pre-war success with the ‘locked room times ten’ mystery, Ten Little Niggers (1939) – Ten Little Indians in the US. With the outbreak of war Christie wrote and stored away ‘last’ cases for Poirot (Curtain) and Miss Marple (Sleeping Murder): both were published shortly before her death. As she explained in her autobiography, they were written ‘in anticipation of my being killed in the raids, which seemed to be in the highest degree likely as I was working in London’. However, she survived to write seventeen books during the war and, as before, she worked in a hospital dispensary. Her husband Max joined the Royal Air Force and spent much of the war serving in North Africa. The author’s only grandchild, Matthew, was born in 1943. After the war Christie continued to write voluminously, adapting her settings to the new age of austerity – a planet away from the Edwardian milieux of her youth. Her now global popularity was boosted by theatre dramatisations and film versions of her stories. In 1954 she had three plays of her own composition running simultaneously in London’s West End, including the interminable The Mousetrap (1948). Christie professed not to like any film versions of her novels, even the immensely popular Margaret Rutherford Marple series.

  The novels of the last phase of Christie’s life tend to be perfunctory performances. An exception is The Pale Horse (1961), in which a mass poisoner uses the exotic toxin, thallium. Allegedly the mass poisoner Graham Young (who also favoured thallium) was caught because the investigating detective had read and remembered the Christie novel. Uncomfortable as such settings as ‘swinging London’ were for Miss Marple in At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), her readership continued to grow. She was never out of fashion. Despite long-running tax problems, Christie, ‘The Queen of Crime’, was a wealthy and honoured woman of letters. She was awarded a CBE in 1956 and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1971. She died in 1976. Her tombstone at Cholsey in Berkshire is inscribed ‘Agatha Christie the Writer’.

  FN

  Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (née Miller; later Mallowan)

  MRT

  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

  Biog

  L. Thompson, Agatha Christie:An English Mystery (2007)

  147. Richmal Crompton 1890–1969

  ‘I’ll thcream and thcream and thcream till I’m thick.’ Violet Elizabeth Bott

  Richmal Lamburn was born in Lancashire, the middle child of a Church of England parson. Her three-years-younger brother Jack (in later life a man of action, and a writer of action novels) evidently inspired a bit of William Brown. Crompton’s elder sister, Gwen (nothing like Ethel Brown) was throughout their joint lifelong spinsterdom Richmal’s closest friend. The ‘Crompton’ middle name was in honour of a maternal grandfather who, for no recorded reason, swallowed a lethal dose of prussic acid when Richmal was three.

  Her home life was unlike William’s cosy, bourgeois, home-counties menage – Mr Brown doing his something in the city, Mrs Brown darning socks, Robert at his dramatic society, the delectable flapper Ethel fending off beaux, the incorrigible maid breaking the crockery (‘It came to pieces in me ’and, M’um’), the gardener mysteriously busy in the potting shed – and, of course, Just William, schoolboy, Outlaw, proud owner of Jumble, and sworn rebel against all the above. Aged eleven (William’s age, for four decades), Richmal was bundled off to a ‘clergy daughters’ boarding school in Warrington. A bright pupil, she won a place to read classics at Newnham, but prudently turned it down in favour of the £60 p.a. scholarship Royal Holloway College, London, offered her. She was canny about money. On graduation, with a respectable ‘second’, she entered the teaching profession and eventually found a long-term post at Bromley High School for Girls. For the fifteen most formative years of her life she lived in wholly boyless institutions. Early 1920s England was also notably manless, thanks to the Kaiser.

  Richmal wrote her first William stories for the Home Magazine and Happy Mag. (sic): they were published in volume form by the magazine magnate, George Newnes. The first book, with its hallmark illustrations by Henry Thomas, was Just William (1922). The last, some forty volumes on, was William the Superman (1968). Crompton’s naughty schoolboy bestrode the twentieth century like a ragamuffin colossus. It changed, he never did. As early as the fifth volume, Crompton called William her ‘Frankenstein’s monster’. She made fitful attempts (as had Doyle with Sherlock Holmes) to kill him, but ‘he insisted on having his own way’. William the Unkillable. Crompton wrote thirty-odd books for adults, some of which, like the early Bildungsroman, The Innermost Room (1923) and her collection of ghost stories, Mist (1929), stand up well. But no one liked them as much as William’s exploits – or reads them nowadays – as they do William.

  Crompton’s life took an irreversible turn in her early thirties with polio, causing her to lose the use of her right leg, and another in her early forties, when she developed breast cancer. What sexual experiences she had – if any – are unrecorded. Her pen name, ‘Richmal’, her family name, ‘Ray’, and her tomboyish girlhood are too slight to build on. She may, like Jane Austen, have died a virgin novelist. ‘I am probably,’ she said, ‘the last surviving example of the Victorian professional aunt.’ And, by all accounts, a fond one. Thanks to William, the only man in her life, she could live in a grand house – ‘The Glebe’, in Bromley – and leave a healthy £60,000 on her death.

