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

by John Sutherland

  Does travel broaden the mind? J. R. R. Tolkien never left England (rarely Oxford and rarely even his own college) other than for a brief excursion, on Norse-scholar business, to Scandinavia. But, as other ‘two-inches of ivory’ novelists attest, novelists that do not go far can, none the less, mine very deep. Dasgupta’s first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), was an updated Canterbury Tales (homage to his birthplace) in which stranded airline travellers swapped stories about different cities of the world. Thirteen passengers (fateful number) on route to Tokyo find themselves stranded – ‘socked in’ by snow – at a nameless nowhere airport. They tell each other tales to pass the time in that most vacant of places, the terminal concourse. There is no termination, no concurrence in that misnamed location. The stories are surreal – one, for example, features Robert De Niro’s misbegotten, half-Chinese son, who has mastered the transubstantiation of matter. A Japanese businessman becomes infatuated, to the point of self-destruction, with a sex-doll. In another, human minds are evacuated of memory, which is stored safely on CDs. The world becomes historyless, as – with jet travel – it has become placeless. What is the difference between an international airport in Los Angeles (LAX) or Heathrow (LHR)?

  Walter Benjamin famously declared that the novel was the end of story-telling and a symptom of the end of community. In a fragile, accidental, way Dasgupta fantasises its being momentarily restored:

  The book is not only the stories; the book is a reflection on story telling. Now I think that story telling is rather rare in our culture – it’s disappearing. We don’t meet people who tell stories anymore. We feel a lot of that. We feel that there is something good when we sit around our grandmothers and listen to their stories, because there is wisdom in them. So I wanted to say, okay, here are 13 middle class modern travelers, who decide to tell stories, and they can.

  If there is one word that attaches itself to Dasgupta’s fiction, it is ‘global’. But Solo (2009), his second novel, is, on the face of it, more local than its predecessor – at least, for its first 168 pages. The novel is set in Bulgaria, a country which, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, is far away and of which we know little, and care even less. The hero is Ulrich, whom we first meet aged 100 years, in 2005. Bulgaria itself is scarcely older. It was invented, as a European constitutional monarchy, out of the Balkan cauldron in 1878. Ulrich is blind. Like Sophocles’s Tiresias, this means he can see his country’s history, and destiny, more clearly than those of his compatriots with eyes.

  Ulrich’s father was a visionary railway engineer, who dreamed of shining steel rails which would connect Baghdad, Sofia and Paris, and drag Bulgaria ‘out of Asia’. When young Ulrich shows early stirrings of musical talent, he is encouraged by his mother but savagely suppressed by his father, who smashes his son’s violin and throws it in the fire, with the words:

  ‘You won’t do this, my son! I won’t have you waste your life. Musicians, artists, criminals, opium addicts … You’ll end up poor and disgraced. I won’t have it.’

  Ulrich is sent to Berlin where his study of chemistry is cut short by European hyperinflation. He returns to his native country to work in a shoe factory, then as a lowly lab-rat in a chemical products firm. He marries but the marriage fails. His father is mutilated, and his dreams shattered, in the First World War. Bulgaria fights on the German side, as it does in the Second World War. Big mistakes. Thereafter, the country came under the Kremlin’s heel and Moscow’s dullest stooge, Todor Zhivkov. Uncorking a vial of sulphuric acid, Ulrich accidentally blinds himself. Like everything in the novel it is described unexcitedly. These things happen. Ulrich’s mother is hauled off, for no reason, to a Bulgarian gulag and returns a madwoman. Rich in natural resources Bulgaria, Ulrich’s mother-country, is plundered and polluted by its Communist masters so that women’s nylons dissolve at the first touch of Sofia’s polluted air. Ulrich spends his last days, alone, in a shabby room by the bus-station, going nowhere.

  Why did he choose Bulgaria? Dasgupta is asked – as God might be asked why he chose the Jews, or Mallory why he climbed Everest. ‘I refuse to be categorised,’ he blandly replies. But he does concede that Solo’s theme is music – the ways in which, out of group harmony, single voices can emerge. If there is hope in the world, it lies not in the European Union, but in that shattered violin, and the dream it represented for Ulrich. We recognise the theme. It is that of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath her Feet. In that novel, set in Bombay, London and New York, it is the Orphic lyre alone – art – which can bring the world together. Like Rushdie, Dasgupta is a fragmented man whose fiction seeks, desperately and ingeniously, for cohesion. A man, one might say, without biographical base. These, one fears, are the novelists of the twenty-first century, as the author of The Waste Land was the poet of the twentieth. But where does Dasgupta go from here? Lots of places, one expects – resting nowhere.

