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

by John Sutherland

  Two of his works, thanks to TV re-runs, have immortalised his name: The Guns of Navarone (1957) and Where Eagles Dare (1969). The last was proposed to Maclean by the movie producer Elliott Kastner, who put in the order for ‘an adventure story that would sweat … set in the Second World War, with five or six guys overcoming enormous obstacles to rescue someone’. Starring in the film was Richard Burton. He and Maclean bonded on the set over vodka and then – as drunks do – came to blows after too much alcohol. The novelist claimed to have floored the actor. The film critic Barry Norman perceived a telling parallel. Burton was an actor of genius, who had sold out to Hollywood. Maclean wanted to be a great writer, but knew he never could be. Both soothed their professional chagrin with drink.

  Maclean died in Switzerland. There was a memorial service in his home village in the Scottish Highlands. The local paper memorialised him, unkindly, as ‘The Daviot Drunk’.

  FN

  Alistair Stuart Maclean

  MRT

  HMS Ulysses

  Biog

  J. Webster, Alistair Maclean (1991)

  POSTSCRIPT

  229. Robert Shaw 1927–1978

  Quint’s tale of the USS Indianapolis [in the film Jaws]was conceived by playwright Howard Sackler, lengthened by screenwriter John Milius and rewritten by Robert Shaw following a disagreement between screenwriters Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Shaw presented his text, and Benchley and Gottlieb agreed that this was exactly what was needed.

  Imprisoned, like a fly in amber, in one of the films adapted from Maclean’s fiction, was a much more gifted novelist. Robert Shaw played ‘Major Keith Mallory’ (his last complete role) in Force 10 from Navarone (1978), a feeble sequel to the earlier and much superior Navarone actioner, in which Gregory Peck had played Mallory. It was Shaw’s fate to find himself immured in the inventions of lesser writers than himself. He is most famous for having invented, after some creative fisticuffs, Quint’s ‘Indianapolis’ monologue in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1975) – a creation which ranks with Orson Welles’s interpolated ‘cuckoo clock’ riff in Citizen Kane. Welles was Graham Greene’s equal. Peter Benchley was nowhere near as good a novelist as Robert Shaw.

  Shaw was born in Lancashire, the son of an alcoholic doctor who had married one of his nurses and later killed himself with an overdose of opium when his son was twelve. He passed on his drinking disease. Shaw taught for a while, after leaving school in Cornwall (whose regional accent is detectable, even under his assumed American accent) and before coming to study in London at RADA. At school he excelled at sport, and might – had his career gone differently – been a professional rugby player (as was David Storey, for a while). In his acting career he would gravitate towards physical roles. Like Richard Burton, he could not afford to waste his considerable acting talent on the stage, where he had made an early reputation as a Shakespearian actor. Film paid more. His most commendable screen role was as Aston in the 1963 adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Notably memorable is the character’s extended monologue about the abusive effect of electro-convulsive therapy on his brain. But Shaw’s name was made, and his career likewise, by his performance as the psychopathic SPECTRE assassin, Red Grant, in the James Bond film From Russia with Love, which also came out in 1963.

  Like Burton, Shaw enjoyed (if that’s the word) riotous sessions with fellow drunk and screenwriter, Alistair Maclean, on adaptations of that novelist’s work. He died on the set of a wholly undistinguished film, aged only fifty-one, leaving a clutch of distinguished novels. ‘I would rather’, he once said, ‘go down as having written one good novel than be acclaimed as a great actor.’ The best of his novels, The Hiding Place (1959) and The Man in the Glass Booth (1967), deal with imprisonment. In the first two, British airmen who have bailed out of their bomber during the Second World War are imprisoned by a German in his cellar, and deluded – for years after the Allies’ victory – that Germany has actually won the war. They make their escape into a world of confusion. The man in the glass booth is a Nazi war criminal (inspired by Adolf Eichmann), on trial in Jerusalem.

  Shaw died leaving three wives, ten children, five novels and debts of hundreds of thousands to the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – with whom he was always in hot water. His novels are now out of print and undeservedly unread, while Jaws replays, year in year out, on TV and in revival houses. Wetherspoon’s pub has been named after him in his birthplace of Westhoughton, Lancashire, although he always felt his home was Ireland, where he spent the last seven years of his life when not on set – in the Gaeltacht village of Tourmakeady, Co. Mayo. Ireland’s enlightened laws had allowed him to live there tax-free. A memorial was raised to him in the village in 2008.

  FN

  Robert Archibald Shaw

  MRT

  The Hiding Place

  Biog

  K. Carmean and G. Gaston, Robert Shaw: More Than a Life (1994)

  230. Kurt Vonnegut 1922–2007

  Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

  On the night of 13 February 1945, three months before the end of the Second World War, Kurt Vonnegut was a POW sheltering in an underground animal slaughterhouse during the devastating fire-bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse Five (Schlachthof Fünf) was the shelter from the slaughter. ‘We got through it’ Vonnegut wryly recalled, ‘because we were quartered in the stockyards where it was wide and open and there was a meat locker three stories beneath the surface, the only decent shelter in the city. So we went down into the meat locker, and when we came up again the city was gone and everybody was dead. We walked for miles before we saw anybody else: all organic things were consumed.’ Vonnegut and his fellow American POWs, exhumed at dawn from their underground coffin, were set to work ‘corpse mining’ – excavating blackened bodies for a second cremation on open piles. The live meat took care of the dead meat.

