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

by John Sutherland

  The ‘strain’ of creative writing proved paralysing, despite all the travelling. After A High Wind in Jamaica (begun on the shores of the Adriatic, finished in Connecticut, on the blustery Atlantic), he found the fame intolerable and exiled himself to Morocco (‘his favourite country after Wales’), where ‘he bought a house in the Kasbah of old Tangier for two donkey-loads of silver’. He returned to Britain in 1932 and married a wealthy wife. They had five children. The family lived the life of country gentry in rural Wales. Although a novelist by vocation, Hughes would produce no second novel until In Hazard (1938), a tale of storm in the Caribbean, prophetic of war. During the stormy years of the war, Hughes worked in a civilian capacity in the Admiralty. In the post-war years he jobbed around, never desperate for money, but always glad to have it – reviewing, lecturing, and doing screenplays for Ealing Studios (hence the connection with Mackendrick).

  Meanwhile he embarked on his life’s work, a multi-volume sequence called The Human Predicament, a conspectus of the history and origins of the Second World War from the Nazi takeover in 1923 to VE day. Two volumes saw the light of print before his death in 1976: The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973). The Fox in the Attic has a forlorn Foreword indicating that this is the first particle of a work ‘conceived as a long historical novel of my own times culminating in the Second World War’. The reader, Hughes says, may wonder why ‘a novel designed as a continuous whole rather than as trilogy or quarter should appear volume by volume’. The plain truth, he confesses, ‘is I am such a slow writer that I have been urged not to wait’.

  The advice was sound. The trilogy, after its somewhat less good second part, delivered to the world twelve years later, would never reach completion. Whoever urged Hughes to publish The Fox in the Attic prematurely deserves the thanks of posterity. It ranks as arguably one of the finest works of the post-war period – if one of the least conventional. It can itself be considered as tripartite. The narrative opens with a passage of breathtaking beauty:

  Only the steady creaking of a flight of swans disturbed the silence, labouring low overhead with outstretched necks towards the sea.

  It was a warm, wet, windless afternoon with a soft feathery feeling in the air: rain, yet so fine it could scarcely fall but rather floated. It clung to everything it touched; the rushes in the deep choked ditches of the sea-marsh were bowed down with it, the small black cattle looked cobwebbed with it, their horns were jewelled with it.

  Two men appear in this damp Welsh landscape – back from shooting birds in the coastal marshes. One is carrying something over his shoulders. It is not the usual brace of duck, but a dead child.

  The first section of Hughes’s novel is, despite the little corpse, country-house comedy – P. G. Wodehouse crossed with Cold Comfort Farm. The hero Augustine just escapes the First World War: he was about to be called to the Front when the Amnesty came. His cousin Henry was killed in the trenches. Augustine becomes heir to the family’s decaying mansion: it is 1922. His world – what is left of it – is similarly decayed. He flagrantly neglects the traditions and duties of his class and is falsely suspected at the inquest of killing the dead girl. In fact he removed the body merely to protect it from water rats. He decides to go to Germany, where he has distant relatives and where he hopes to find signs of life. The middle section of The Fox in the Attic is a prose essay on the death of liberal England and the scar of the war, which will never heal. It is a lump of historical discourse framed in fiction. The third section is set in Munich, in the days surrounding the failed 1923 Nazi Putsch. The young Adolf Hitler flares, darkly, across the narrative, ‘an ego without a penumbra’. Augustine falls in love with a cousin, Mitzi, who is going blind and has symbolic visions of imminent catastrophe. If England’s inter-war plight is symbolised in the dead child, Germany’s is in the stinking fox in the castle attic. Mitzi joins a convent while Augustine drifts on, aimlessly, as history prepares for something worse even than the First World War.

  There are those who consider Hughes’s fiction as among the best that never quite got round to happening; others who think him, apart from the best two novels, negligible. There is occasional curiosity as to the origin of his monumental writing block. D. J. Taylor wonders if Hughes’s interest in ‘little girls’ merits closer attention than it has received. We shall never know. If Amis is the hare on steroids, Hughes is the tortoise with arthritis. With the difference that the tortoise, in this instance, lost the race.