  FN

  Rana Dasgupta

  MRT

  Tokyo Cancelled

  Biog

  www.ranadasgupta.com

  Epilogue

  The Preface claims this book to be an idiosyncratic history of fiction in English. What, having come some four hundred years, is its future history? We have not always had the novel, said the critic Walter Benjamin, and there will come a time, he bleakly foresaw, when we shall no longer have it. I should not like to live in it. But that fictionless time seems, at the present moment, thankfully distant. There are today more novels, and more kinds of novel, than ever before in literary history – too many for most readers. Trying to make sense of the novel in English, as we come into the second decade of the twenty-first century, is like sculpting with sand or paddling in a tsunami.

  Some handholds can be found. The six great nineteenth-century genres – Romance, Male Action (‘Adventure’), Crime, Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy – march on. They still map out the topography of the typical bookstore. Nowadays they are supplemented by what one can call ‘constituency’ literature: gay fiction, chicklit, ladlit, teen fiction. Constituency fiction is defined by customer affinity, not style. It thrives vigorously as new social constituencies pop up. The old vertical architecture remains obstinately in place: the literary novel, experimental fiction, middlebrow- blockbuster, pulp fiction. As to how these will be rearranged, dissolved, or redefined in the future is unknowable. The factors and pressures which will carry future changes through can, however, be defined as a set of binarisms.

  Globalism and atomism

  Viewed through trade papers (Publishers Weekly, the Bookseller), the trend over the last fifty years would seem to be one of inexorable agglomeration. The fusion of producers (literary agents, publishers, retailers – electronic and walk-in, transnational reading publics) into ever larger structures has been remarkable and seems unstoppable. In the nineteenth century, when both firms came into being, the notion of HarperCollins, yoking Glasgow and New York, would have seemed something from the pen of Mr H. G. Wells. It has happened. Fiction is, in the twenty-first century, a global operation. Leading practitioners conform to that globalism – see, for example, Rana Dasgupta above, or Salman Rushdie’s bold proclamation:

  I suppose if you were asking me formally, I would still think of myself as a British citizen of Indian origin. But I think of myself as a New Yorker and as a Londoner. I probably think of those as being more exact definitions than the passport or the place of birth.

  A main instrument of the agglomerated apparatus is the bestseller list. There will be close congruence – irrespective of the national origins of the authors – between what appears weekly in the New York Times and what appears in the Sunday Times. Is Rushdie, when he appears on those lists, a British or an American property? One thing is certain, he is not an Indian or Pakistani property, and will never be until the subcontinent develops a publishing and distributive machinery to rival that of London and New York. Novelists, like everyone else, follow the money. And the money, currently, is in two big cities.

  Alongside all this skyscrap
er publishing, there has been a downscaling unprecedented in literary history. It originated in the mid-1990s, with nationwide internet connectivity. Most fiction which is produced nowadays will never see a printed page, but will none the less be widely read. It remains in the domain of so-called ‘fanfic’. The most read of the fanfictioneers, Cassandra Claire – famous for her Lord of the Rings extension, The Very Secret Diaries – is, effectively, self-published and expects no revenue. All that is required for Claire’s kind of novel is a keyboard, an internet connection, and accessible companions in her chosen ‘fandom’. Atomistic publishing will surely advance over the foreseeable future – already it is vast.

  Scriptive and pictorial

  The novel is, conventionally, a textual form: words on the page. It is one of the things which, sadly, renders it unattractive to many young readers whose culture (via iPod, screen, Facebook, and TV game console) is audio-visual and increasingly ‘virtual’. Translating black marks on a white surface into narrative is not sexy. There has, however, been some symptomatic hybridisation. One is the growing popularity of the graphic novel, and of practitioners such as Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) and Neil Gaiman (The Sandman). Graphic fiction eases itself into film readily, creating a large knock-on readership. The economic rise of Japan and China, whose writing systems are substantially pictographic, will add force to this mutation, one can surmise. Put grandly, I have seen the future of the novel – and it’s something you see, not read. At the very least a revival of the illustrated novel, so popular in the nineteenth century, may be confidently anticipated.

  New novels/old novels

  The name of the form suggests newness, or ‘novelty’. But unlike other new lines of product – the latest models of car, TV or computer, for example – fiction does not disappear once consumed and is no longer used. Fiction keeps piling up, like cultural plaque. How many novels in English are there in the dusty vaults of the British and North American copyright libraries? Probably, using Dewey Decimal calculation, around two million. While they are lying in the dust they do not much trouble the novel of the day in its appeal to the customer. But when the Google Library Project makes all those millions of novels, in highly readable form, cheap or free of charge, instantly available on one’s electronic reader (iPad, Sony, Kindle), how will that affect reading practices?

  Within the short historical space of half a century, British and American literary culture has moved from managed shortage (symbolised in the public library waiting list) to unmanageable surplus. Whatever else, one can foresee a Darwinist struggle for space (‘exposure’) and the disposable time of the reading public. Shall I read the latest Julian Barnes or go back and read Laurence Sterne? – a couple of brushes of the finger on the keyboard will decide the matter. Ideally what will happen will be a better sense and utilisation of the whole territory of fiction. The worst that will happen is that readers, as a whole, will feel utterly swamped and surrender to whatever ephemeral pressures come their way – word of mouth, importunate advertising, celebrity endorsement (of the kind pioneered by Oprah Winfrey).

