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

by John Sutherland

  Bowen’s father recovered sufficiently to remarry in 1918 – but did not create a home for her. She took refuge in her own marriage in 1923, the event coinciding with the publication of her first volume of short stories. It was the more important event for her. She chose as her spouse a middle-ranking educational bureaucrat, Alan Cameron, six years her senior. He was English, had a third from Oxford, and had distinguished himself as an officer in the war. His eyes were permanently damaged by gas; he was unintellectual, and as devoted as a Basset hound. Bowen did not use his name on her books and the marriage was apparently unconsummated. Cameron would eventually fade out as a drink-sodden, unregarded parenthesis to his wife’s brilliant career, conscious of himself as ‘Blimpish’, fat, red-faced, walrus-moustached, cuckold: a figure of fun to his wife’s smart friends (and possibly her as well, as the pathetic Major Brutt in Death of the Heart suggests). None the less he supplied what Bowen needed in the formative years of that career – ‘fatherhood,’ she called it. Sex was as off-limits in the marriage as incest would have been with her other father.

  During the early years of the marriage, Cameron ascended the rungs of the Civil Service. Momentously, for his wife, he was appointed Secretary for Education for Oxford, in 1925. They took up residence in Old Headington, close to Lord and Lady Tweedsmuir (i.e. the novelist John Buchan), who became her special friends. Over the next ten years, Bowen’s literary personality would bloom. With nothing but a modest boarding-school education behind her, she was cultivated by a coterie of the university’s most fashionable dons: Maurice Bowra, Lord David Cecil, Isaiah Berlin, and later the Bayleys, John and Iris Murdoch. She had, enthused Bowra, ‘the fine style of a great lady’. Oxford adored her novels and the adoration was crowned with an honorary doctorate in later life.

  Oxford was the making of Elizabeth Bowen – but what it did to her fiction was dubious. It pleased her friends – and dedicatees – to believe that she was writing novels for them principally. She was cocooned in a coterie of warmth which gave her strength, but stunted her development. Writing in response to her early copy of The Heat of the Day (1949), Rosamond Lehmann gushed about ‘the sustained excitement, the almost hyper-penetration, the pity and terror. It is a great tragedy … Oh, and the wild glorious comedy, the pictorial beauty, the unbearable re-creation of war and London and private lives and loves. You do, you really do, write about love. Who else does, today?’ This over-pitched praise from a claque of cultural power-brokers encouraged a vein of inane portentousness. Chapter 5 in the novel Lehmann is raving about throws off, in its second sentence, the following: ‘The lovers had for two years possessed a hermetic world which, like the ideal book about nothing, stayed itself on itself by its inner force.’

  What on earth does that mean? Yet, on the opposite page, is a passage of sublime delicacy, describing the spiritual inertia of wartime London, awaiting nocturnal destruction from the air. What follows is a snatch of Bowen’s best: ‘The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or think was to ache. In offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens the hot yellow sands of each afternoon ran out slowly; fatigue was the one reality.’ How can a writer write so well and so awfully? Coterie caressing encouraged Bowen to neglect the perennial weakness of her narrative, an inability to handle mechanism. At the conclusion of To the North (1932), one of the two heroines, who has made a bad choice in love, sets up a Liebestod – careening up the Great North Road, her cad lover in the passenger seat, intending to crash and end it all. In an open car, roaring along a busy highway at 70 mph, they converse with the suavity of a couple in a quiet nook in the Savoy Riverside Bar.

  On her father’s death in 1930, Bowen inherited Bowen’s Court. She was the first woman in the line to do so and, it would prove, the last of either sex. For the next thirty years she would move, socially, between metropolitan England and rural Ireland. In 1935 Alan Cameron was appointed secretary to the Central Council for Schools Broadcasting and Bowen established herself as a London literary hostess at 2 Clarence Terrace, the fine property overlooking Regent’s Park, acquired on lease from the Crown.