  FN

  Martin Louis Amis; Richard Arthur Warren Hughes

  MRT

  London Fields; A High Wind in Jamaica

  Biog

  G. Keulks, Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis and the British Novel since 1950 (2003); R. P. Graves: Richard Hughes: A Biography (1994)

  292. Patricia Cornwell 1956–

  It’s important for me to live in the world I want to write about.

  Cornwell claims to be descended from Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Calculator-bustingly large sales figures would seem to be one of the things the two have in common. ‘Patsy’ Daniels was born the daughter of a Miami lawyer. Her parents divorced when she was five. ‘It killed me,’ she recalls. A couple of years later, what was left of the family moved to North Carolina. A couple of years after that, broke and broken down, her mother deposited Patsy and her two brothers with neighbours – the evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth, who passed them on to be fostered by missionary friends (whom the young Patsy loathed – she kills her foster-mother, she says, in every novel).

  Aged eighteen, Patsy was treated for anorexia in the hospital where her mother had earlier been a mental patient (‘like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, the novelist jauntily recalls). She made it to college, got a degree in English and capped that achievement by bagging her professor, Charles Cornwell, as her husband. In 1979, the new Mrs Cornwell got a job as a reporter on the Charlotte Observer and was contracted as Ruth Bell Graham’s authorised biographer. The book came out in 1983. When she got a post at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, her husband moved with her, giving up his academic career to take up a position in the church. The marriage was a ‘disaster’ from the start and collapsed soon after.

  Patricia, meanwhile, had become fascinated by her paper’s ‘crime beat’ – particularly the ‘bone farm’ – and had formed a friendship with the Chief Medical Examiner for Virginia, Dr Marcella Fierro (the original of Kay Scarpetta). Fierro is the dedicatee of Cornwell’s fourth book, Cruel and Unusual (1993), with the coy comment ‘You taught Scarpetta well.’ What Cornwell apprehended, very early in the game, was that new forensic techniques, particularly DNA analysis, gave the detective an entirely new instrument – a magnifying glass more revealing than anything Sherlock wielded. More importantly, the forensic lab – unlike the mean streets – was an arena where women were entirely equal with male police officers.

  Cornwell had the unpublished author’s traditional difficulty getting her first Scarpetta novel accepted. After being turned down by seven publishers, Postmortem was finally taken by Scribner’s, who gave her a tentative $6,000 advance, but only after the author had taken the advice to change the sex of the narrator-hero(ine) from ‘Joe Constable’. Largely written in the mid-1980s, it was eventually published in 1991.

  Scarpetta, a tough-talking, gun-toting, chain-smoking (up to Cruel and Unusual), whisky-drinking, detective, is clearly cut from the same genre cloth as Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, introduced in Indemnity Only (1982); and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, introduced in A is for Alibi (1982). Postmortem won five major genre prizes and golden opinions from connoisseurs of crime fiction. It made the New York Times bestseller list. By the end of the 1990s, with a novel a year pulsing out, Cornwell could plausibly claim –and did, insistently – to be the bestselling woman novelist in the world. Only Grisham’s legal thrillers outsold her.

  Ms Scarpetta is Chief Medical Examiner in Richmon
d, Virginia. Her duties go well beyond the routines of autopsy, written report and expert courtroom witness. She solves crimes and invariably blows the bad guys away with her own formidable fire power. The formula is repetitive. A serial killer is on the loose and is terrorising the law-abiding citizenry of the American South. His (always his) victims are postmortemed by the heroine. Inexorably the killer’s sights turn on Scarpetta herself. In her fight against crime, she is assisted by her lesbian niece, FBI field agent Lucy, and her faithful police buddy, Pete Marino.