  For the moment we can, and should, revel in the plenty which we, unlike all previous generations, enjoy. Long live the novel, and Walter Benjamin be damned.

  Index

  A

  Abbott, Edward 746

  Achebe, Chinua (born Albert Achebe) 217, 636–9

  Achebe, Christie (née Okoli) 638

  Ackerley, Joe 311

  Ackerman, Forrest J. 564

  Acton, Harold 437, 438

  al-Ad, Muhammad 311

  Adams, Katherine (Mrs Louis L’Amour) 497

  Addams, Charles 515

  Addison, Joseph 106

  Adorno, Theodor W. 473, 588

  Aesop 337, 677, 779

  Aguilar, Grace 117–18, 313

  Aiken, Clarissa 504

  Aiken, Conrad 504

  Ainsworth, Fanny (née Ebers) 89

  Ainsworth, William Harrison 89–90, 111, 174–5

  Alain-Fournier (Henri Alban-Fournier) 620

  Alaya, F. 211

  Aldington, Richard (born Edward Godfree Aldington) 306, 365–6

  Aldiss, Brian Wilson 575, 603–5, 710

  Aldrich, Robert 545

  Alger, Augusta 157

  Alger, Horatio, Jr 156–7, 303, 447, 531, 532

  Alger, Horatio, Sr. 156

  Algren, Nelson 601

  Alig, Michael 763, 764

  Allan, John 98, 99

  Allardice, Lisa 243

  Allen, Annette (née Andrews) 356–7

  Allen, Fred 529

  Allen, Grant 190–91

  Allen, Penny 782

  Allen, V. 201

  Allen, William Hervey, Jr 356–7, 643

  Allen, Woody 621, 644, 691, 734

  Allingham, Herbert 448

  Allingham, Margery Louise (later Youngman Carter) 448–9

  Ambler, Eric Clifford 498–501, 510

  Ambler, Joan Mary (née Harrison) 500

  Ambler, Louise (née Crombie) 499

  Amis, Sir Kingsley William 441, 476, 477, 494, 550, 553, 554, 571, 580–83, 604, 667, 729, 752, 771, 784

  Amis, Martin Louis 57, 608, 729, 751, 770, 771, 779, 783–5, 787

  Andersen, Hans Christian 746

  Anderson, D. D. 394

  Anderson, Kate Baird 279

  Anderson, Lindsay 697, 698

  Anderson, N. F. 138

  Anderson, Sherwood 403

  Andrews, Lucilla 782

  Andrews, Sarah 17

  Andrews, Virginia Cleo (born Cleo Virginia Andrews) 594–6

  Anka, Paul 526

  Anstey, F. 240

  Aquinas, St Thomas 610

  Arbuckle, Fatty 380

  Archer, Jeffrey Howard (Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare) 450, 725–7

  Archer, Mary (née Weeden) 725, 726

  Archer, William 319, 320

  Arendt, Hannah 652

  Armstrong, Neil 68

  Arnold, Julia 197

  Arnold, Matthew 172, 196, 385

  Arnold, Thomas 196, 197

  Arnold, Dr Thomas 708

  Arran, Earls of 75

  Ashbery, John 459

  Ashcroft, Dame Peggy 387

  Ashford, Daisy (Margaret Mary Julia Ashford; later Devlin) 313–15

  Ashton, R. 129, 130

  Asimov, Isaac (born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov) 553, 561–3

  Asquith, Lady Cynthia 235

  Atlas, Charles 705

  Atlas, James 528, 529

  Attlee, Clement 499

  Attwell, D. 730

  Atwood, Carl 720

  Atwood, Margaret Eleanor (later Polk) 125, 720–23

  Auden, W. H. x, 446–7, 457–8, 472, 687–8

  Austen, Cassandra 598

  Austen, Revd George 59

  Austen, Henry 59

  Austen, Jane 37, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57–9, 61, 75, 80, 142, 309–10, 313, 364, 654, 686

  Auster, Daniel 758, 761, 763–4, 765

  Auster, Lydia (née Davis; later Cote) 757, 758, 760–62, 766, 768

  Auster, Paul Benjamin 757–60, 761–5, 766–8

  Auster, Siri (née Hustvedt) 758, 759, 760, 761, 762–5, 766, 767–8

  Auster, Sophie 763

  Autry, Gene 290

  Avallone, Michael Angelo, Jr 599–601

  Ayer, A. J. 591

  Ayres, Ruby M. 161, 521

  Ayrton, William 259

  B

  Bacall, Lauren 393

  Bachardy, Don 456

  Backscheider, Paula 6, 11

  Badel, Alan 533

  Baer, Max 741

  Bage, Robert 32–34, 52

  Bagehot, Walter 59, 436

  Bagley, Desmond 584