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

by John Sutherland

  The other most-favoured mode is setting literary criticism and literature in a relationship analogous to that between theoretical and applied physics. ‘Applied fiction’ we might call it. The principal exponent of this genre in the UK is David Lodge, currently the country’s leading novelist of ideas – principally literary critical ideas. For him the novel is a laboratory, where those ideas can be tested.

  In America, more arresting because of its rather different mixture of modes, is the case of Austin M. Wright. According to the terse memorials on his death, aged eighty, Wright’s life was uneventful and modestly successful. Born in Yonkers, New York, he graduated from Harvard, with a degree in geology, in 1943. On graduation he was conscripted and then demobilised from the army in 1946. Taking advantage of the GI Bill, Wright switched his intellectual interests, taking an MA and Ph.D. in Literature at the University of Chicago. The departmental ‘line’ at the time was firmly that of the theorist Kenneth Burke, whose Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) was a dominant influence. Chicago, at that period, was fascinated by the mechanics of fiction.

  The newly graduated Dr Wright took up an appointment at the University of Cincinnati in 1962, marrying in the same year. He would have three daughters in the course of his fifty-two-year-long marriage. He remained in Ohio until his retirement in 1993, and beyond, rising through the ranks to an endowed chair. In his last ten years he enjoyed the status of an admired emeritus member of his department. Wright was the regular winner of awards for teaching excellence, but published only two monographs: The Formal Principle in the Novel (1982) – a work whose contents are as Burkean as its title – and Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors: A Critical Fiction (1990). Neither book created much stir in a subject currently intoxicated with French theory from the pens of younger trendier professors.

  Wright also wrote seven crime thrillers, all of which play with the idea of narration. One of Wright’s novels, Tony and Susan (1993) stands out: not merely for its thrill (testified to by every reader) but its cunning play with the aesthetics of fiction. The central character, Susan, has made a successful – if obscurely uneasy – second marriage. Her husband, Arnold, is a surgeon, away at a conference in New York. He too is on his second marriage. His first wife, Selena, went homicidally mad, and is incarcerated (Mrs Rochester-style) in an asylum. Susan receives a mysterious package out of the blue. It is a manuscript novel by her ex-husband (of fifteen years) Edward. His ambition to write was frustrated during the course of their marriage and he blamed Susan for having to do boring office work instead. The manuscript is entitled ‘Nocturnal Animals’. As the story opens, a professor of mathematics, Tony Hastings, is driving by night (a daring departure from his normal practice) from Ohio to his holiday home in Maine. Travelling with him are his wife and teenage daughter. Their car is hijacked; Laura and Helen are raped and killed by three low-life drifters. Tony runs away – is he driven by self-preservation (they would surely kill him as well) or cowardice? A year later, the criminals are apprehended – but look as if they are going to get off on a legal technicality. With the aid of a local lawman, who is dying of terminal cancer and doesn’t give a damn what he does, Tony embarks on a Death Wish-style vigilante campaign. He turns himself into an animal of the night.

  So far, so conventional. What makes Tony and Susan unconventional is that the chapters are interspersed with Susan’s chapter-by-chapter responses to the text she is reading. And as she reads, the gothic novel gradually permeates her cosy bourgeois home, and demons, long suppressed from her first marriage, are released. Obliquely, the novel is directed not to her, but at her. It works on her not as entertainment, but infection. Tony and Susan is a classic work of high-end crime fiction – and something more. It embodies decades of thinking about fiction. The novel was reprinted, seven years after Wright’s death, in 2010. Its republication was accompanied by a round of belated applause. Saul Bellow, no less, praised it as ‘marvellously written – the last thing you would expect in a story of blood and revenge. Beautiful.’

  It calls out to be considered alongside Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors, which was written at the same period. Novels within novels are common enough (there are notable examples in Don Quixote, Tom Jones and The Pickwick Papers). Common too are ‘framework narratives’ – such as those in The Turn of the Screw or Heart of Darkness, in which the narrator tells his story to a listening audience. But that audience does not interrupt, interject, interpose or interact. They are literary décor and gradually fade into background invisibility. The double foreground of Tony and Susan is an unusual experiment in fiction, based on a classroom experiment described in Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors. That work recounts the diverse running response of a group of students to their first reading of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, giving equal attention to what was read and how it was received as it was read. Like the novel on its first appearance, the monograph (published by an obscure university press) made little impact.

