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

by John Sutherland

  Recognition of his talent came early – as it often does in SF, with its highly developed critical and word-of-mouth circuits. He won an O. Henry Award in 1948 and a ‘best author’ award from the National Fantasy Fan Federation a year later. In 1950 Bradbury broke through into international fame with The Martian Chronicles, a collection which was ‘made’ by an influential review from Christopher Isherwood. The stories in the volume compose a haunting panorama of pioneer life on a Mars which is alternately Edenic and horrific. Bradbury’s most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), a fable of book-burning in the future, targeted the current McCarthyite witch-hunting in the United States and satirised the intellectually numbing spread of television, and its destruction, as Bradbury saw it, of print culture. ‘I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it,’ he said. He could also misunderstand it.

  At this period Bradbury was recruited to work in film. Among other assignments, he wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956). When he confessed to the director that he’d never read Melville’s novel, he was assured it was OK: the studio paid people to do that kind of thing for you. His own work was also successfully filmed, notably Fahrenheit 451, directed by François Truffaut, in 1966. In later life, Bradbury’s knees buckled with the honours with which SF loves to load its most admired practitioners. His great achievement, particularly in the shorter fiction was to raise the quality of writing in the genre, opening the way to the literary experimentations of New Wave writers in the 1970s and 1980s. Bradbury liberated SF from the accusation made by Kurt Vonnegut (in the person of his SF hack ‘Kilgore Trout’) that its writers had great ideas, but couldn’t write worth a damn.

  In a genre preoccupied with technology and hardware, Bradbury was unusual in never having a driving licence and not flying (and then very reluctantly) on an aeroplane until he was sixty-two. Arthur C. Clarke, an enthusiast for gadgetry, gave him a laptop computer, only to discover, as Bradbury’s biographer records, that ‘he used it as a drink coaster’. Bradbury suffered a devastating stroke in 1999, which left him able only to communicate by pen and pad. He none the less contrived to write fiction, even in this terminal condition. All he had ever needed was pen, paper, imagination and a mental cliff to fall off.

  FN

  Raymond Douglas Bradbury

  MRT

  Fahrenheit 451

  Biog

  S. Weller, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005)

  222. Charles Bukowski 1920–1994

  I can’t see any other place than L.A.

  James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man actually opens with the portrait of the artist as a baby. Little Stephen sits alongside the family feet as they argue – passionately – about Ireland and the Parnell scandal. Charles Bukowski’s portrait of himself as a young man in Ham on Rye (1982), opens, allusively, with much the same scene:

  The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table, I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of the people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under there. I liked being under there. It must have been in Germany … I felt good under the table. Nobody seemed to know that I was there.

  Say ‘Hank Bukowski’ and most readers will think ‘Barfly, Bum, Bohemian’ – not a lover of Joyce. Ham on Rye, dedicated to the author’s early years, is so-called because he’s Los Angeles through and through, but German (rye bread) by origin. Bukowski had many gifts, not least for resonant titles such as this: for example, Crucifix in a Deathhand; At Terror Street and Agony Way; All the Assholes in the World and Mine; Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. But, many will think, the title which sums up his life work best is that of the column which he wrote for many years in a semi-underground newspaper, ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’.

  The DOM was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, the son of a German mother and a German-American serviceman serving in Europe after the First World War. He claimed – frequently – to have been ‘bastardised’ by his ‘monster father’ but his Catholic parents were in fact decently married and considerably less monstrous than he paints them. The Bukowskis moved to Maryland in 1923, where Heinrich Karl became Henry (‘Hank’) Charles, although his parents’ habit of dressing him as a ‘German’ led to bullying and a solitary early childhood. It was not helped by disfiguring acne – a lifelong affliction: he was ‘so ugly’, he said, ‘that girls spit on my shadow’. His pimples were the ‘size of apples’ and left volcanic craters still visible on photographs of his face sixty years later. In 1930 the Bukowskis moved on to Los Angeles. An early chapter in Ham on Rye describes his father being humiliated stealing oranges, by a gun-wielding farmer, who did not take kindly to citrus poaching. He claims thereafter to have despised his parent and to have suffered beatings from him – ‘a cruel shiny bastard with bad breath’, and not that much of a provider. Aged sixteen, as he proudly recalls, he knocked the shiny bastard out and the beatings stopped. At the same time, he discovered his love of alcohol. Like LA, it would be his friend for life.