  While her marriage was sexless, her life was not. In Oxford she had flings (including, apparently, some lesbian episodes) and a flagrant affair with Humphry House, a pioneer Dickens scholar. She went on to have another steaming affair with Goronwy Rees, ‘journalist, Soviet agent, and fellow of All Souls’, as Deirdre Toomey sardonically describes him. Both lovers were a decade her junior – she liked her men young (‘fatherly’ Alan, by contrast, was six years her senior). House was astonished, after they first went to bed in 1934, to discover – after twelve years of marriage and thirty-five years of life, including the roaring twenties – that Bowen was a virgin. Once she got the hang of it she was a harsh mistress. House and Rees found themselves mercilessly punished in her fiction for their defections to other women; in House’s case, the scourging continued up to her last novel in 1968 (the poor man had been dead fifteen years). Rees was so enraged by the depiction of himself as the paedophiliac Eddie in The Death of the Heart (1938) he had to be talked out of libel action by E. M. Forster.

  Bowen’s centrepiece is The Heat of the Day (1949), her wartime novel, worked on for ten years until its publication in 1949. The plot – mechanically inept, as usual – revolves around a beautiful Regent’s Park hostess, in her forties, so irresistible that rather than serve his country’s interests, an MI5 agent blackmails her into sex by offering not to betray her lover, Robert, as a Nazi spy. The novel chronicles the great romance of Bowen’s life, with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat (seven years younger) whom she met in 1941. He is the dedicatee of the book in which he is depicted as Robert. Their most rapturous love-making took place at Bowen’s Court, in the marital bed presumably. In 1945 she told him that he was ‘my real life, my only life’; the relationship lasted thirty years. Alan meanwhile found solace in the whisky bottle. That Ritchie himself was married meant nothing to Bowen: her lovers’ wives were never more than tiresome distractions.

  Cameron finally succeeded in drinking himself to death in 1952. She described his going as like the death of a ‘next of kin’ – not, by any means, her ‘only life’. As postwar Britain reconstructed itself, Bowen became a public woman. There were honours – doctorates, decorations, committee work. One of her friends nominated her for the Nobel Prize. She earned well but the expense of living in an age of austerity in two expensive houses was crippling. She was obliged to sell Bowen’s Court in 1959 to a farmer who, in an act of class revenge, pulled it down. She eventually took up residence in Hythe, where she had been a displaced little girl all those years ago. She died of lung cancer.

  FN

  Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen (later Cameron)

  MRT

  The Heat of the Day

  Biog

  ODNB (Deirdre Toomey); V. Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen (1977)

  167. Vladimir Nabokov 1899–1977

  The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Opening line of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory

  Nabokov was born in St Petersburg, the cosseted eldest child of a rich, prominent and aristocratic family. His father was a politician of liberal convictions and high literary cultivation. Vladimir’s early life, as lovingly recalled in Speak, Memory, was idyllic: nurses and nannies cared for him; tutors instructed him. St Petersburg’s best school gave him the best education available in the country and he was driven to school in a Rolls-Royce. ‘I was bilingual as a baby,’ he modestly recalled and, of those two languages, English was the first he read, while French was spoken at home. A tutor was recruited to teach him Russian. The family had large properties in town and in the country and Vladimir’s passion for butterflies – in which he would become one of the world’s experts – was formed in childhood at the family estate. They were, in a sense, his butterflies – just as, a few decades earlier, the Nabo
kovs had owned serfs.

