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

by John Sutherland

  Now a fixture in the pages of the New Yorker, the world was at Harold Brodkey’s feet. Many would have backed him against that other young literary meteor, John Updike, but the Brodkey feet never moved and thereafter his career was silence and rumour. Personal life may have been a factor. He and his first wife divorced in 1962 and he was for a while energetically bisexual. How long is unclear – he remarried in 1980. It was, over these years, put about that Brodkey had embarked on a gigantic work – possibly the greatest Great American Novel ever; a work which would make Moby Dick look like a newly spawned minnow. Six thousand pages were mentioned. He had, it was further intimated, been working on this novel since childhood: it would be called A Party of Animals, though the title gave nothing away. Meanwhile, Brodkey’s silence was portentous. He had, it was said, a cork-lined room in his New York apartment, specially constructed on the Proustian model of interior decoration, in which he was forging his masterwork – it demanded no lesser an environment.

  But did it exist? As his New York Times obituarist, Dinitia Smith, tartly records over the thirty-two years this GAN was in active composition, ‘Mr. Brodkey received advances for it from at least five publishers, refinancing it much as some people do their homes with mortgages.’ A provisional manuscript (some 5,000 pages, it was rumoured) had been lodged with one of Brodkey’s publishers, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ‘in a form so that if something happens to me, someone can deal with it’. Indeed, something did happen to him. Brodkey contracted HIV from homosexual encounters ‘largely in the 1960s’, he claimed in an announcement ‘To My Readers’ in 1993 in the New Yorker. If so, the symptoms were, like his publishing output, abnormally slow to emerge. They did not appear for thirty years (and that without modern retroviral drugs). Brodkey insisted he wasn’t gay but, like many writers, experimental by nature – and unluckier than most. His readers had endured a long, forty-year wait and an anti-climactic one. In 1991 there finally appeared the work which the world had been on tenterhooks to see. It was entitled The Runaway Soul and ran to a mere 853 printed pages. Brodkey announced that it was only the first instalment of A Party of Animals. But he was sixty-one and Methuselah couldn’t have finished the work at this rate. He brought out another novel, Profane Friendship, in 1994, a rewrite of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. He died in January 1996 of Aids – within the same 48 hours, curiously, as Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist with whom, to Brodkey’s irritation, he was perennially confused during life. Such things vexed him. He was famous for his feuds – accusing John Updike, for example, of depicting him as the Luciferian hero of The Witches of Eastwick.

  In his last two years Brodkey penned a poignant account of his end, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996). An ars moriendi (a venerable but obsolete genre), it traces his painful journey to the dying of the light. It reads more fluently, and with more narrative drive, than any fiction-proper he ever wrote. In it, he seems at times to mount a defence of the snail-like pace of his work. Published a few months after his death, he cannot quite be said to have to beaten the undertaker in the race to the finishing line, but he gallantly finished the course. His great novel didn’t – if, indeed, it existed. In This Wild Darkness, Brodkey recalls that when he was six or seven years old, ‘I asked everyone … I mean everyone, the children at school, the teachers, women in the caféteria, the parents of other children: How long do you want to live? I suppose the secret in the question was: What do you enjoy? Do you enjoy living? Would you try to go on living under any circumstances?’ The question remained hanging.

  FN

  Harold Brodkey (born Aaron Roy Weintraub)

  MRT

  This Wild Darkness

  Biog

  New York Times, obituary, 27 January 1996 (Dinitia Smith).

  251. Edna O’Brien 1930–

  Any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical. Edna O’Brien

  As O’Brien recalls, ‘the first book I ever bought – I’ve still got it – was called Introducing James Joyce, by T. S. Eliot’. She proceeded to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and ‘reading that book made me realize that I wanted literature for the rest of my life’. As Joyce famously pronounced, the Irish author can only survive by ‘silence, exile and cunning’ and a willingness to offend Ireland. O’Brien passes the last in grand style: the first half-dozen of her novels were banned in Ireland. She also sails through on Joyce’s exile criterion. She left Ireland in her early twenties and her career as an author – as flamboyantly Irish as her name – has been entirely passed in literary London. ‘Silent’ O’Brien has never been. Cunningly, however, she has kept hidden details of the many love affairs London literary gossip credits her with.