  By the turn of the century, ‘Cornwell Enterprises’ was very big business. The author herself travelled with an entourage of twelve people, including bodyguards. Her houses are reported to be bristling with motion detectors, CCTV cameras and ‘stockpiles of guns’. In 1993, Cornwell, after an evening discussing film projects with Demi Moore, drunkenly crashed her Mercedes in Malibu – Jaws of Life were required to extract her from the wreckage. She was sentenced to the first offender’s twenty-eight days rehab, and was diagnosed bipolar. At first she thought it was a reference to her sexuality. Lithium stabilised her, allegedly. There were, however, further scandals. In June 1996 a maddened former FBI agent went on a gun-wielding, hostage-taking rampage, claiming that Cornwell had alienated the affections of his wife. In 2007, Cornwell let it be known that she had contracted a marriage a couple of years before with Dr Staci Ann Gruber.

  Cornwell also attracted notoriety with her much-publicised theory that Jack the Ripper was the Camden artist, Walter Sickert. She demolished one of the artist’s canvases to discover the DNA which would clinch her case. Art historians are as unimpressed by her art history as criminologists by her criminology, but readers continue to devour Scarpettas (nineteen of them by 2011).

  FN

  Patricia Carroll Cornwell (née Daniels)

  MRT

  From Potter’s Field

  Biog

  G. Fabrikant, New York Times, 23 March 1997; www.patriciacornwell.com

  293. Alice Sebold 1963–

  My life was over; my life had just begun. From Lucky

  There’s no scale by which to measure the distance between lived life and written fiction. According to Charles Bukowksi, 93 per cent of his fiction is fact. The pseudo-precision is, of course, a joke. Sometimes, however, fiction and life are so inter-meshed, that they collapse on each other, creating a genre for which we have, as yet, no handy term.

  Alice Sebold was born in Wisconsin in 1963, and brought up in Philadelphia, where her father, Russell P. Sebold, was a distinguished professor of Romance languages at ‘Penn’, one of the Ivy League colleges. Her mother, a journalist, was, as her daughter recalls, an unhappy, eventually alcoholic woman. Sebold later suspected her mother was a frustrated writer. The marriage was solid, but emotionally frigid. By her own account, Alice was a difficult child. She was precocious, fat and ‘too loud’. Nor was she – unlike her elder sister – dutifully academic. ‘I wanted,’ she said, ‘to be the moron of the family.’ She ‘ended up going to Syracuse because I didn’t get into the University of Pennsylvania, which is where my father taught. It looked like I was a shoo-in, a faculty kid – and I got rejected.’

  She went to less demanding Syracuse University, in New York State. It was in her first semester, walking through the tunnel of the campus amphitheatre on the way back to her dorm, that Sebold was raped. It was a defining event: one which she would describe (reliving it? exorcising it?) in memoir, fiction and interviews. She was beaten up. Her plaintive protests that she was a virgin were ignored, she was multiply penetrated, and – final indignity – urinated on. Her attacker was black – a source of some embarrassment with interlocutors in later publicity interviews. In the same tunnel, the police later informed her, another girl had been raped, killed, and dismembered. She was ‘lucky’. She was taken home where her father asked her if she needed food. She had spirit enough to reply, ‘that would be nice, considering the only thing I’ve had in my mouth in the last 24 hours is a cracker and a cock’. She went on to reassure him, ‘I’m still me, Dad’ – but what kind of me? She would not know until she had written it up. As she tells it in her memoir, a few months later she met her rapist (‘Gregory Madison’) in the street. He greeted her with a cheery but puzzled, ‘Hey, girl, don’t I know you from somewhere?’ She certainly knew him, picked him out from a line-up, gave evidence at two trials – batting off hostile cross-examination, and saw him given a maximum sentence. It was the early 1980s.