  Dyslexia, a dysfunctional family, and disrespect for all authority made him an awkward child. He recalls bullying and furtive investigations of little schoolmates’ panties. Bukowski left Los Angeles High School to study journalism at community college, but he soon dropped out and picked up menial work where he could. These drop-out years are commemorated in Bukoswski’s 1975 novel, Factotum. Although in free fall socially, he was reading widely and intelligently and it was in the LA Public Library that he came across the author who would be most influential on his mature writing, John Fante – specifically Fante’s novel Ask the Dust (1939). Fante cultivated a style of fragmented immediacy, with low-life LA settings and a high autobiographical element (there was 93 per cent autobiography in his own fiction, Bukowski later calculated).

  Bukowski did not quite dodge the draft, but he more or less evaded it, letting others fight for America. He occasionally voiced a liking for Hitler. ‘If he had any politics he was a fucking fascist,’ observed one friend. Psychiatrists judged him, eventually, unfit to serve. ‘Extreme sensitivity’ was the odd reason recorded on the report. Sex may have come into it. He did not, as he liked to confess, get laid until he was twenty-three. His early attempts at writing were everywhere rejected and over the next decade he went into a long debauch – his ‘barfly’ years, as he called them. He had by now dropped ‘Henry’ in favour of ‘Charles’ in his pen name. Henry reminded him too much of his father, he said. He nevertheless kept the family first name in his fictional alter ego (and hero of five of his six novels), ‘Henry Chinaski’. Over these years he kept body and soul together with short-term ‘shit jobs’. He roomed in crummy lodging houses, bummed around America, and was regularly in and out of the drunk tank. When he had money, he drank it or lost it at the race track – his other addiction.

  In these early vagrant years Bukowski came across another work which would contribute to his own distinct style, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. His experiences in the lower depths of Los Angeles furnished him with the store of material he would recycle, and lavishly exaggerate, in his later writing. It was during this period that he fell in with his first long-time partner, Jane Cooney Baker. Like Bukowski, she was alcoholic, morally dissolute and considerably less of a catch than Faye Dunaway, who plays her in the 1987 film Barfly. He regarded her as his muse and used her as his bed-warming room-mate for five years. But Baker lacked Bukowski’s canny survival instincts and their dissipation à deux broke up and she drank herself to death a couple of years later.

  Bukowski lavished Baker’s memory with elegies and then went on to marry the poet Barbara Frye in 1957. Physically deformed, acutely shy, Frye had never even had a boyfriend before Bukowski. The marriage lasted two years. In the early 1950s Bukowski had entered the employment of the US Mail, as a postal sorter and carrier. He would toss parcels around by night, and write furiously by day, honing the image of himself as hell-raising, bohemian, barfly maudit. T
his ten-year stint is commemorated in his first novel, Post Office (1971). The rise of the Beats (to whom Bukowski owed no literary allegiance, or respect, whatsoever) created a cultural environment favourable to Bukowski’s idiosyncratic West Coast bohemianism. Wild men were in. The difference between him and Kerouac was that he was really wild, not a mama’s boy.

  His poems were at last being picked up by the small magazines which were thriving at the time. His first chapbook, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, was published in 1959. At around the same time, the death of his father brought him a handsome $15,000 nest egg, which he prudently squirrelled away for a rainy day. Making up for lost time, Bukowski consoled himself with a string of partners by one of whom, Frances Smith, he had a daughter. According to Howard Sounes, the first word the little girl learned to read was ‘liquor’. Smith was herself a well-regarded hippy poet and was instrumental in getting the bearishly anti-social Bukowski talked about where it mattered. At this period, encouraged by one of his small-press patrons, he began writing short pieces of autobiographical fiction around the character ‘Henry Chinaski’. They were collected as Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts (1965). His growing profile in avant-garde West Coast circles led to what would go on to be a career-long association with the most distinguished of the 1960s small presses, Black Sparrow. Guaranteed payment allowed Bukowski, at the age of fifty, to leave the Post Office and, at last, write full time.