  She was born in a village in County Clare in the west of Ireland in an atmosphere she describes as ‘fervid, enclosed and catastrophic. The spiritual food consisted of the crucified Christ.’ Since her family owned a run-down farm, the food on the table was that of the healthy peasant. Peasant-like, too, was the culture of her home. The opening chapters of her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), give a grim picture of that home. Her father was drunken and when in drink physically violent to his womenfolk. The novel opens with the fourteen-year-old heroine, Caithleen, waking with the petrified thought ‘he had not come home’ – which meant he had spent the night ‘on the batter’ and will perpetrate some domestic battery (which he duly does). The O’Briens had once been well off and there remained ‘the relics of riches. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but another couple lived there; we had lots of fields, but they weren’t all stocked or tilled. I remember fields high with ragwort. I remember my father giving them to other people. There was a prodigality, which I regret to tell you I have inherited.’ Her father would be the ‘ogre figure’ in much of her early fiction. Her mother, to whom The Country Girls was dedicated (she did not appreciate the gesture and went through her copy carefully obliterating all the dirty bits), had been to America and almost escaped her Irish destiny. Her daughter would succeed.

  Aged eleven, Edna won a scholarship to a convent boarding school some forty miles away. The nuns, if her novel is to be believed, proved as tyrannical as her father – if more ingenious in their cruelties. ‘Sins got committed by the hour, sins of thought, word and deed and omission.’ In The Country Girls there are two girl-heroines who, as O’Brien records, reflect different aspects of her own personality. Caithleen (later Kate) is obedient, bookish, clever and shy. Baba, the daughter of a rather more decent veterinarian father, is rebellious, sluttish and dumb – but full of life. Caithleen’s initial vocation is to take the veil, but, encouraged by her wayward alter ego, she too rebels. At the climactic moment, ‘anger pervaded like a rash and then and there I knew that I would not be a nun rather I would be a film star and get a perm in my hair’. O’Brien left the Sisters of Mercy in 1946. Whether, like Caithleen (egged on by Baba), it was for writing blasphemous filth is not clear. If so, it would have been in character. The Country Girls, when it came out in 1960, offended the authorities on any number of scores but its most wounding charge against Irish society was that – while fanatically defending the traditional ‘family’ – it institionalised sexual abuse of the young. The fourteen-year-old Caithleen is targeted, continuously, by ‘happily’ married men. Ireland, we apprehend, is a cesspit of sexual hypocrisy and furtive male lust.

  Aged eighteen, O’Brien went off to Dublin to qualify as a chemist’s assistant. She worked in a shop by day, dispensing worm powders with gentian-stained hands. There was a glorious night at the ‘pictures’ once a week and evening classes. She pigged it in a bedsit, with few prospects other than the kind of marriage which had destroyed her mother. O’Brien has always been sensitive about the higher education she deserved and was denied. She takes malicious pleasure in relating the fact that a reviewer on the New Statesman was dismissed for calling her ‘illiterate’. As she recalls in her semi-autobiographical bo
ok, Mother Ireland (1976), she lost her virtue in a field on the outskirts of Dublin. It was the ‘ultimate crime’ but she no longer felt it as such. She was eventually ‘whisked away’ from her dreary existence in the chemist shop by the Czech-Irish writer, Ernest Gébler. The complex nature of their relationship is reflected in the second volume of her ‘girls trilogy’ and only fully disclosed after his death in 1996.

