Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives
Page 71
During the early war years, Snow carried a cyanide vial in his pocket. He had two entries on the Gestapo death list, he informed friends, some of whom would have been flattered to have one. He was recruited by ‘Intelligence’ as a scientific adviser – keeping the Cabinet informed about what the boffins in the backroom were doing and where the Nazis had got to with their nuclear research. ‘I think I was pretty effective,’ he records. His best novel, The Masters, was begun with the leisure of peacetime and published in 1951. It chronicles a battle for high college office which comes to symbolise a clash between old and new learning. The novel was widely read at a period when British universities were struggling to redefine themselves. Curricula were duly revised along Snow’s suggested bilateralism: indeed, a whole ‘new’ university, Keele, was set up in his intellectual image.
Snow, despite some early homosexual experiences (candidly confessed to), had conducted affairs, alluded to in his novels. In 1950 he married the recently divorced novelist, Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912–81), a lover of some years standing. The marriage was socially high-profile and successful, but he was not faithful. Johnson was either unaware or complaisant. The couple’s only child Philip was born in 1952.
After the war, Snow was smoothly shoe-horned into the upper echelons of industry, as Director of Personnel at GEC. He stayed in the post for fourteen years. Strangers and Brothers, meanwhile, pulsed out, tracking, remorselessly, its author’s upward progress. The peaks were in sight, he was now a sage. In 1959 he took the nation to task in his Rede lectures, entitled: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). There were, he argued, ‘New Men’ and ‘Old Men’. The one knew Shakespeare but were stumped by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the other vice versa. There was, he implied, one man who effortlessly bridged the two – there should be more Snows. The two-culture thesis was influential and adopted as holy writ in the sixth forms of Britain. Congenial as it was with liberal educationists, it provoked ferocious refutation from the leading literary critic of the time, F. R. Leavis. In an answering lecture in 1962, Leavis, much the more effective polemicist, denied any such facile cultural split and mocked the pontifical tone of Snow’s argument which, as he bitingly observed, only genius could justify: but, then, who could imagine genius using such a tone? As for Tolstoyan pretension, ‘Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist … his incapacity as a novelist is … total … as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist … not only is he not a genius … he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.’ Snow’s reputation among the discriminating few, and his amour propre, never recovered.
With the public at large his reputation was unaffected, however. A lifelong socialist, Snow was one of the darlings of the 1964 Wilson administration, wedded as it was to the utopian belief that ‘the white heat of technology’ would make Great Britain great again. It was entirely in line with Baron Snow of Leicester’s view of things. It was not, otherwise, a happy decade for the Snows. As the 1960s swung on, they were increasingly preoccupied with the nation’s moral decay – principally the growth of the pornography industry and crimes such as the Moors murders. Evil resurgent is dramatised in Snow’s tenth novel, The Sleep of Reason (1968) and Johnson’s j’accuse, On Iniquity (1967).
Snow looked prematurely ancient and Yoda-like almost from youth. A sceptical Pamela Hansford Johnson consulted Who’s Who for confirmation when informed that the bald, fat, wrinkled fellow she was falling in love with was as young as he claimed to be. Not that age mattered. ‘I have a certain charm, when I choose to exercise it,’ Snow blandly informed his biographer (luckily male). He smoked and drank immoderately, and was disabled in body and fogged in mind towards the end of his life, when his main writing was ponderous reviews for the Financial Times. His own financial affairs were in apple-pie order: he left £300,000 on his death. Johnson died shortly after.