  Vonnegut survived the slaughter to write Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Thousands didn’t survive. In the novel, Billy Pilgrim, the unheroic hero, is a POW in the same shelter as Vonnegut during the devastating fire-bombing. He too survives – but he goes crazy. Vonnegut published many personal accounts of his Dresden experience – as well as that in Slaughterhouse-Five. The following is from an interview in 1974. ‘I was present in the greatest massacre in European history, which was the destruction of Dresden by fire-bombing … The American and British air forces together killed 135,000 people in two hours. This is a world’s record. It’s never been done faster, not in the Battle of Britain or Hiroshima. (In order to qualify as a massacre you have to kill real fast). But I was there, and there was no news about it in the American papers, it was so embarrassing.’ RAF estimates later downscaled the civilian casualties to a ‘mere’ 35,000. But Vonnegut’s point stands. Fiction, like history, has been generally silent about Dresden. Victors, as Hitler said, write history. They also forget the embarrassing bits. Vonnegut himself had almost insuperable personal difficulties writing his ‘Dresden novel’. He had to forge an entirely new ‘schizophrenic’ technique, weaving realism, SF schlock (little one-eyed green men from Tralfamadore, resembling toilet plungers), and slapstick social comedy into a startlingly innovative pattern.

  The thesis of Slaughterhouse-Five is T. S. Eliot’s – mankind cannot bear too much reality. Life is so horrible, that only fiction can deal with it – and, crucially, the more horrible the life experience, the more fantastic (unrealistic) the fiction. After Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno famously declared, poetry was impossible. One of the underlying contentions of Slaughterhouse-Five is that after Dresden, fiction (specifically ‘War and Peace’ fiction of the old Tolstoyan kind) is impossible. A way out of the impasse was science fiction. Billy Pilgrim, a time and intergalactic traveller (or, more likely, merely nuts) ends his post-Dresden pilgrimage incarcerated no longer by Nazi Germany but by al
iens from the planet Tralfamadore, some 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles from earth, whither he has been transported by flying saucer (widely believed in during the 1960s).

  Billy’s imprisonment on planet Tralfamadore is in a geodesic dome – a style of architecture much favoured by hippy communes in the 1960s – made tolerable by furniture from Sears, Roebuck (less favoured by hippies), and the even more luxuriously upholstered, but wholly brainless, starlet Montana Wildhack, who is also flying-saucered across the vast tracts of space as Billy’s ‘mate’ (she is also one of Hugh Hefner’s playmates). They will be earthling specimens in the Tralfamadorian national zoo, kindly treated and grateful for the dome, the furniture, and each other. ‘I was there,’ is a constant interruption in the text. In two places in the novel, Vonnegut actually gives himself a Prufrockian speaking part. Walter Scott was not present at Culloden. Tolstoy wasn’t at Borodino, Thackeray wasn’t at Waterloo, nor was Stendhal. Norman Mailer – though the myth persists – didn’t see a lot of action in the Pacific campaign. Interestingly, Vonnegut himself did not call Slaughterhouse-Five a ‘novel’ but, more awkwardly, ‘my Dresden book’. Billy Pilgrim is not Vonnegut, but a fellow POW called Joe Crone who did not survive the war. Crone was, like Billy, comically malcoordinated, a soldier doomed always to be the platoon klutz. He let himself starve to death before the firestorm and is ‘buried somewhere in Dresden, wearing a white paper suit’. Vonnegut resurrected him.

  Vonnegut did not, in the conventional sense, write Slaughterhouse-Five – it rose out of his subconscious like a slow bruise. Immediately after the war he found he could not remember the event: ‘There was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place … And I looked up several of my war buddies and they didn’t remember either.’ In his first, fuzzy, conception of his ‘Dresden book’, he imagined something like the popular war movies of the period: ‘I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra.’ Ironically, these two ‘dirty old men’, as Mary O’Hare calls them, in Chapter One of Slaughterhouse-Five, declined to serve their country in the Second World War, but made millions out of playing war heroes onscreen where the bombs don’t hurt.

  One problem for Vonnegut, both as a POW and an author, was his ethnicity. He was an American with a name more German than most of the enemy he was sworn to kill. Kurt Vonnegut Jr was born in Indianapolis, into a wealthy German-American family, settled in the New World for two generations. His father, with whom he had a fraught relationship, was a successful architect and painter. His mother, Edith Lieber Vonnegut, was heiress to a brewing family, highly cultivated, a published author, and a lifelong depressive. She would eventually kill herself on Mother’s Day, 1944, while her son was serving abroad. Others in the Vonnegut family, including Kurt, would make suicide attempts during the course of their lives.