  Gébler earns a place in literary history as Ireland’s first international bestselling author. His novel, The Plymouth Adventure (1947), about the pioneer American puritan voyage, was made into a film starring Spencer Tracy in 1952. Gébler was a Marxist, an intellectual fifteen years O’Brien’s senior, and in the process of divorcing a rich American wife. On learning that his daughter was living in sin with a married man, Edna’s father burst into the couple’s house, as O’Brien recalled, decades later, in a radio interview: ‘There was a fight so he [Gébler] was hit or kicked. That evening he had wounds and was livid. My father came with a priest. It was like something out of the Middle Ages.’ The couple went on to marry after his divorce came through in 1954, ‘in a very grim little wedding in the sacristy of a Catholic church in Blanchardstown and the witnesses were two builders’. They moved to London a few years later. According to O’Brien’s memoir, Mother Ireland, ‘I left Ireland without a wrench’ – but, in every other than the geographical sense, the country would never leave her.

  Gébler eventually became yet another tyrant in her life. Where men were concerned, O’Brien concluded, she was incorrigibly ‘masochistic’. Gébler is portrayed as Eugene Gaillard (the initials are a giveaway) in the trilogy, thinly disguised as a middle-aged documentary film-maker with a previous wealthy American wife, ‘35 and going bald’. Gaillard is initially drawn to Caithleen by her innocence and docility. ‘You’re like Anna Karenina in that coat,’ he compliments her, and she duly goes off to read the novel. As time passes and two children arrive, he comes to see her innocence as something to despise. ‘He said I came from ignorance and peasants,’ a pained Caithleen says.

  It was now the turn of the decade. Through Gébler’s connections, O’Brien (Mrs Gébler, as she was) had picked up part-time work as a reader for the publisher Hutchinson. Impressed by her fluent reports, they offered her £25 for a catalogue-filler. She dashed off The Country Girls in a few weeks, followed by The Lonely Girl in 1962 and Girls in Their Married Bliss in 1964. It was a decade of rebellion – whether James Dean’s in southern California or Jimmy Porter’s in London – and her novels about two Irish moral dissidents were hugely successful. It certified their success when the first volume was publicly burned by the parish priest in her home village.

  Gébler was now in his mid-forties and had never been able to reproduce his early success. He found himself overshadowed by a woman whom he had always looked down on intellectually. In O’Brien’s trilogy, Kate’s infidelities, with distinguished lovers, did not help things along. The marriage was dissolved, angrily, in 1964. O’Brien suggests – something confirmed by her son Sasha’s later memoir – that Gébler could not live with his wife’s eclipsing him and convinced himself, in an extremity of paranoia, that he had actually written her bestselling trilogy. Those books forlornly express the view that ‘there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t kill any woman the minute she draws attention to his defects’. Kate and Baba, the trilogy concludes, will never find happiness. And O’Brien herself? In a late interview she confided that, ‘now I am 78 years of age … I haven’t met the man with whom my whole being, heart, soul and body would be miraculously entwined. I didn’t. My prayer has not been answered in that, nor is it likely to be.’

  The trilogy ends on a note of terminal embitterment. O’Brien has given numerous hints that she has sought help along the way in psychotherapy. She records treatment by the trendy 1960s guru R. D. Laing whom she met socially ‘with Sean Connery’ (the true O’Brien touch). Laing gave her LSD, which was ‘terrifying’ – whether it helped or not she does not say. In the last volume of the trilogy, Kate attacks a railway station weighing machine for obscure reasons and is, for a while, hospitalised. Forcible hospitalisation in a mental institution is the harrowing subject matter of O’Brien’s later novel, In the Forest (2002).

