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

by John Sutherland

  He marks out 1970 as a turning point. He had heard something about a new MA course at another new university, East Anglia. It was the first creative writing course in the country, founded by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. As McEwan recalls, ‘I phoned the university and amazingly got straight through to Malcolm Bradbury. He said, Oh, the fiction part has been dropped because nobody has applied. This was the first year of the program. And I said, Well, what if I apply? He said, Come up and talk to us.’ It was an ideal nursery for the young would-be writer. His first instinct, under Bradbury’s cosmopolitan influence, was to move away from the pervasive ‘greyness’ of English fiction towards what was being done in America. In this frame of mind he composed ultra-gothic short stories which, while he was still a student, were picked up by little magazines in the US and the UK. Connection with Ian Hamilton’s New Review brought him into social contact with other young writers in Hamilton’s merry Soho stable: Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Clive James. He saw himself as Aesop’s country mouse come up to town. He was still in his early twenties and very much on his way.

  After UEA, McEwan dropped out to do the hippy thing, wandering as far afield as Afghanistan. He was not, one suspects, smoking Woodbines (his early characters, such as the couple in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), enjoy a relaxing joint after the day’s business. Thirty years later, in Saturday (2005), it’s fine wine for the McEwan hero – precisely vintage-checked). He had inherited his father’s work ethic and after six month’s hippydom he dropped back into a full-time career in writing. Jonathan Cape, under Tom Maschler, the dominant patron of up-and-coming novelists, took on his first two collections of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978). Abused children feature centrally in these collections. The opening story of the first volume, ‘Homemade’, for example, climaxes on an elder sibling complacently raping his young sister. It ends:

  ‘You’ve wet inside me,’ and she began to cry. Hardly noticing, I got up and started to get dressed. This may have been one of the most desolate couplings known to copulating mankind, involving lies, deceit, humiliation, incest, my partner falling asleep, my gnat’s orgasm and the sobbing which now filled the bedroom, but I was pleased with it.

  McEwan is at pains (and one believes him) to record that his own childhood, though at times straitened, was straight. His fiction signally wasn’t. These early stories revel in rape, paedophilia, castration, bestiality and perversion – the sheets were very twisted. But all the reviewers lined up to agree, that whatever their disgust, a major new talent had arrived. He was, in literary terms, a made man. He followed up with two short novels (he habitually writes shorter than his peers), The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers. The first is routinely compared to Lord of the Flies. Four suddenly orphaned children decide to live in a juvenile commune, without informing the adult world of their parents’ death. Bad things ensue (McEwan, following his own 1960s brush with it, has little time for the hippy life: it comes under his satirical lash again in Enduring Love). The Comfort of Strangers, set in an unnamed Venice (to avoid evocation of Thomas Mann, one suspects) is a study in decadent sexual sadism. An initially rather boring, and terminally bored, English tourist couple discover, to their alarm, the masochist within themselves.

  Looking back, McEwan sees a break at the mid-1980s point in his career, away from ‘formally simple and linear short fiction, claustrophobic, desocialised, sexually strange, dark’. There followed a string of substantial and more ambitious works. The Child in Time (1987) opens with one of McEwan’s ‘powerful moments’. A man is walking through rush-hour London, by Millbank. He sees everything around him with crystal clarity – not because he is an artist but because he is looking for his (now) five-year-old daughter, abducted from a supermarket, two years previously. The Innocent (1990) contains another hammeringly powerful set-piece, the description of the dismemberment of the corpse of the hero’s lover’s earlier lover for packing up in a suitcase and clandestine disposal. Black Dogs (1992) offers elegant play with time schemes – the hounds of the title, as the last section of the narrative reveals – are emblematic of a Nazi evil that will never die. Enduring Love (1997) opens with a delicately poised mind-game: a helium balloon flies off its anchorage in the Chilterns; a child is marooned in its basket. A miscellaneous crew of men, who happen to be near by, grab the tie ropes. But their attempt to help sets up an ethical dilemma. If they hang on, they discover, they will all be pulled away to their death or injury. But who will break ranks and let go first, who will hold on, whatever the consequence? What binds us together in society, the novel implies, is love. But love, like everything else, has its breaking strain. It endures only so long.