  For Wright’s purpose, crime fiction was the ideal raw material. He explains why in chapter seven of Tony and Susan:

  Susan Morrow is running out of book … Violence thrills her like brass in the symphony. Susan, who is well past forty, has never seen a killing. Last year in McDonald’s she saw a policeman with a gun jump a guy eating a sandwich. That’s the size of violence in her life … In a book there is no future. In its place is violence … Never forget what’s possible, it says.

  FN

  Austin McGiffert Wright

  MRT

  Tony and Susan

  Biog

  Cincinnati Enquirer obituary, 30 April 2003 (Rebecca Goodman)

  232. V. C. Andrews 1923–1986

  ‘V. C. Andrews’ has become so much more than just a name, it has become a legacy.

  V. C. Andrews official website

  Cleo Virginia Andrews (she later transposed her first two names) was born in 1923 in Virginia – a region she loved and where, after an unsettled life, she chose to be buried (hence the transposition of first names; she may also have died virginal – or, at least, wanted it to be so thought). As a teenager, Virginia fell down the stairs at her school, incurring a horrific spinal injury. She would be handicapped for life – needing crutches and a wheelchair in her later years. After her father, a tool and die maker, died in 1957, she lived with her widowed mother (formerly a telephone operator), helping support the household as a commercial artist. There were three children. Virginia was a prize-winning schoolgirl but college was beyond her. None the less, she made heroic attempts to educate herself beyond twelfth grade by correspondence courses and self-improvement.

  Allegedly, Andrews destroyed her first complete manuscript novel on the grounds that it was too ‘personal’. According to devotional websites, ‘in 1972, she completed her first published novel, Gods of Green Mountain, a science-fantasy story’. The work is currently available only as an e-text. At this point in her life, Andrews was in her fiftieth year and almost wholly disabled. But her writing hand wasn’t. Between 1972 and 1979, she completed nine novels (‘confession stories’, she piquantly called them), and twenty short stories, of which only one would ever see the light of publication – ‘I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night.’ Or was it in fact published? It has never been located and is hunted by fans as the Andrews Eldorado. The third most-asked question on www.completevca.com/faq.shtml is ‘Where can I find a copy of “I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night”?’ Where indeed.

  Incest would be a principal theme in her subsequent fiction – or, as Andrews herself quaintly put it, ‘unspeakable things my mother didn’t want me to write about’. Unspeakable, perhaps, but not unwritable – or, finally, unpublishable. Andrews at last broke into print with a paperback original, Flowers in the Attic, published in 1979 by Pocket Books. She was now fifty-six years old. Originally entitled ‘The Obsessed’, the manuscript was hugely overlong and had to be hacked into shape by the publishers. The ‘uncut’ version awaits publication.
Flowers in the Attic, which attracted a measly advance of $7,500, tells the story of the four attic-incarcerated and sexually adventurous Dollanganger children. The novel (‘a fictionalised version of a true story’, the author tantalisingly calls it) derives, clearly enough, from Jane Eyre – both the Red Room (in which young Jane is incarcerated) and the madwoman in the attic hover over the narrative. Anne Frank is also there somewhere – and, for more recent readers, Josef Fritzl. A sad brew.

  In her ‘pitch letter’ in January 1978 to the agent who would eventually take her on, Andrews summarised the frame of her novel:

  Plot: A young wife is suddenly widowed. Left with four children. She is totally unskilled for the labor market, and deeply in debt. Her home and all she has is repossessed. However … she has one solace. She is the sole heir to a fortune if she can deceive her dying father, and never let him know she is the mother of four children whom he would despise. Four children are imprisoned in an upstairs room of a huge mansion. Their playground is the attic.

  Their ‘play’ becomes intense as they are ‘tested’ by adolescent hormone storms.