  In the decades after the initial trilogy, now a successful woman of letters, O’Brien wrote fluently – novels, drama and non-fiction. Anger blazes, inextinguishably if sometimes smoulderingly, in virtually every word she put on paper. She revisits the woes of marriage, and pays out sadistic husbands, in Time and Tide (1992). She revisits the sexual nastiness of Ireland in A Pagan Place (1970), in which the girl heroine is seduced by a priest (this, O’Brien says, is her favourite among her own novels). Her campaign against the Irish Church has been unremitting. In one of the most strident of her novels, Down by the River (1996), an incestuously raped fourteen-year-old becomes the focus of a right-to-abortion battle. If they could, one suspects, the priesthood of her native land would make a bonfire of all her works – with Edna O’Brien on top. Her two-minded feelings about the IRA are laid out in House of Splendid Isolation (1994). She commemorated her eightieth year in 2011 with a string of lively interviews, the promise of a memoir (one which, it was hoped, would name names – who was that prominent politician ‘Duncan’ in Girls in Their Married Bliss?) and a collection of short stories, Saints and Sinners (2011). There was by now no question into which category the author placed herself. Reviews were indulgent, while noting that changes in post-Good Friday Agreement Ireland had rather passed her by. Exile was in danger of becoming dislocation and a relapse into savage nostalgia.

  FN

  Edna O’Brien (later Gébler)

  MRT

  The Country Girls

  Biog

  E. O’Brien, Mother Ireland (1976)

  252. Donald Barthelme 1931–1989

  It’s entirely possible to fail to understand or actively misunderstand what an artist is doing.

  A novelist and short-story writer whose work is jaggedly absurd, minimalist, wittily allusive, aggressively trivial, consciously postmodern – and above all funny (not a word which automatically collocates with ‘postmodern’) – Barthelme was born in Philadelphia, the child of two high-achieving, first-generation students at Ivy League Pennsylvania University. If a fairy godmother had hovered over infant Donald’s cradle, she would doubtless have waved a Ph.D. scroll as well as the traditional wand. If any writer of the twentieth century is a child of the university ethos, it is Donald Barthelme. His whole life would intertwine with the academic world.

  When he was two, the family removed to the University of Texas at Houston where his father eventually became a professor of architecture. Donald Barthelme Sr’s tastes were advanced for the time and even more so for the place. He built himself a Mies van der Rohe house which his son recalls as seeming as exotic as a jewel in the head of a toad, in the featureless, windblown Texas plains. Another unimpressed son dismissed it as ‘swoopy’ and not at all homey.

  Donald enrolled himself as a student at Houston – it was convenient, but a mistake. His relationship with his namesake father would be troubled throughout their lives. They fell out over issues ranging from his parents’ (particularly his mother’s) Catholicism to the kind of literature Donald eventually wrote (under his father’s name, minus the easily overlooked ‘Jr/Sr’ suffix). He had decided, aged ten, that he would be a writer, although what kind was not immediately apparent. James Thurber and Edgar Allan Poe were early favourites – both pushing him towards brevity. In his teens he became a devotee of jazz, took up drums and had hopes of making it as a musician. Oddly, so did his friend, John Barth, in his youth. A doctoral thesis remains to be written on the coincidence (e.g. ‘The Percussive Syntagm – Postmodernist Arrythmias’.) Barthelme majored in journalism, and was a powerhouse on the student newspaper while at university. He married in 1952. He left university as the Korean War broke out and, like other young men of his age group, was conscripted for a cause whose point was never entirely cle
ar. It was all the less clear since peace broke out immediately after his infantry training. He persuaded the army ‘his weapon was a typewriter’ (they had intended assigning him to the bakery) and served his country for two years, editing an army newspaper.

  On his discharge in 1955, Barthelme returned to Houston where he read and pondered philosophy under the guidance of Maurice Natanson – a thinker (only six years older than Barthelme) who is credited with introducing awareness of existentialism and phenomenology to the US. It was a partnership. A witty philosopher, Natanson was particularly interested in the connection of his subject with creative writing and explores the theme in his best-known book, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (1997). The foundation of Barthelme’s later fiction would be Kierkegaard and Kafka rather than the post-romantic recklessness of the currently vogueish ‘Beats’. For a few years Barthelme bounced around his home town, searching for his groove. He worked on local newspapers, edited little magazines, reviewed jazz, and for a short period was the director of an art museum. He supplemented his income by short-contract university teaching and helped set up a creative writing programme at his alma mater. Over these years he was dependent financially on his father, which rankled with both Barthelmes.