  The fine ‘set-pieces’ highlight one of the cruxes of McEwan’s fictional method. Is his long fiction merely the setting for inset short stories? Any such suspicion was put to rest by Amsterdam, the novel which won the 1998 Booker Prize. The plot centres on a suicide compact between two friends – one of whose mutual friends has died prematurely and degradingly. They agree to take the other to the Dutch city, where euthanasia is legal, should the trip prove necessary. They ‘fall out and lure each other to Amsterdam simultaneously for mutual murder’, as McEwan summarises the plot. He describes the novel as ‘comedy’. In fact, Amsterdam takes in large questions – about art (should one sacrifice everything for it) and about modern journalism (one of the pact-makers is the editor of a newspaper very like the Guardian). The shortest novel ever to win Britain’s premier fiction prize, Amsterdam is constructed with a watchmaker’s art.

  His reputation went ‘nova’ – another way of saying he became very big in America – with Atonement (2001). The plot pivots on a wickedly perceptive child who grows up and becomes a prize-winning novelist – this McEwan sees the destiny of James’s Maisie had the other novelist followed it through. McEwan’s own father was recently dead and Atonement reconstructs the Dunkirk evacuation in which David McEwan was swept up. As Ian recalls:

  Many ex-servicemen have found it difficult or impossible to talk about their experiences of war. My father never had any such problems. He never tired of telling me, a bored adolescent, and later, an attentive middle-aged son, how his legs were shot up by a machine gun mounted on a German tank; how he teamed up with a fellow who had been wounded in both arms, and how between them they had managed the controls of a motorbike to drive to the beaches of Dunkirk and eventual evacuation.

  The story was profoundly uninteresting to the young McEwan, but fascinating as he himself entered late middle age.

  Age is relevant elsewhere. One of the questions frequently posed by those who have followed his fiction is ‘Do you prefer the early or the late?’ His later work has evolved in various ways. It has become less jaggedly disturbing, whilst dealing with the same central issues. In On Chesil Beach (2007), the lives of a honeymooning couple are deformed by their 1960s unfamiliarity with the mechanics of sex. ‘Do not begin your marriage with a rape,’ warned Balzac. Don’t begin it with a sperm-showering fumble, advises McEwan. Along with the softening of edge is an enlargement of scope: in Saturday (2005) he takes on the Iraq War; in Solar (2010), global warming.

  Reviewing McEwan’s life so far, a number of distinctive features emerge. One is the fluidity with which his fiction slips into celluloid. His hit rate, in big-screen adaptation, is rivalled only by Stephen King’s. In a 1999 lawsuit brought by his former wife, an estimate of annual earnings of £500,000 were alleged. If true (it seems, on the face of it, untrue), much of that income must have come from film rights. He has turned his own hand to screenplays – notably, with Richard Eyre and The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985), a scathingly satirical ‘Condition of England’ film.

  Another salient feature in his career is the way in which, despite what looks like a constitutional desire for privacy, headlines seem to seek him out. In the late 1990s, the press made much of a dispute between him and his divorced wife, Penny Allen (the dedicatee of his early work)
over the custody of their now teenage children. The couple had married in 1982 and separated in1995. She had carried their children off to France, in defiance of an English court order. The row gave rise to surreal ruses, which would have seemed far-fetched in a novel (Ms Allen’s new partner renaming himself, for example, ‘Ian Russell McEwan’). McEwan maintained silence, other than to express grateful acknowledgement that his legal rights were finally observed. It must, one assumes, have been distraction verging, at its worst, on downright torment. In 1997 he married again, to Annalena McAfee, then literary editor of the Guardian, and the couple had moved from Oxford to Fitzrovia, North Soho, the closely charted setting of Saturday. Location has always been worth noting in McEwan’s fiction. One of his sons studying science at nearby UCL seems, plausibly, to have revived the novelist’s own fascination with the discipline in his later career – making him a favourite guest lecturer at such front-line institutions as MIT and Caltech.