  Andrews is credited with founding a distinct new line of gothic fiction – the ‘children in jeopardy’ genre. The term was taken over by the social service industries in the US and Britain and evolved, after a decade or two, into ‘misery memoirs’ of the Child Called ‘It’ and Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed kind. Harry Potter, as an abused waif in his cupboard under the stairs at Privet Drive, began his fictional life as a child in jeopardy – a Flower in the Closet. Flowers in the Attic went on to be a bestseller: the first of a whole string of sagas revolving around clusters of, typically, children in jeopardy. V. C. Andrews had begun late as a bestselling author and finished sadly early. Seven years after Flowers in the Attic, aged sixty-two, she died of breast cancer – a year before the release of the film of her novel in which she had a non-speaking cameo; she had always longed to be an actress. But her career as a novelist did not die with her. Works kept on pulsing out after her death under the auspices of the estate. An unceasing flow of echt Andrews was promised – and there could never be enough of it for her fans. Allegedly, Andrews had left some sixty scenarios at the time of her death. The family announced it was working ‘closely with a carefully selected writer’ to midwife the latent Andrews oeuvre into print. And they would, of course, be her novels – as much so as Flowers.

  The identity of the ‘carefully selected writer’ was kept strenuously secret, so as not to contaminate the Andrews brand with another name. Many of the author’s devoted readers, of course, had not apprehended she wasn’t alive and writing the ‘Andrews’ novels which continued to pour out with her name only on the cover. By 2007, the count had reached something over seventy titles – two thirds of which have come out under the trademarked V. C. Andrews brand. The ghost in the Andrews machine was, after some years, discovered to be Andrew Neiderman: his name does not appear on the copyright pages. To this day the most asked question on the ‘Complete V. C. Andrews website’ is ‘Where can I write to V. C. Andrews?’

  FN

  Virginia Cleo Andrews (born Cleo Virginia Andrews)

  MRT

  Flowers in the Attic

  Biog

  E. D. Huntley, V. C. Andrews: A Critical Companion (1996)

  233. Norman Mailer 1923–2007

  Too much. Times Literary Supplement, 20 May 1949, in a dismissively brief notice of The Naked and the Dead

  Adultery figures from time to time in the fiction of David Lodge. When asked whether he is thinking of himself, Lodge replies that he is a war reporter, not a warrior. It’s a good answer – and very believable that those on the sidelines, with ‘Press’ on their flak jackets, see things more clearly than those blasting away with their firearms. War is proverbially foggy at the frontline.

  Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) was one of the last books George Orwell reviewed before dying, while writing his own, posthumous, bestseller, Nineteen Eighty-four. ‘You will live with these men,’ he wrote, of the fourteen-strong Intelligence & Reconnaissance platoon who supply the dramatis personae to Mailer’s novel. Orwell’s remark was splashed on the cover of the execrable, double columned, 6s, English paperback which was passed, hand to hand, among me and my school-friends in 1949. Sex, rather than the Second World War (in the 1940s we knew all about that) was what made it a book to devour out of sight of one’s custodians. Particularly relished were passages such as the following, in a flashback to pre-war carnalities by the redneck ‘Woodrow’ Wilson:

  It is intensely hot in the cabin and he strains against her. Ah’m gonna tell ya somethin’, they was a little old whore Ah had back a while ago that Ah took twelve times in a night, and the way Ah’m fixin’ now, what with the honey in mah insides, Ah’m gonna beat that with you.

  Twelve times!

  Orwell’s implication, assumed by the mass of early readers, was that The Naked and the Dead was a first-hand account: that Mailer, described, simply, by his American publisher in advertisements as a ‘young rifleman’, had been ‘there’. The inference was both true and false and it raises some definitive issues about fiction, life and war – and about the author. Norman Mailer (Nachem Malek) was brought up in Brooklyn – the safest place in the world for a Jew to be between the wars, it was said. His father, Barney, was an immigrant from South Africa, recalled as charming but feckless (with a ‘cockney accent’ and an Irish nickname, oddly). Norman’s life was dominated by his adoring mother (the co-dedicatee of The Naked and the Dead, tellingly), Fanny. Her only son was, as she liked to say, her ‘king’ and, when anglicising it, she gave him the discordant middle name, ‘Kingsley’. A tigerish woman, Fanny made enough from a one-truck oil delivery business to push her beloved son through high school, where he excelled, and into Harvard in 1939, aged a precocious sixteen. To please his mother, Mailer enrolled to study aeronautical engineering, but he soon became infatuated with literature. The influences on Mailer at this formative period were Hemingway and Dos Passos.