FN
Charles Percy Snow (later Baron Snow)
MRT
The Masters
Biog
J. Halperin, C. P. Snow: An Oral Biography (1983)
186. Rex Warner 1905–1986
The only modern novelist I like is Kafka
While confessing to arrant Kafkaism, Warner routinely added that his other principal influence was Tobias Smollett – English cheese and Czech chalk. The son of an Anglican parson in Gloucestershire, who encumbered his son with the archetypally Victorian forenames ‘Reginald Ernest’, and a mother whom he candidly hated, Warner attended a minor public school. He shone on the rugger field and in the classroom, winning a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to read classics. That subject was then presided over by the formidable Maurice Bowra – a man whose genitals, one of his hero-worshippers later recorded, resembled the ruins at Delphi. They were frequently on view at Parson’s Pleasure, where dons bathe nude and can exchange donnish pleasantries.
As Anthony Powell recalled, ‘Bowra always talked as if homosexuality was the normal condition of an intelligent man.’ Warner shared Bowra’s philhellenism, but not his sexual proclivities. At Oxford he made a flying start and in the first round of ‘final’ examinations (‘Mods’) he racked up a record number of alphas – more, even, than had Bowra. Score one for heterosexuality. A glittering academic career was in prospect – but never materialised. In his third year, Warner suffered a spectacular nervous breakdown. Bowra, never one to let sympathy interfere with a witticism, recalled: ‘he was said to see the transcendental deduction of the categories lying in solid blocks across the room.’ Warner’s first wife, Frances Grove, diagnosed in her husband an irreconcilable clash between ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’ – Oxford and the real world; hetero and homo. There was also an infection of fashionable Marxism and incipient alcoholism.
Having lost a year of study, Warner transferred from classics to English – a softer option. The change of subject had momentous career consequences. It brought him together with W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and other founder members of the ‘Thirties group’. Like Auden, Warner scraped a ‘gentleman’s third’ (Spender – never one to do things by halves – flunked out with no degree whatsoever). Like his comrades, Warner fell back on school-teaching to keep the wolf from the door. During the slump there were no easy jobs – even for gents. His first serious efforts as a writer reflect the mechanophiliac ‘pylon’ poetry Spender was writing in the early 1930s and Auden’s perverse sentiment that the most beautiful walk in Oxford was along the stinking canal by the gasworks. No dreaming spires for these young men. But the main influence on Warner’s writing originated elsewhere: the Muirs, Edwin and Willa, had translated Kafka’s The Castle in 1930 – it exploded like a bomb on insular British culture.
Warner’s first published novel, The Wild Goose Chase (1937), is a Kafkaesque allegory of totalitarianism. The novel’s best-known episode is a football match in which the pitch elastically reshapes itself to favour the home side. This chapter (which Spender believed the second best thing of its kind ever written – the first is unrecorded) was published in the house journal of the Thirties group, John Lehmann’s New Writing. Like others in that group, Warner was at this period what he called in later life a ‘near communist’. But the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact, as with other fellow travellers, extinguished any loyalty he might have had to Moscow. Warner wrote his masterpiece, The Aerodrome (1941), in the run-up to the Second World War and published it during the conflict. Fictionally it echoes Orwell’s ‘As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’ The Aerodrome’s narrative pivots on the binary opposition of an old English village, presided over by the ‘Rector’, and the new, nearby aerodrome, presided over by the ‘Air Vice Marshal’. One represents totalitarian ‘apparat’, the other liberal English ‘muddle’, as E. M. Forster called it. Woven into this design is a complicated love story centred on the orphan hero, Roy (a version of ‘Rex’, as critics note). To win the war, Old England has to ape its enemy, de
stroying the principles for which it initially fought the war. Victory merely recreates the enemy in yourself – such is the irony of history. During the war Warner, too old and too crocked to serve, taught and wrote. It was, he said, ‘escapism’. At the war’s end, he was sent on a BBC mission to Germany and the concentration camps. What he saw, inescapably, precipitated another breakdown. The first, at Oxford, had made him a modern novelist; the second extinguished that career.