  He promptly began writing novels drawing on Fante and Hemingway, using his distinctive spare, dismembered, ironic and self-centred style. Above all, his fiction was ‘real’. ‘Writing,’ he once said, ‘was never work for me … All I had to do was be there.’ New women passed through his life. He used them (cruelly in some cases) in his 1978 novel, Women. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Bukowski’s reputation grew – he was becoming a literary cult. The image was carefully promoted by readings in which he would drunkenly rant and turn violently on his audience. They lapped it up. His readings survive in a DVD entitled There’s Gonna be a God Damn Riot in Here. In point of fact, as Howard Sounes records, the ‘God Damn Riot’ was all an act. But a good one – and profitable: he could pull in as much as $1,000 a riot.

  The tenor of his personal life was less riotous. In the 1970s he embarked on a relationship with the sculptress Linda King. According to his publisher, John Martin, ‘she was probably the first real sexual relationship he’d ever had in his life’. He bought a house and a smart BMW. He was still drinking heavily – but he had always been able to handle quantities which would destroy less robust writers. These were the years of what he grandly called his ‘final decadence’ – but none the less in a comfortable house he owned, with a good car and a well-stocked full refrigerator. And always a new woman. In 1976 Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle. She was twenty-four years his junior and an aspiring actress. The relationship lasted, in the usual on-and-off way, and they married in 1985. Worldwide fame, and the monumentalisation of the Bukowski image, came with the movie Barfly, two years later, in which Mickey Rourke played Chinaski and Faye Dunaway played ‘Wanda’ (i.e. Baker). Bukowski’s mixed feelings about the movie are inscribed in his outrageous 1989 roman-à-clef, Hollywood. See, for example, his pen portrait of ‘Tab Jones’, a Welsh singer who has made it big in Las Vegas:

  Here is this Tab Jones. He sings. His shirt is open and the black hairs on his chest show. The hairs are sweating. He wears a big silver cross in these sweating hairs. His mouth is a horrible hole cut into a pancake. He’s got on tight pants and he’s wearing a dildo. He grabs his balls and sings about all the good things he can do for women. He really sings badly, I mean, he is terrible. All about what he can do to women, but he’s a fake, he really wants his tongue up some man’s anus.

  Poor Tom.

  In his later years Bukowski became very rich but never admitted to himself that he had sold out. He died, not of the booze he had swilled all his life, but of leukaemia, leaving behind his last novel, Pulp. His gravestone (arguably his last poem) reads:

  Henry Charles Bukowski Jr.

  Hank

  (‘Don’t Try’)

  1920–1994

  Between the dates is the image of a professional boxer.

  FN

  Henry (‘Hank’) Charles Bukowski Jr (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski)

  MRT

  Ham on Rye

  Biog

  H. Sounes, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (1998)

  223. Dick Francis 1920–2010

  She’s a tremendous help when I’m looking for words.

  Francis was born in Pembrokeshire of semi-gentrified stock. His father was a prosperous dealer in horseflesh, and the child grew up surrounded by the beasts which would be the most important thing in his life. Infant Dick won his first race, aged eight, and left school at fifteen, intending to be a jockey. A sudden growth and weight spurt in his teens meant that his chosen line would be ‘jump’, not ‘flat’ – the sport of kings and midgets. Francis was an unusual child in wanting to grow up but not to grow.