  In 2007 McEwan was less painfully in the headlines when the existence of a hitherto unknown brother was revealed. This elder son of his mother, then Rose Wort, had been ‘given away as an illegitimate child at a railway station in 1942’. She had become adulterously pregnant by another soldier (Ian’s father David, it transpired) while her first husband was serving abroad. He was subsequently killed in the Normandy landings, and Rose married Ian’s father, David, in 1947. It was wartime and such things happened. The child was adopted by a childless couple and Ian was kept in the dark for sixty years, as was his brother. It all came to light as Rose McEwan was dying of vascular dementia. The two brothers – one a bricklayer, the other Britain’s most applauded novelist – hit it off, McEwan records. Another headline squall was whipped up in 2006 when Julia Langdon, in the Daily Mail, pointed out resemblances between passages in Atonement and Lucilla Andrews’s memoir, No Time For Romance (a work cited by McEwan in his acknowledgements). He felt obliged to take over the front page of the Guardian to proclaim ‘I am not a Plagiarist’, which served to make it gossip for the whole world. A band of distinguished fellow novelists, including the notoriously secretive Thomas Pynchon, sprang to his defence. Not that he is incapable of defending himself.

  What is interesting are the reverberations from these public squalls, which over-ingenuity can pick up in the fiction. Abduction in The Child in Time, for example, at a period when McEwan was exercised about the custody of his children. Atonement’s focus on Dunkirk, wartime love affairs, and the vascular dementia which finally kills Briony can be connected with the life. Intellectual theft is a main plank in Solar’s narrative and reviewers pounced on the ‘alleged plagiarism’ brouhaha of a few years earlier. One should not push such things too far, or any distance at all, but keyholes onto the lives of novelists are, sometimes, irresistible, however one hates oneself for peeking through them.

  FN

  Ian Russell McEwan

  MRT

  Enduring Love

  Biog

  www.theparisreview.org/interviews/393/the-art-of-fiction-no-173-ianmcewan

  291. Martin Amis 1949–; and Richard Hughes 1900–1976

  Our only way of experiencing the identity of others. Richard Hughes on fiction Osric. Martin Amis’s nickname for himself

  Even as he closed in on his bus-pass years – a date British newspapers gleefully commemorated – Martin Amis (‘young Marty’, in laddish journo-speak) was lumbered, like some wartime evacuee, with a worn-out French label for which, hélas, there is no sufficiently classy English equivalent: enfant terrible (‘Bad Boy’, as popularised by the German band Cascada, has a very different lexical tang). Precocious (never infantile) is the appropriate term. Everything came early: brilliant first at Oxford; assistant literary editor at the Times Literary Supplement at twenty-three; acclaimed first novel at twenty-four; the Somerset Maugham Prize, designated for the young novelist, was his by right at twenty-five. (The Booker, by contrast, has always been beyond his reach: probably he will be too young if he lives to a hundred.)

  The New Statesman, where he was assistant literary editor, aged twenty-six, ran a competition, inviting readers to come up with something to rival in owlishness the recently published Jane Austen and the French Revolution (1979). ‘Mein Kampf, by Martin Amis’ won, sardonically. Amis’s first volume of autobiography came out in 2000. It was hard not to recall B. S. Johnson’s ironic: ‘Aren’t you Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?’ At the launch party for Experience, Amis’s editor predicted the book would still be read in 200 years’ time. He may be right: it’s very good. But anyone reading Experience would be justified in assuming that the most important fact in Martin Amis’s life is Kingsley Amis. Picking up this cue, the first biography of Martin, in 2003 (again rather premature an event) is entitled: Father and Son.

  There is, however, another novelist who briefly crosses the young meteor’s path in Experience – unmeteorically, it must be said. In 1963, as Martin’s parents’ marriage was breaking up – with traumatic impact, it seems clear, on their fourteen-year-old son – his mother had a nervous breakdown. During this difficult time, Elizabeth Jane Howard (with whom Kingsley was now living), intending kindness, introduced Martin to Alexander Mackendrick, a film director, with titles such as The Ladykillers and Whisky Galore to his credit. His current project was not an Ealing comedy, but a film version of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1965). Hughes’s novel had enjoyed a huge success on its publication in 1929 and interest in its adaptation had been reignited by the current success enjoyed by the 1963 film of Lord of the Flies, directed by Peter Brook. Both novels are about the monstrosity of children. They were routinely compared by reviewers with long memories when Golding’s novel was published in 1959.

