by Colm Toibin
Edmund White was born in Ohio in 1940, and lived in Paris for many years. He has now returned to the United States. His other books include States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), Genet: A Biography (1993), The Married Man (2000), Fanny: A Fiction (2003) and Rimbaud (2008).
Age in year of publication: forty-two.
Patrick White 1912–1990
1961 Riders in the Chariot
A Jewish refugee scholar, Himmelfarb, the half-caste painter Alf Dubbo, a washerwoman from the English Fens, Ruth Godbold, and the spinster and innocent Miss Hare, alone in the abandoned wilderness of the mansion Xanadu, are Patrick White’s riders. Their stories become a study of love and hate, of good and evil; evil as epitomized by the Holocaust, but also the persecution everywhere of those who see a vision by those who don’t, of the publicly weak by the publicly strong. This is the most compassionate and the most beautiful of all Patrick White’s works; colours fly everywhere; his words, comic, ecstatic, are like the brushstrokes on a canvas by Nolan or Blake.
Each rider is a creator and misfit – outcasts all. Circling them, in contest, are the citizens of Sarsaparilla, Patrick White’s mythic Australian suburban town. Patrick White’s account of the Holocaust is an epic achievement; but Himmelfarb’s experiences are balanced by portraits of the female harridans of Sarsaparilla which are acute and farcical – a fierce battalion of Barry Humphries’ Edna Everages, taking the Holocaust from European isolation into neighbourhood life. Patrick White tells us in Riders in the Chariot ‘that all faiths … are in fact one’ – and so the greatness of the novel also rests on the fact that it remains thunderously relevant.
Patrick White, born in London of Australian parents, divided his time between England and Australia until 1948 when he settled in Sydney. Awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature, his other major novels include The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957) and The Twyborn Affair (1979).
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Jeanette Winterson 1959–
1985 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
There is something effortless about this novel; the tone is a mixture of almost innocent wonder at how richly strange things are and shrewd memories and sour observations. The narrator is both knowing and unknowing, and the play between the two makes the novel absorbing and fascinating.
Our heroine has been adopted by a most religious lady, and, it should be said, a most neurotic one, in the North of England. Prayer-meetings, stirring sermons and Bible-readings fill her childhood, as well as strange urges (and a fortune teller) which lead her to believe that she will never marry. Odd fairy tales are spliced into the narrative, which helps give this story of a charmed young girl a mythic quality. Everyone around her intrigues her, puzzles her and amuses her. She goes deaf, and the people in church think that she is full of the spirit. She goes to school, but fails to fit in, and the description of the failure contains some classic comic writing. She works in an undertaker’s. She then falls in love with her friend Melanie, much to the horror of the church. She suffers from a mixture of religious fervour and lesbian passion: it is clear that one of them will have to give. She cannot go on preaching by day and doing the other by night, although she sees no reason why not. And it is this seeing no reason, this pure (or impure) determination, that lends great drama to the narrative and makes this book fresh and original, one of the best English novels since the war.
Jeanette Winterson was born in Lancashire and now lives in Gloucestershire. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won the Whitbread First Novel Prize. Her other novels include The Passion (1987), Lighthousekeeping (2004) and The Stone Gods (2007).
Age in year of publication: twenty-six.
Tim Winton 1960–
1991 Cloudstreet
Cloudstreet is an Australian novel remarkable for its sense of the country, for the atmosphere of the streets and houses, the weather, the aboriginal people who are the ghosts in every city, and their companions at the bottom of the heap, the ordinary Australian women and men who live on the cities’ fringes.
Two families, the hardworking, God-fearing Lambs and the drinking and gambling Pickles, escape their diverse rural catastrophes and end up in Cloudstreet, making do, but uneasy in the midst of the city. With their children they settle into one of those vast ramshackle houses which have a life of their own, furnished with a pig outside that sings its head off ‘like a bacon choir’.
Winton has an excellent ear for the words and phrases Australians use. The Lambs and Pickles argue, fight and pass the time of day in an Australian idiom which is inventive, amusing and pithy, a perfect match for Winton’s natural skill at giving voice to the dreams and myths buried in everyday affairs.
Using sentiment with an exhilarating energy Winton carries each Pickle and each Lamb to magical or prosaic conclusions. It is rare to find a novel which so successfully combines family observation with unsugary charm and such easygoing cleverness, stirred into the entertainment and laughter of the people in the street.