  On graduation from Syracuse she went far away to Houston, Texas, to do an MA in writing, but dropped out. She returned to New York, working part-time as an instructor at Hunter College, but effectively ‘drifting’. Everyone in New York, she later said, ‘thinks they’re a literary genius’. She wrote poetry – much of it about her traumatic experience in the tunnel. By her own account Sebold went off the rails in her twenties; doing drugs and living a promiscuous life. It was two decades too late for dropping out to be glamorous.

  In her early thirties she moved to Southern California (where, as she completes her wisecrack, ‘everyone thinks they’re famous’). She was, by now, writing more seriously and had drafted parts of a novel provisionally called ‘Monsters’ about a fourteen-year-old rape victim. She enrolled in a writing course at the University of California, Irvine, in 1995. On her first day of class she met the man she would later marry, Glen David Gold. They were both, Gold later said, ‘weirdos’ – made for each other. It must have been a strong intake that year at Irvine. Gold too would produce a bestselling novel, Carter Beats the Devil (2001), a few months before his wife’s bestselling The Lovely Bones.

  Her first published work had been, in point of fact, not the novel, but a memoir (later seen as a pioneer of the so-called ‘misery memoir’), Lucky, an ironic echo of the cop’s sublimely tactless consolatory remark all those years ago. Lucky was published in 1999 and generally ignored. It, and what she learned at UCI, helped her pull ‘Monsters’ into shape and a friend, the writer Wilton Barnhardt, forwarded it to his agent.

  After much editing, ‘Monsters’ was published in 2002 as The Lovely Bones. The publisher, Little Brown, expected no great things from a first novel, on an extremely uncomfortable subject, by an unknown novelist but – as was later surmised – 9/11 had shaken things up and fiction about coping with gross trauma was in demand. The book generated powerful word of mouth and sold in the millions. Over the years Sebold had worked out an ingenious scenario. The narrative opens:

  My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.

  Over the subsequent years, from a strangely drab heaven (a bit like a never-ending junior high school), Susie observes her family fall apart and studies, with minute attention, her rapist-killer, the banal bachelor neighbour, Mr Harvey. Things eventually work out more or less well for the Salmons – less well for the rat next door.

  In the novel’s wake, Lucky was brought back from oblivion. The two narratives of rape were read side by side, along with interviews which stressed the inspirational trauma which inspired the works. Fictional and factual merged: both books became prescribed reading on ‘Victimology’ in American colleges. Now rich (Gold’s novel, a fantasy about magicians and pacts with the devil, had also done well), the married authors retired to San Francisco. No more eating chickpeas straight out of the can, as Sebold wryly observed.

  Never one to rush into print, it was five years until she produced her second novel, The Almost Moon (2007). It, like its two predecessors, had the now trademark wham-bang Sebold opening: ‘When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.’ The middle-aged heroine, Helen, murders her demented eighty-eight-year-old mother – the novel reconstructs the lives that led up to the
act. The Almost Moon fell very flat. Reviewers were universally critical. Was Sebold a one-novel novelist? If so, that one novel had life left in it. The film of The Lovely Bones, which came out in 2010, was a huge success and jumped the book back into the bestseller lists.

  FN

  Alice Sebold (later Gold)

  MRT

  The Lovely Bones

  Biog

  A. Sebold, Lucky (1999)

  294. Rana Dasgupta 1971–

  Paradoxically, the more the world becomes interwoven the less it seems possible to tell a single, representative story of it … yet the connections are real and lived. So how do you narrate this?

  I have chosen to end this very selective biographical run through the novel in English with Dasgupta – though not with any sense that I am anointing him as anything other than an interesting variety of the novelist of the future. ‘Symptomatic’, in a word and, it can be claimed, potentially distinguished. Rana Dasgupta is described as a ‘British-Indian novelist’. The term does him ethnic injustice. He was born in Canterbury, grew up in Cambridge, took his first degree at Balliol College, Oxford, did postgraduate work at the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked for some years in New York, in marketing, before moving to Delhi – his current (if that word means anything in the Dasgupta progress) residence. His first novel was published when he was thirty-four. His second novel was published first in Australia, then in India, finally in the UK and US.