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was eighteen – a fully formed product of the ancien régime with a brilliant future before him – when the Bolshevik Revolution broke. He would never own a home to call his own for the rest of his life. Nor would he have a country he could call his own. The Nabokovs narrowly escaped with their lives, eventually taking up residence in Berlin among a community of similarly expatriated White Russians. Among them, Nabokov’s father again rose to prominence. But they were no longer rich and Vladimir’s higher education had to be paid for with a string of pearls that his mother, Elena, contrived to smuggle out of Russia in a pot of face powder. He spent three years (1919–22) studying modern languages at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  He was a gifted student at Cambridge: the university was hospitable to émigrés, and Nabokov might, like Ludwig Wittgenstein or Paul Dirac, have found a lifetime berth there. He was already writing poetry and criticism. Events, however, forbade a donnish destiny. His father was shot – by a hopelessly incompetent assassin – in Berlin. Vladimir was there at the time, on vacation, and subsequently remained in Germany to embark on his first career in fiction. There was a large enough community of exiles to supply a reading public for Russian novels but not a large enough market to make it profitable. He made ends meet by teaching languages and tennis (at which he was an ace). Nabokov’s first effort in fiction, a love story distilling the melancholies of exile, was published in 1926. The sardonic tones of his later work would emerge later.

  Handsome, cosmopolitan and debonair, Nabokov had a number of affairs before, in 1925, marrying Véra Evseyevna Slonim, a Russian Jewish émigrée. They had met at a masked ball – the symbolism pleased Nabokov. His literary mask was ‘V. Sirin’, under which nom de plume he wrote seven novels in Russian for Russians. Russia, now the USSR, ignored them. Nabokov also developed his sidelines in lepidoptery and chess (he specialised, unsurprisingly, in ‘problems’). By the late 1930s, Berlin was no longer a safe city for a Russian with a Jewish wife and the family (now with a six-year-old son, Dmitri) moved to Paris. It was a period of crisis for Vladimir: his marriage was troubled, he was tormented with psoriasis, and depressed by never-ending exile. He contemplated suicide. However, a number of important things emerged from these mid-life troubles, most important of which was his resolution to write in English. The result was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). The novel is a series of riddles. Is one’s own life one’s own? The narrator begins to suggest that, like the knight on the board, he is in the hand of an intelligence he does not understand. ‘I am very happy that you liked that little book,’ Nabokov later told Edmund Wilson, ‘I wrote it … in Paris, on the implement called bidet as a writing desk – because we lived in one room and I had to use our small bathroom as a study.’

  With the outbreak of war the Nabokovs fled to America. Here, in 1941, Sebastian Knight was published. Nabokov was befriended by literary admirers, notably Edmund Wilson, who helped ease him into a succession of posts at American colleges, teaching comparative literature, Russian, and lepidoptery. His tenure case at Cornell inspired a famous wisecrack. When, in support of a permanent position, the committee was reminded that he was a distinguished novelist, one member objected: ‘should we then make a rhinoceros professor of zoology?’ His failure to secure a permanent place inspired the ironic campus novel, Pnin (1957). Along with Pale Fire (1962), it reflects Nabokov’s mordant belief that American academics are to a man ‘mediocrities’.

  As he liked to jest, a twelve-year-old ‘nymphet’ freed him from this campus mediocracy. The birth of Lolita was as cosmopolitan as its creator’s career. He showed the novel, rewritten from a 1939 sketch, to Edmund Wilson in 1954. Wilson (who had himself written a ‘dirty book’, The Memoirs of Hecate County) passed Lolita on to his publishers. They turned it down on sight (‘Do you think we’re crazy?’ one editor asked) – the American public wasn’t ready for paedophilia and incest even if packaged in hyper-literary gloss. Eventually Lolita was published in 1955 by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, a Paris firm that specialised in sophisticated porn written in English. Chauvinistically, the French authorities only concerned themselves with French language products – foreigners were perfectly free to corrupt themselves.

  In its green Olympia livery, Lolita enjoyed an underground éclat. In the 1955 Christmas round-ups, Graham Greene cited it as one of his ‘books of the year’ in the (London) Sunday Times. It provoked an apocalyptic diatribe against ‘filth’ from the Sunday Express’s John Gordon, a veteran campaigner for British purity. Greene, even more provocatively, founded a ‘John Gordon Society’, comprising some of London’s leading intellectual lights, to oppose book-banning. All this publicity encouraged the American publisher, Putnam, to buy the book’s rights and a ‘legitimate’ Lolita duly appeared in 1958. It shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list (contesting the Number 1 spot with another ‘Russian’ work, Dr Zhivago), holding its position for two years.