Tim Winton was born in Perth, and lives near there, in Western Australia. His novels include That Eye, The Sky (1986), Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1990), The Riders (1994), Dirt Music (2002) and Breath (2008). He is also the author of a collection of stories, The Turning (2005). Shallows, Cloudstreet and Dirt Music all won the Miles Franklin Award.
Age in year of publication: thirty-one.
P. G. Wodehouse 1881–1975
1960 Jeeves in the Offing
(US: How Right You Are, Jeeves)
Jeeves is about to go on holiday (to Herne Bay for the shrimping), and Aunt Dahlia has invited our hero Bertie Wooster to her country seat at Brinkley Court, Market Snodsbury, near Droitwich, where Roberta Wickham, ‘the red-haired menace’, will be in residence, not to speak of Bertie’s former headmaster Aubrey Upjohn MA and his daughter Phyllis, and, to thicken the plot, Adela Cream, the mystery writer, and her son Willy. Very soon all is not well: Roberta has announced her engagement to Bertie in The Times so that her mother, who hates Bertie, will not object to her attachment to Bertie’s friend ‘Kipper’ Herring. ‘Kipper’, in turn, has written a vicious review of Upjohn’s new book, he also being a former pupil of Upjohn.
Is Willy Cream mad? Should Phyllis become engaged to him? Aunt Dahlia has cleverly lured Sir Roderick Glossop, the brain surgeon, to pretend he is her butler Swordfish and thus observe young Cream. ‘Kipper’, in the meantime, is invited to distract Phyllis. He is in love with Roberta but enraged by her ad in The Times. Ma Cream, the mystery writer, is snooping around. Upjohn is suing the reviewer of his book for libel. ‘Kipper’ will be ruined. Where is Aunt Dahlia’s husband’s eighteenth-century silver cowcreamer? Luckily for everybody, Jeeves, who has been reading Spinoza’s Ethics, returns from his holiday, and the day is saved. The writing, as always, is sharply comic, and the plotting is as elaborate as ever. This is vintage Wodehouse.
P. G. Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey. He lived in Berlin for several years and eventually settled in the USA. He wrote vast numbers of books, including the Blandings series of novels, and the series of books about Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.
Age in year of publication: seventy-nine.
Tom Wolfe 1931–
1988 The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe is a brilliant ‘reporter novelist’, one of those writers who, avoiding literary ‘isms’, take life as his subject. Tom Wolfe was lucky. For his version of The Rake’s Progress, he had the comic insanities of 1980s New York for his material and, cool pioneer of the ‘New Journalism’, a baroque writing style to match.
This is a panoramic, rumbustious cartoon of a novel, encompassing every chicanery and vanity New York has to offer. Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street man with an annual salary of a few bucks less than a million dollars, a wife Judy and a mistress Maria. As with so much else in Sherman’s life Maria is a mistake: she involves him in a car accident with two black youths one of whom is mortally wounded and … bingo! Enter black ghetto leader Reve
rend Reggie Bacon, poisonous English hack Peter Fallow, harassed Assistant District Attorney Larry Kramer, and creepily ambitious District Attorney Abe Weiss – living, walking and talking examples of the seven deadly sins. All bring about Sherman’s downfall with brio and enthusiasm.
Tom Wolfe comes at the vanities of man like a boxer punching the air, using wit, audacity and ridicule as weapons. As a demolition job on the prancing snobberies, arrogance, greed and ambitions of American man, the novel is unsurpassed, and as a novel of unlimited entertainment and social comment, likewise.
Tom Wolfe was born in Virginia and lives in New York. His renowned non-fiction includes The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and The Right Stuff (1979). His other novels are A Man In Full (1998), and I am Charlotte Simmons (2004).
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
Tobias Wolff 1945–
1996 The Night in Question
The Americans encountered in these short stories could, with a bit of adaptation of surroundings and preoccupations, just as easily be Muscovites or New Zealanders. Wolff’s people are loners living together. ‘Even together, people were as solitary as cows in fields all facing off in different directions.’ But there is no self-pity and little sadness here. Instead, Wolff conjures up certain moments of recognition, moments when the riddles posed by the bewildering behaviour of others rise to the surface for baffled inspection.