As Theodor Adorno famously pronounced, writing, after Auschwitz (Belsen in Warner’s case) was pointless. Warner accepted a series of cushy British Council jobs, well beneath his talents, in Greece and Germany, and drank excessively. He changed marriage partners, leaving his loyal wife and three children for Barbara Hutchinson, the wealthy widow of a Rothschild. Later he drifted to America, where he landed even cushier college jobs at Bowdoin and Storrs. Life became one long, sodden, sinecure. Over the years he mainly translated classical texts. His Thucydides, in its Penguin Classic (half-crown) livery, sold over a million copies. His desultory efforts in fiction, particularly an unlucky essay in Wodehousian comedy, were less wanted by the reading public.
In his seventies, Warner retired to rural Oxfordshire with Frances (his first wife, who he remarried in 1966), where, despite a heroic intake of alcohol in the neighbouring pub, he survived until his eighties. At his funeral, as his biographer records, ‘no figures from the London literary world were present’.
FN
Reginald Ernest Warner (‘Rex’)
MRT
The Aerodrome
Biog
S. E. Tabachnik, Fiercer than Tigers: the Life and Works of Rex Warner (2005)
187. Samuel Beckett 1906–1989
Sodom and Begorrah. Dylan Thomas on Murphy
Beckett was born in Foxrock, near Dublin, Ireland, to a Protestant family. He records the occasion of his birth with gloom-edged precision: ‘I was born on Friday the thirteenth and Good Friday too. My father had been waiting all day for my arrival. At eight p.m. he went out for a walk, and when he returned, I had been born.’ Biographers have queried the date, time and paternal absence. Elsewhere Beckett recalls: ‘You might say I had a happy childhood.’ He does not quite say it himself. His father was a prosperous housing contractor (not quite an architect, as Beckett pedantically observed). His mother, musical by nature, had no luck moving her younger son, Sam, towards that ‘safe’ line of work, but she remained the dominant figure in his life until well into middle age. As a child, he loved games, particularly cricket in which, ever enigmatic, he batted left-handed and bowled right-handed. Ireland, between 1916 and 1922, was in rebellious upheaval but it did not materially affect the Becketts, or him. He attended the same school as had Oscar Wilde (Portora Royal) where, like his elder brother Frank, he was more distinguished as an athlete than as a scholar. Even at this early stage of his life, he was observed to be unusually ‘private’. What he later called his ‘crescendo of disengagement’ had begun.
Beckett went on to read Modern Languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1923. He steeped himself in French poetry and Dante (like cricket, a lifelong passion) and drank heavily. On graduation, he took up a two-year teaching assistant post at the École Normale in Paris. Here he was introduced to James Joyce, whose occasional amanuensis he became. There was a complicated relationship with Joyce’s disturbed daughter, Lucia, who was infatuated with him. It led to a ‘bust up’. He could not bring himself to love Lucia, he said enigmatically, because he was ‘dead’. James Joyce he was very much alive to. In Paris, Beckett published his first books, the long poem Whoroscope (about Descartes) and a study of Proust.
On his return to Ireland he seemed destined for an academic career. But his habits were increasingly – and rebelliously – bohemian and he eventually gave up the university. After an unsettled few years, much illness, and a frustrating inability to find his métier as a writer of fiction, he settled in Paris in 1937. Again he took up the role of Joycean acolyte. ‘To the dismay of some of his friends,’ his biographer records, ‘Beckett began to imitate Joyce’s mannerisms.’ It extended to imitating the master’s distinctive footwear: like Cinderella’s sisters (Beckett’s feet being the larger) he had to squeeze his feet into the master’s shiny, but smaller, shoes.
For some five years Beckett had been working on an autobiographical work, narrated by a ‘Mr Beckett’, called Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Clearly an act of Joycean homage, it mixes dialects, neologisms, parody and jokes (one of the best being the title – a department in which Beckett was always strong). It opens with the hero masturbating and pursues a maze of subsequent mind-centred fantasies. Dream of Fair to Middling Women proved unpublishable and Beckett himself later dismissed it as ‘immature and unworthy’. He was better pleased with the short stories collected under a title which would make it wilfully difficult to see the light of print in his home country – More Pricks than Kicks.