  The William stories are both formulaic, invariably involving some ingenious act of juvenile rebellion against the adult world, and flexible – adapting, hand in glove, to the historical period in which they were conceived and first published. A prime example is ‘William and the Nasties’, published in the Happy Mag., June 1934. William, having caught wind of what’s going on in Germany, declares himself by schoolboy putsch ‘Him Hitler’ (‘Her[r] Hitler’ is, needless to say, ‘girly’). The Outlaws, now stormtroopers, duly hound the Jewish sweetshop owner, Mr Isaacs, but after a while they find the whole business somehow ‘wrong’, and befriend their victim. The story was later suppressed, but it is noteworthy that it precedes (and foretells) by four years, Kristallnacht.

  Crompton drew on Tom Brown, Stalky & Co., P. G. Wodehouse and, above all, Tom Sawyer. The stories are saturated with English class prejudice. Hubert Lane and Violet Elizabeth Bott are rich and vulgar: the ‘evacuees’ with whom William goes to war during the war are ineffably common. But, as Crompton’s biographer argues, there is always a subtle Twainian satire against the author’s own class in her
stories.

  In her later years Crompton turned to table-rapping and a belief in reincarnation. Independent to the end, she died of a heart attack, having driven herself home, alone, from a dinner party, in her controls-modified car.

  FN

  Richmal Crompton (born Richmal Crompton Lamburn)

  MRT

  Just William

  Biog

  M. Cadogan, Richmal Crompton: The Woman behind William (1986)

  148. Richard Aldington 1892–1962

  Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.

  Aldington was born in Portsmouth and brought up in various seaside towns – which he later despised as the epitome of Englishness. The son of a solicitor’s clerk and a (not very good) novel-writing mother, he received the school education of his class, which did not much educate him but did enable him to make himself, in later life, a high-achieving autodidact. In 1910, he enrolled at University College London – the ‘Godless Place in Gower Street’. It was, he later declared, an institution designed to turn out ‘ten thousand pedants for one poet’.

  Aldington resolved to be the one among ten thousand and left UCL’s ‘buttressed respectability’ after a year for Soho and ‘the freer if frowstier fields of bohemianism’. In those frowsty fields he became intimate, if never quite a leading spirit, with avant-gardistes such as Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Herbert Read, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Together they brought in the ‘Revolution of 1912’ – or imagism, as less impressed literary historians term it. Aldington married the Revolution’s star practitioner, H. D., in 1913. It would be a modishly open union: photographs of the period display a goatee-bearded Ezra lookalike – poetic to the core. Three years later, after the outbreak of war, the image is of a smart young infantry officer, with the obligatory ‘tache’, swagger stick and middle-distance stare.

  Unlike fellow poets (Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Charles Sorley), Aldington survived the trenches, gas and shellshock, although the pointlessness of it all imbued him with cosmic despair – he claimed to have attempted suicide twice. For the rest of his life he maintained, ‘There are two kinds of men: those who have been to the front and those who haven’t.’ It was his personal heart of darkness. The relationship with H. D. broke up without animosity, as both followed their wayward lusts. In the 1920s Aldington settled down with his new partner, as a tweedy man of letters, working for the TLS. He was increasingly intimate with T. S. Eliot, whom he had met in 1917. He bought a cottage in Berkshire and countryfied himself.

  Aldington had begun writing Death of a Hero almost the day the war finished but it would not see print until 1929 (the same year as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front). He called it a ‘jazz novel’. It’s not clear what he meant by the term. Transparently autobiographical, it tells the story of George Winterbourne, who, in the trenches, discovers the real enemy is not the Hun but England – ‘a country where there are so many old fools and so few young ones’. Wholly disillusioned he hurls himself into a hail of machine-gun fire: ‘The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.’ Chatto (who had just rejected Lady Chatterley’s Lover) agreed to publish Aldington only with some savage wielding of the blue pencil. Aldington insisted on asterisks to mark the ‘mutilation’. It is necessary, said Zola, to ‘kill the hero’. Aldington did it twice: with his first novel (and a couple of pallid successors), and his gloriously iconoclastic biography of T. E. Lawrence, published (to screams of patriotic outrage) in 1955.

  The belated publication of his novel produced in Aldington what psychiatrists call ‘abreaction’. The despair he had felt in 1917 flared up again and he stalked into the Soho restaurant where Herbert Read and T. S. Eliot were dining to announce, ‘I’m on my way to Paris … I’ve done with this country.’ He clinched it with a postcard to Eliot ‘on which was written a single four-letter word’. What word is not recorded. Perhaps four asterisks. Thereafter, Aldington was, like his friend D. H. Lawrence, a passionate pilgrim living by his pen in Europe, then, during the Second World War, in America. He died in France. On his gravestone, Aldington instructed there be written Wilfred Owen’s assertion: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity.’ Not the heroism.

  FN

  Richard Aldington (born Edward Godfree Aldington)

  MRT

  Death of a Hero

  Biog

  C. Doyle, Richard Aldington (1989)

  149. Djuna Barnes 1892–1982

  Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know.