  Physically, Mailer was not warrior build. He was short (every one of his many wives would be taller than him, some toweringly so), underweight and myopic. None the less he had great presence and an ability, noted by all whose paths crossed with his, to melt into whatever society he found himself: he could be Irish, Southern, Brahmin-WASP – everything, he himself wryly noted, except ‘a nice little Jewish boy from Brooklyn’. Mailer graduated from Harvard in June 1943 with a degree he would never use and, now twenty-one years old, impatiently awaited his draft letter. As one college friend recalled, ‘Rather than thinking about the horror of war or the fact that he might get killed, he looked at it as an experience which would feed the novel he wanted to write afterward.’ He had for some time been writing another massive novel – entitled, shamelessly, Transit to Narcissus – which was turned down by every publisher shown it. Too narcissistic.

  Before being conscripted, he married his first of his many wives, Bea Silverman (the future co-dedicatee of The Naked and the Dead with the other Mrs Mailer). The marriage was kept secret from his mother, who, when she found out, vainly attempted to annul it. She was not disposed to share her ‘king’. A few weeks later Mailer had been drafted and was on his way to Fort Bragg. He elected not to use his Harvard background to get into officer school. According to Bea, it was ‘because he wanted to see combat’. After basic training he was posted to the 112th Armoured Cavalry Regiment, heading for the invasion of the Philippines. Combat didn’t happen. Mailer was initially shuffled, to his chagrin, among various desk jobs – important to the war effort but not to him. He had brought with him a multi-volume set of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West for cheerless reading in his bunk. It was mildewing in the tropical climate. After incessant pestering, he was finally transferred to frontline duty as a rifleman (lowest rank) in an I&R platoon.

  Unlike the men in The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s platoon saw virtually no action. Probably a good thing. As one of his comrades recalled, ‘H
e was a brave soldier but not a good one. He couldn’t see worth a damn. Near sighted … he couldn’t hit anything with a rifle. It’s a miracle Mailer lived through the war.’ His wife Bea put it even more laconically: ‘He took a few potshots, but I don’t remember worrying every day that Norman would get killed. It wasn’t that kind of fighting anymore.’ What did happen – virtually every day – were long letters home from which would come the kernel of The Naked and the Dead. And Rifleman Mailer certainly picked up – at second-hand – what it was like to hear Jap bullets humming past your ears ‘like a bee’ as you strained to ‘keep a tight ass-hole’.

  For Mailer, as for Dos Passos before him, war was Sisyphean pointlessness. The central episode in The Naked and the Dead is the platoon’s gruelling ascent of Mount Anaka. There is no military purpose: it merely expresses the fact that Sergeant Croft, the incarnation of Nietszchean will to power, wants the peak under his heel. The real foe is not Nippon, but the US Army, and the licence it gives to men like Croft, and the even more ruthless General Cummings, who relishes the prospect of the total militarisation of America. As in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, war is too useful to the men it empowers ever to have an end. As a soldier says in Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, ‘I guess I wouldn’t mind the war if it wasn’t for the army.’

  In mid-August 1945, the Japanese capitulated. Mailer stayed on for a while, as a sergeant-cook in Japan. Evidence is mixed as to how good he was in the kitchen. According to one jaundiced commentator he couldn’t tell white from yellow in a hen’s egg. On his return to civilian life in May 1946, Mailer had leisure, thanks to the GI Bill, to work full-time on The Naked and the Dead. He borrowed Dos Passos’s ‘objective’ style for its word-sparing narration. The novel opens with the men preparing for their landing next morning on the beach of a (fictional) Philippine island, knowing that in twenty-four hours many of their number will die. But who? Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead. A bunch of the I&R men are killing the night hours playing poker, wondering about the vagaries of luck (the winner of the poker pot will, as it happens, die horribly).