Beckett was getting by at this period of his life with handouts from his parents. He was disturbed emotionally and submitted to their wish that he undergo psychoanalysis in London. He was interested to discover in himself a ‘womb fixation’ – an unhealthy attachment to his mother. He had not, in Jungian terms, been ‘entirely born’. It was an idea which would recur throughout his later writing and drama. His major work of the 1930s was the novel Murphy. The narrative again plays out within the hero’s mind. A Dubliner and a ‘seedy solipsist’, Murphy inhabits a condemned building in London where he ruminates, naked, in a rocking chair. There is an intricate denouement via a chess game with revised rules. The hero dies in an explosion detonated by a downstairs jakes. His will instructs that his cremated remains be flushed down the loo of the Abbey Theatre. Murphy was the first of his novels to be bilingualised into French by Beckett himself. It was rejected by close on fifty publishers, well reviewed on its eventual publication in 1938 by discriminating critics, and sold abysmally.
In 1938 Beckett was stabbed – nearly fatally – in the Parisian streets by a pimp, having refused the services of a ‘lady of the evening’. He was lucky not to die. When he found himself in the courts of justice alongside his assailant, he asked him why he had done it. ‘I don’t know,’ was the reply. The remark had significance for Beckett. He had by now firmly resolved that ‘I didn’t like living in Ireland’ and he chose to remain in France after the outbreak of war in 1939. During the German Occupation, as an Irishman, he was technically neutral but he involved himself, at great peril, with the French Resistance. After being betrayed, he spent two years underground (for a while in the cellar of the novelist, Nathalie Sarraute) and won a post-war Croix de Guerre. He had undertaken this life-threatening work, he said, for personal reasons, not for the French nation: ‘I was outraged by the Nazis, particularly by their treatment of the Jews.’ It was in the Resistance that Beckett formed what would be a lifelong attachment to Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (though they did not marry until 1961).
During the war he suffered intolerable nervous stress, something that feeds into the novel he wrote during these years, Watt (1953) – the punning title is arch-Beckett. The hero is a servant, embarking on the service of a Mr Knott (another pun). It removes to a lunatic asylum where a character ‘Sam’ appears. The novel ends with the now familiar mental dissolutions. Beckett, in his mid-life forties, saw himself principally as a novelist – writing in both French and English. Once asked was he English, Beckett replied ‘au contraire’. He would have so replied had he been asked if he was French, and – conceivably – if he was Irish. He was forever contrary. Watt was followed by Mercier et Camier (1946), Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). All ponder cosmic loneliness, all are ruminative in form (there is a famous scene in Molloy in which the hero returns to the seaside, with his sixteen ‘sucking stones’ – can you, the novel ponders, squeeze the past out of a stone?) All his work poses the large question, why live? Typically the hero, like Malone, is stripped as naked as Lear on the heath. Malone’s only contact, as he lies,
man alone, interminably dying, is an old lady who brings him a daily dish and a clean chamberpot.
By the 1950s Beckett had recognition among advanced literary circles as an experimental, but crotchety, writer. World fame came to him as a dramatist with the absurdist play, Waiting for Godot (1953), particularly after its sensational 1956 launch on the London stage. Godot ushered in the theatre of the absurd as a dominant style: it revolutionised drama and cinema. His later career saw the award of many prizes, crowned by the Nobel in 1969. He wrote some minimalist fiction in his last years, e.g. Worstward Ho (1983), gnawing the same old bones into ever more boniness.
FN
Samuel Barclay Beckett
MRT
Murphy
Biog
J. Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (1996)
188. John Dickson Carr 1906–1977
He is the acknowledged master of that classic rarity, the tale of detection in which detection is seen to take place, the clues really are shared with the reader, and crimes of majestic and multifarious impossibility are shown at last to have been possible after all, if not always very plausible. Kingsley Amis on Carr