  Barnes was born into a bohemian, free-thinking, sexually liberated family, the daughter of an artist, ‘Wald’ Barnes, and Elizabeth Chappell, an English-born concert violinist. A convinced advocate of polygamy, Wald moved in his mistress during Djuna’s childhood. Barnes was brought up on the family farm in New York state, alongside a tribe of siblings and half siblings. The domestic environment was comfortably off, liberated, but irregular in the extreme – Djuna may, it is suspected, have suffered incestuous rape. Her early education certainly suffered. Aged seventeen, she was coerced into marriage with the fifty-two-year-old brother of her father’s mistress. The marriage lasted only a few weeks.

  The family broke up when Djuna was twenty, and she left for New York where she worked as a well-paid journalist, based in the city’s Latin Quarter, Greenwich Village. She was meanwhile writing on the side in an aggressively avant-gardiste manner. Her first major literary work, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), is a collection of her poems (‘rhythms’) and her drawings – decadent and frankly, for the time, lesbian. She had affairs with lovers of both sexes, but child-bearing she abominated.

  Like other advanced writers, Barnes was drawn to Paris after the First World War, initially as a journalist. She remained there as a creative writer for fifteen years. The city was, in the 1920s, a cauldron of literary modernism: Hemingway, Stein, Durrell, cummings and Miller had all cultivated their talents there, and ‘prohibited’ authors, such as Joyce (whom Barnes came to know well) and Lawrence, could freely publish work banned in their home countries. Paris was also as tolerant of variant forms of human sexuality as of new forms of literature. Barnes embarked on an intense – and doomed – relationship with the expatriate American artist and sculptor, Thelma Ellen Wood.

  Ford Madox Hueffer published Barnes’s work in his Little Review and her Joycean and semi-autobiographical novel, Ryder, came out in 1928. In it, she seems to come to terms, psychologically, with her wayward father. The narrative covers fifty years in the life of a family, in which Djuna Barnes’s own family is easily recognisable (notably ‘Wendell’ for Wald). Ryder was, inevitably, seized as obscene in America, by the US Postal Services, who – with the Society for the Suppression of Vice – acted as the country’s official censorship board. It took them a few weeks to uncover the ‘filth’ lurking under the carapace of literary experimentalism. However, the seizure did wonders for the author’s reputation.

  Barnes’s second book, Ladies Almanack, a florid exercise in eighteenth-century pastiche, was wholly unpublishable in America on the grounds of its openness about lesbianism. In the late 1920s, and in the wake of her painful separation from the increasingly drunken Thelma Wood, Barnes was working on Nightwood, the novel on which her subsequent reputation mainly rests. A narrative of ambitious scope and high modernity, Spenglerian in tone and Joycean in method, Nightwood chronicles the decay of Western civilisation alongside the complications of personal sexuality: specifically the author’s relationship with Thelma. The book was again judged unpublishable in the US, but was accepted in Britain by Faber and Faber. T. S. Eliot, chief editor, wrote an introduction in which he asserted the novel was ‘so good … that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it’. The novel appeared, prudently toned down, in 1936 in the UK and a year later in the US.

  On the outbreak of war, Barnes returned to New York, and Greenwich Village, in 1940. Nightwood had been much acclaimed, but sold poorly. There weren’t that many Eliotic sensibi
lities trained on poetry around unfortunately. She could no longer be trusted with journalistic assignments, was drinking heavily and dependent on handouts from well-wishers, notably Peggy Guggenheim, whom she had come to know in her Parisian glory years. Other friends also remained loyal to her. She managed to control her alcoholism in 1950 and produce her last significant work of literature, the scaldingly autobiographical play The Antiphon (1958). Apart from that, her last forty years were reclusive and unhappy – periodically embattled, creatively extinct and little honoured.

  FN

  Djuna Chappell Barnes

  MRT

  Nightwood

  Biog

  Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (1995)

  150. Max Brand 1892–1944

  There has to be a woman, but not much of a one. A good horse is much more important. Brand’s formula for a good Western

  Max Brand (the pen name is now a registered trademark in America – literally a brand name) was variously nicknamed the ‘King of the Pulps’, ‘the Great Faust’ and ‘the Western Giant’. From 1917 until his death in 1944, Brand hosed out an estimated 30 million words of fiction, some 900 stories, and around 600 full-length novels. He wrote under as many as twenty pseudonyms in all the major popular genres (Westerns, mysteries, hospital stories, melodramas, even science fiction). His formula for success was simple: ‘All you have to do is concentrate on a snappy beginning and a smash for the close.’ Some 350 of Brand’s titles are reckoned to be Westerns, of which the first was The Untamed (1919) and the most famous Destry Rides Again (1930), as filmed with Marlene Dietrich. In passing, Brand invented the character of Dr Kildare, and can thus claim, along with his pulp kingship, to be the grandfather of the TV soaps and ‘hospital melodrama’ – see, for instance, Young Dr Kildare (1941).