  The hero-narrator of Lolita is Humbert Humbert (a pseudonym), born in 1910, ‘a Swiss citizen of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of Danube in his veins’, an academic and minor poet. He is sexually obsessed with what he calls nymphets, little girls ‘between the age limits of nine and fourteen’. Their nature, he believes, ‘is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac)’. They victimise poor fellows like him. Humbert is left some money by ‘mon oncle d’Amerique’ and – the Old World incarnate – travels to the New World. Following a nervous breakdown, he goes to recuperate in Ramsdale, New England. It is 1947. He lodges with a widow who has a twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores (‘Lolita’) the nymphet of his lustful dreams:

  Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

  She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

  Following a series of happy accidents, including her seducing him in a motor hotel, he takes off with his little nymphet on an odyssey across the highways of America. It all ends tragically after Lolita dumps Humbert for Clare Quilty, a pornographer of genius. Everyone dies, including Lolita, ‘in childbed [sic] giving birth to a stillborn girl’.

  The book and Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie (of which Nabokov approved) enriched him and from 1959 he lived in Switzerland in a four-star hotel – a comfortable nowhere. He continued Lolita’s explorations with language in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, becoming increasingly self-important and given to such haughty utterances as: ‘I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning.’

  From 1974 until his death, from mysterious viral infections, Nabokov worked on a final novel, The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). The novel was never completed and he instructed the manuscript be destroyed. He was not one to leave working materials lying about: ‘Rough drafts, false scents, half-explored trails, dead ends of inspiration,’ he once wrote, ‘are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius.’ The lordly crack about mediocrities (a category which includes, for Nabokov, many of the reading public, most living authors, and all professors of literature) is hackle-raising, but no genius was more concerned with ‘finish’. And if not finished one way the book must be finished the other – destroyed. Nabokov’s wife and son, defying (like Max Brod and Kafka) his instruction, preserved and in 2009 published The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). The scrappy, bewildering, narrative ends with a thesaurus of finalities:

  efface

  expunge

  erase

  delete

  rub out

  wipe out

  obliterate

/>   Perhaps it should have been.

  FN

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

  MRT

  Lolita

  Biog

  B. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and The American Years (2 vols, 1990, 1991)

  168. Margaret Mitchell 1900–1949

  If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it, or well I’d be a prize fighter – anything for the thrills. Margaret Mitchell, aged fifteen, in her diary

  The author of Gone with the Wind (‘GWTW’ to its in-group fans) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where her father was an attorney with a distinguished southern bloodline. Her mother, ‘Maybelle’, was Irish by ancestry and fiery by temperament and – one may plausibly suppose – the original of Scarlett O’Hara. As a child, Margaret saturated herself in the history of the South, and specifically of Atlanta during the Civil War and Reconstruction. They were still relatively recent and deeply felt events and there were those living who could remember the burning of their town, which is the centrepiece of both novel and film. ‘It’s happened before and it will happen again,’ Maybelle once told her daughter, ‘and when it does happen, everyone loses everything and everyone is equal. They all start again with nothing at all except the cunning of their brain and the strength of their hands.’ Personal disasters, and the need to start over again and again, certainly afflicted Mitchell in her young womanhood. Her fiancé was killed fighting in France in 1918. Her mother died in the 1919 influenza epidemic and her father was invalided at the same period. Margaret was obliged to give up her studies at Smith College, Massachusetts, to come home and take charge – all of which can be tied in, allegorically, with the fictional sufferings of the indomitable Scarlett, and her return to Tara after the sack of Atlanta and the ruin of her plantation, with the stoical ‘tomorrow is another day’.