  The Vonneguts, although they kept the family name, followed the ‘Americanisation’ routine in their ethnic community after the First World War. They studiously immunised their son from any German cultural influences. He might as well, Vonnegut ruefully said, have been brought up Tibetan. If Goethe was Greek to him, he was strongly influenced, growing up, by the stars of radio comedy (Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante). The more depressing the Great Depression of the 1930s, he observed, the funnier and zanier the jokes. At his father’s insistence, he enrolled in 1940 to do biochemistry (a ‘useful’ subject) at Cornell. In 1943 he enlisted in the US Army. As a serviceman Vonnegut never put himself forward for promotion on the persuasive grounds that all officers were ‘shits’. It was as a scout (i.e. in a dangerous forward position) with the 106th Infantry Division that Vonnegut was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, one of the more ignominious episodes in American military history. On his release and demobilisation, he married. At the same period he enrolled on the GI Bill in the University of Chicago’s MA programme in anthropology. He flunked. The examiners failed his thesis on ‘simple tales’. Some would flunk his fiction for the same reason.

  Work was fairly easy to come by during the post-war boom and Vonnegut got a job in the PR department of the vast multinational, General Electric. On the side he was writing his own stuff. His first short story was published in 1950. Other pieces for the ‘slicks’ (upmarket magazines) followed. Confident of his powers he left GE to write a satire on the company, Player Piano (1952). He was in business. Science fiction was in vogue and he did well with his first Tralfamadorian comic-epic, The Sirens of Titan (1959). Fame came with Cat’s Cradle (1963), another whimsical dystopia centred on a miraculous new chemical compound (‘ice nine’). It caught the fancy of the campus market. Other novels followed and his reputation grew. World fame, and critical respect, did not come until Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel which he brought into its final shape with the help of a Guggenheim grant to revisit Dresden (described in the novel’s non-fiction first section), a stint at the University of Iowa’s writers’ workshop, and acute personal problems with his family.

  Slaughterhouse-Five was a bestseller, as were the novels which followed. None, however, garnered great esteem with pundits. Vonnegut’s whimsy, when not fused with Kurtzian ‘horror’, was not regarded as truly serious. His first marriage was dissolved in 1979 and he remarried the photographer Jill Krementz, whose portraits perfectly catch Vonnegut’s sardonic charm. That charm, and his anti-war convictions, wittily purveyed, served him well on talk-shows and as a lecturer in his later years – particularly with campus audiences, who remained faithful to him long after the popularity of Cat’s Cradle among the larger reading public had waned. His last public words, after a college lecture, were: ‘Thank you for your attention, and I’m outta here.’

  FN

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

  MRT

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  Biog

  K. Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (2005)

  231. Austin M. Wright 1922–2003

  Absorbing, terrifying, beautiful and appalling. Ruth Rendell on Tony and Susan

  Question: What do the following have in common?

  1. Dorothy L. Sayers

  2. J. I. M. Stewart

  3. Austin M. Wright

  4. Trevanian

  5. Lionel Trilling

  6. David Lodge

  Answer: they are all university professors of literature who wrote novels ‘with their left hand’. ‘Hobbyists,’ the professionals might sneer. Ambidexters is the more friendly verdict. On the face of it, the conjunction ‘professor-novelist’ is unsurprising. Marinaded career-long in fiction, lecturing on it omnisciently for a living, who would not try their arm at what they were so good at pontificating about? Creative writing. But what is surprising, on reflection, is that so few professors have done it or, more precisely, done it and got their work published, and the majority of those who have done it (the above are exceptions) seem to have been second-raters or worse.

  In philosophy, a discipline which nestles alongside literature in university arts faculties, professors of philosophy (A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Wittgenstein) have been great philosophers. Professors of literature … the canon speaks for itself. For those of a cynical cast of mind, it bears out the Wildean quip that those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach: scholarly eunuchs in the harem of literature. Those university teachers who have gone into the real world of fiction have, in general, taken one of a few paths. That most favoured in the early twentieth century was donnish amateurism, and a daring descent from high to low literature, as a country clergyman might daringly visit a brothel. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels belong to this category as, more worthily, does J. I. M. Stewart’s (pen name ‘Michael Innes’) forty-odd crime novels – of which the most admired remains the first he published, Death at the President’s Lodging (1937). A fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford, for most of his long career Stewart was entrusted with the last volume of the Oxford History of English Literature, covering the modern period. Crime fiction does not get a look in. The right hand of scholarship wilfully does not
know what the left hand is doing.

  Lionel Trilling is an interesting case, and almost unique among professorial novelists. The first Jewish academic to get tenure at Columbia, a leading member of the leftist ‘New York Intellectuals’ who clustered around the Partisan Review, Trilling wrote one work of fiction, The Middle of the Journey (1947). Intelligence, believed Trilling, is a human being’s moral duty. The Middle of the Journey is an excessively intelligent rumination on the political hysteria which would climax with the outright madness of McCarthyism and the emasculation of American universities for a generation. The book is generally found dull, not helped by the self-aggrandisingly Dantean title.