  Hughes’s narrative is set in the Victorian era. A violent storm, graphically described, induces a colonial settler, Bas-Thornton, to send his children, three girls and two boys, off to safety in England. En route, their vessel is taken by pirates and they find themselves stowaways. The eerily precocious Emily wins over the pirate captain – seduction of a kind is involved. The children are the ultimate pirates. It is the quality of the writing, Hughes’s supporters argue, which raises his novel notches above Golding’s – that and the strangely powerful detail (the amputation in the early pages of a monkey’s cancerous tail, for example). Above all, Hughes’s revisionary idea of childhood is more powerful. Young humans are, above all, strange. This is how Hughes describes the youngest of the children, Laura:

  Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term ‘human’ a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human – they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.

  Not easy to graft this into a movie. None the less Mackendrick would try, and invited Martin to play the Bas-Thornton son, John. As Amis recalls, ‘a few weeks later I was taking my mother – first-class BOAC – on a highly paid as well as complimentary two-month holiday in the West Indies.’ It may, one suspects, have been set up by the well-disposed Howard as therapy.

  On location, the newly created young star ‘played chess with my co-star, the consistently avuncular Anthony Quinn’ (the film’s Long John Silver). Amis was later to describe film-making as waiting around until you do the same thing over and over again and, luxurious as the experience was, he did not like it. ‘My acting duties were light,’ he recalls, ‘because I died just over halfway through: blood-thirstily watching a cockfight in the square below, I fell from a window of [a] bordello.’ The scene is different in the novel. But in both versions, the sudden death of John Thornton jolts. One does not expect it.

  Amis is dismissive of his ‘talentless’ performance. It was years before he ‘steeled’ himself to watch the film, which got mixed reviews. He thought his bum looked bi
g. Much later even than that, Amis read A High Wind in Jamaica and found it ‘a thrillingly good book … more continuously sinuous and inward (and enjoyable) than Golding’. Hughes, he recalls, visited the set, ‘Otiosely tall … he was pleased, impressed, tickled … I keep meaning to read more of him but something prevents me.’ I fancy that what prevents him is the fact that Hughes, in a sense, ‘killed’ him. Fictional victims rarely meet their authorial murderers, and it is fascinating when they do.

  The film and renewed interest in the source novel made Hughes an in-demand public speaker. He was invited to speak at the University Teachers of English conference at the University of Sussex (spit-new in those days) in 1965. It was the first such conference that I (spit-new lecturer myself) attended. Hughes gave the expected readings from his work in progress but then diverged to muse at inordinate length on the mysteries of inspiration, particularly the death of John Thornton in High Wind. Why, Hughes asked himself – somewhat to the bemusement of his audience – had he killed the boy? It was never in his plan for the novel. The need for this act of authorial homicide had come to him suddenly, from nowhere, and irresistibly. Although Martin Amis wasn’t (as I recall) mentioned, the boy actor, physically there in the flesh, had obviously ‘tickled’ his curiosity, and perhaps even his guilt. Why had he done it?

  In Hughes’s own background, one can find speculative answers. He was born one of three children of a civil servant. By the time Richard was two, the other elder children in the family had died, and his father died three years later. He recalled the event all his life: ‘I wanted to ask Father something [and] scampered up to his bedroom, burst open the door … Under the stiff folds of the sheet lay what looked like a not very skilful wax copy of him.’ The family was a hecatomb of sudden, untimely, death. Hughes was educated at Charterhouse and Oxford. He narrowly missed being called up for the war (another hecatomb). By the time he graduated, he had gained some reputation as a poet. The fourth-class degree mattered little to him. As the ODNB entry, written by a close friend, records: ‘While still at Oxford (‘that intense white incandescence of young minds’, he calls it in The Fox in the Attic), he began travelling as a way of countering the strain of creative writing, and, within a week of graduating, he was sailing a boat down the Danube and dabbling dangerously in Balkan politics; thus began a wanderlust and taste for adventure which he was to indulge for the rest of his active life.’