Each story is firmly placed within the traumas and trivia of daily life: the jumble of bottles and tubes on a dressing table, the flickering of the television set, ‘chemical gizmos’ that turn the lavatory water blue. Amid this entirely recognizable world Wolff’s men and women, fathers and mothers, suitors, soldiers and schoolteachers negotiate safe passage. Children look after their parents (a favourite Wolff topic), dogs bark, newspapers are read and discarded, people hope for the wrong kind of love and create their own disappointments. Wolff records all this in writing of beauty and simplicity, a lemon twist of irony or wit often present. These are stories flavoured too with Wolff’s sense of delight in humankind at its most precarious, but there is always a notion of happiness fluttering in the air, like a delicate kite or a multicoloured balloon.
Tobias Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and lives in California. His books include the famous memoirs This Boy’s Life (1989), and In Pharaoh’s Army (1994). He has also written the acclaimed novel Old School (2003) and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008).
Age in year of publication: fifty-one.
Francis Wyndham 1924–
1987 The Other Garden
In Francis Wyndham’s novel, which quietly marks the end of a certain kind of English life, the narrator is a young man living in a village near Marlborough before and during the Second World War, an atmosphere recalled here through the songs and movies of that time. In this village live Sybil and Charlie Demarest, the class of English person young men were supposed to be defending, in fact odiously snobbish, boring and preternaturally cruel, most of all to their daughter Kay, whom they detest. She is not like them. Kay is awkward, undistinguished, with simple affections for the sun, for film stars and for friends. Kay has a droll penchant for not quite managing things, but she is not a snob, she loves what crumbs of life come her way, and most of all the dog Havoc whom she passionately adopts, abandoned as she is. Kay is the personification of those people who do not so much wish to be different, as are, and have to be. What happens to Kay and Havoc and the narrator is the stuff of this report from the Other Garden of England, the untended one, and nothing quite like it exists. The Other Garden gives an alternative view of the accepted world, always in subtle ways, not a word too many or out of place. Quizzically wise, irresistibly funny, this is a poignant novel of great intelligence.
Francis Wyndham was born in and lives in London. He is also a distinguished journalist, critic and short-story writer.
Age in year of publication: sixty-three.
Autobiographies and Memoirs
TWENTY OF THE BEST WRITTEN SINCE 1950
J. R. Ackerley
My Father and Myself 1968
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian 1951
Frank Conroy
Stop Time 1968
Jill Ker Conway
The Road to Corain 1989
Harry Crews
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place 1978
Quentin Crisp
The Naked Civil Servant 1968
G. H. Hardy
A Mathematician’s Apology 1951
Lillian Hellman
An Unfinished Woman 1969
Pentimento 1973
Scoundrel Time 1976
Michael Herr
Dispatches 1977
Christopher Hope
White Boy Running 1988
Mary Karr
The Liar’s Club 1995
Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts 1976
China Men 1980
Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle
Being Geniuses Together 1920 –1930 (1984 edition)
Frank McCourt
Angela’s Ashes 1997
Rian Malan
My Traitor’s Heart 1990
Arthur Miller
Timebends 1987
Jessica Mitford
Hons and Rebels 1977
Frank Moorhouse
Martini: A Memoir 2005
Sally Morgan
My Place 1987
Blake Morrison
When Did You Last See Your Father? 1996
Nuala O’Faolain
Are You Somebody 1997
Literary Biographies
TWENTY OF THE BEST WRITTEN SINCE 1950
Peter Ackroyd
T. S. Eliot: A Life 1984
Walter Jackson Bate
Samuel Johnson 1978
Jane Dunn
Antonia White: A Life 1998
Leon Edel
Henry James 1953–1972
(5 volumes)
Richard Ellmann
James Joyce 1959
Roy Foster
Yeats 1997
Ian Gibson
Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life 1988
Gordon Haight
George Eliot 1968
Ian Hamilton
Robert Lowell 1977
Richard Holmes
Footsteps, Adventures of a Romantic Biographer 1985
Michael Holroyd
Lytton Strachey 1994
(one-volume edition)
Hermione Lee
Virginia Woolf 1996
Fiona MacCarthy
William Morris: A Life for Our Time 1994
Bernard Martin
Tennyson: An Unquiet Mind 1980
George Painter
Marcel Proust: A Biography 1989
(one-volume revised edition)
Graham Robb
Victor Hugo 1997
Richard B. Sewell
Emily Dickinson 1996
Jon Stallworthy
Wilfred Owen 1974
Claire Tomalin