  Of military service age when war broke out, Francis volunteered for the cavalry but was recruited into the RAF – first as a non-commissioned engine-fitter, then, after much pestering on his part, as a pilot. He got his wings, and his pips, in 1944. In his autobiography, he says that he was actively involved in the dam-buster raid. Since that heroic event took place in 1943, he could not have done – unless as a civilian stowaway with the bouncing bombs in the bomb-bay. In fact his war service was disappointingly uneventful, though not, it must be said, from any lack of personal pluck. The career he chose on leaving the service in 1947 meant at least one bone-breaking fall a season and bruises all the way. On his marriage, in the same year, 1947, photographs show the bridegroom’s right arm in a sling. Francis would break his collar bone nine times in his riding career – a recurrent injury that eventually drove him out of the sport. His wife Mary was a graduate in modern languages, a teacher and a woman of extraordinary energy (even after a bout of polio in 1949) and of volubly right-wing views. They had two sons, Merrick and Felix. The year 1947 was a good one in every way for Francis, with sixteen wins and marriage to the woman of his life.

  Francis was always reckoned in the top ten of his profession, and as champion jockey in 1953–7, he rode for the Queen Mother. But in 1956 Francis’s life, as he liked to say, ‘ended’. Everything else would be ‘afterlife’. It was a dramatic final act: in the Grand National that year, riding for the QM, leading the field by many lengths, Francis’s horse, Devon Loch mysteriously collapsed only yards short of the finishing line. Francis had never won the National, the peak of a jump jockey’s career, and his disappointment was bitter. Was Devon Loch nobbled? Perhaps; it’s a recurrent theme in Francis’s thrillers. But the most likely explanation seems to have been a gigantic fart which was so explosive as to prostrate the unluckily flatulent beast. Francis retired, having ridden 2,305 races and 345 winners. In his retirement he began writing insider and tipster columns for the Sunday Express, a line of work (pitifully paid) which he continued until 1973. His first racing world thriller, Dead Cert, came out in 1962. He would thereafter, until 2001, produce one a year.

  According to the novelist himself, he was no Henry James: ‘I start at Chapter 1, page 1, and plod on to THE END.’ Starting gates and finishing lines made him comfortable. His invariable practice was to begin a new book every 1 January, and deliver the MS to Michael Joseph on 8 May for publication in September. As Private Eye put it, with neat sarcasm, in 1992: ‘All his novels are narrated by a male hero. Although this hero begins with a handicap, whether physical or psychological (bereavement, divorce, unrequited love, family tragedy, whatever), he always comes out a winner, proving himself brave and honest, honourable and taciturn, heterosexual but horse-loving, one of nature’s gents.’ What one detects in the above – as with many who profess to be dismissive of Francis – is that the (anonymous) critic clearly reads the novels. Once opened, a Francis thriller sticks to the eyes li
ke glue.

  Nobbling and criminal betting coups are recurrent plot devices. In racing circles, Francis is routinely accused of bringing his sport into disrepute. The charge is belied by his evident love of it. His series hero Sid Halley, injured former champion jockey, is self-confessedly a version of the author (see, for example, Odds Against (1965), Whip Hand (1979) – Francis has a knack in racy titles). Forfeit (1968) is regarded as Francis’s most self-revealing novel. His autobiography, The Sport of Queens (1957), is anything but self-revealing. According to Julian Symons (the critic who made crime fiction critically respectable), ‘Francis has been overpraised.’ One of his more famous overpraisers was Philip Larkin, who declared Francis ‘always 20 times more readable than the average Booker entry’ (he knew whereof he spoke – Larkin was chair of the panel in 1978. Francis, alas, was not longlisted for Trial Run). Francis was also a favourite with Kingsley Amis, Queen Elizabeth II, and, of course, his employer, her ‘mum’.

  Dick and Mary Francis, both broken in body, retired to Florida in their last years. Graham Lord’s flagrantly ‘unauthorised’ biography, published in 1999, alleged outright that Mary had ghosted every one of the ‘Dick Francis’ novels. According to Lord, she confirmed his thesis, telling him that her authorship was suppressed in order to preserve the ‘taut … masculine’ feel of the works. Two pieces of evidence support Lord. First is the fact that the Francises did not sue him. Second that on Mary’s death in 2000 Francis ‘retired’ from writing. He came back, eight years later, in ‘collaboration’ with his son Felix. But what does it matter? Horses don’t win races by themselves: jockeys don’t win races by themselves – they win them in partnership. Why shouldn’t it be the same with novels? He was the horse, she was the jockey.