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

by John Sutherland

  By the end of his career Stockton had published some twenty-one novels. His famous and much-reprinted fable, ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’, was first published in The Century Magazine in 1882, and made his name – in his own day and posthumously. It is still widely read and discussed (by philosophers, among others). The story is one of the great teases of literature. A commoner falls in love with a princess and is subjected to trial by ordeal. He must choose one of two doors. Behind the one, lies a ravening tiger. Behind the other, a beautiful lady in waiting (not his Princess), whom he must marry, if that is the door he happens to choose. In the watching crowd is the Princess who, discreetly, nods to the door he must choose. At this tantalising point, the story ends.

  Stockton – who was prosperous in his later years (no more dime-a-day meals) – achieved mass popularity with the Adventures of Captain Horn in 1895, a ‘gold-fever’ story which coincided historically with the current gold-rush to the Yukon. Captain Horn, an American mariner, discovers the fabulous treasure of the Incas, valued at $200 million. He doggedly persists in his ‘reasonable’ belief that, as the discoverer of this gold, a precise 20 per cent ($40 million) is due to him, and he will not take a dollar more or less than his fair share. Others are less scrupulous. Horn’s second mate, George Burke, is destroyed by man-killing traps in the Inca mound, when he secretly returns to plunder the treasure. Another sailor, Andy McLeish, is slowed down by all the gold he is carrying about him and is staked out by savage Indians to be eaten alive by ants. A corrupt Peruvian government tries to appropriate the booty and shyster lawyers exploit the laws of salvage to steal Horn’s portion. The honest hero finally contrives to secure his legitimate $40 million share and forces the Peruvian authorities to use the $160 million balance for the welfare of the descendants of the Incas, building schools and hospitals and doing good work.

  In 1899 Stockton was voted fifth place among the ‘best living American writers’ by the readers of the magazine Literature. He died of a stroke in 1902. Mark Twain, among other literary dignitaries, paid their respects at his funeral.

  FN

  Frank Richard Stockton

  MRT

  The Adventures of Captain Horn

  Biog

  ANB (Henry Golemba)

  62. ‘Walter’ 1834–1900

  I have in fact become a connoisseur in cunts. Walter on himself

  The longest continuous novel of the Victorian period is also the most aggressively anti-Victorian: My Secret Life, by ‘Walter’. One says ‘novel’, although it may be what it purports to be: a sexual athlete’s frank memoirs from devirgination to (justified) exhaustion, some 1,200 partners later. But, carefully read, most readers will reckon it a life-history no more factual than those of Baron Munchausen, or James Frey. Fiction, that is, through and through. More specifically, My Secret Life is a Victorian Bildungsroman of the Great Expectations kind. ‘Great Ejaculations’, perhaps.

  The likeliest candidate for ‘Walter’ is nowadays thought to be Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834–1900). Born in south London, Ashbee was, by profession, a trader in cloths and textiles. His line of work involved travel and encouraged a worldly, not to say underworldly, view of the human condition. Ashbee, as cultivated as he was randy, collected books – notably Cervantes and erotica. He wrote on the latter under the pen-names ‘Fraxinus’ (Latin for ‘Ash’), ‘Apis’ (‘Bee’), and the bawdily punning ‘Pisanus Fraxi’, under which he wrote his classic three-volume bibliography of ‘Prohibited Books’. Ashbee left both his Cervantes and pornographic collections to the British Museum with the provision that neither should be destroyed or sold on. He never confessed, or directly alluded to, his authorship of My Secret Life – it remained his secret.

  My Secret Life was published between 1888 and 1894 in eleven volumes in Amsterdam, under the imprint of the Belgian publisher Auguste Brancart. Only twenty-five sets were printed, at a cost of £60 apiece. At 2.5 million words, it rivals Proust in length and is longer than any other single-title fictional composition in the British nineteenth-century catalogue of books. The very hugeness of the thing is a measure of what was conventionally left out of the above-ground Victorian novel: namely, sex – or, where in the later decades it made a shy entrance, explicit anatomical description of the act with the vulgar terminology used by the mass of the male population and, specifically, by ‘gentlemen’ in the smoking room.

  My Secret Life is nothing if not explicit and vulgar. Page after page records, in minute detail, couplings and sexual experimentation, with partners from every station in life. Words are not minced: as the word-count facility of the electronic text calculates, the word ‘cunt’ occurs 5,357 times, ‘fuck’ 4,032 times, ‘prick’ 3,756 times. ‘Clit(oris)’ clocks a measly 434. Walter records, in wearisome anatomical detail, using the unbuttoned terminology of the men’s smoking room, the ins and outs (ad nauseam) of Victorian sex. In passing, however, he also offers an unblinkered view of much of what the Victorian novel routinely averts its – and our – eyes from. This filling in of background is its peculiar value to the reader of – say – Middlemarch. To choose one example from thousands – lavatories. It was not, for example, until 1884 that the Ladies Lavatory Company opened its first ‘convenience’ near Oxford Circus. What did a lady – all those ladies in Victorian fiction – do before that? Read Walter.

  A still virginal, but testosterone-maddened, lad, he liked to wander, voyeuristically, in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace. In summer the park seethed with sightseers. One day young Walter was there with his pal Fred, and his family:

  Fred’s mother, mine, the girls, Fred and I went into the park gardens, one day after luncheon. A very hot day, for we kept on the shady walks, one of which led to the place where women hid themselves to piss. My aunt said, ‘Why don’t you boys go and play, you don’t mind the sun,’ so off we went, but when about to leave the walk, turned round and saw the women had turned back. Said Fred; ‘I’m sure they are going to piss, that’s why they want to get rid of us.’ We evaded the gardeners, scrambled through shrubs, on our knees, and at last on our bellies, up a little bank, on the other side of which was the vacant place on which dead leaves and sweepings were shot down. As we got there, pushing aside the leaves, we saw the big backside of a woman, who was half standing, half squatting, a stream of piss falling in front of her, and a big hairy gash, as it seemed, under her arse; but only for a second, she had just finished as we got the peep, let her clothes fall, tucked them between her legs, and half turning round. We saw it was Fred’s mother, my aunt. Off aunt went. ‘Isn’t it a wopper,’ said Fred, ‘lay still, more of them will come.’

  It’s distasteful in the extreme – but telling. And it tells what is not told elsewhere. Where, for example, does Tess the dairymaid go when she needs to ‘go’? Or, perish the thought, Miss Dorothea Brooke?

  FN

  (presumed) Henry Spencer Ashbee (‘Pisanus Fraxi’)

  MRT

  My Secret Life

  Biog

  Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (1966)

  63. Mrs Mary Braddon 1835–1915

  Dead Love has Chains.

  Mary Braddon was born in Soho, London, the youngest daughter of a solicitor. Her mother left her husband, who was reportedly feckless and faithless, when Mary was only four. Among all this domestic strife she contrived to get a good education, began to write fiction at the precocious age of eight, and was publishing in the magazines, as the family breadwinner, before she was twenty. With the same worthy aim she took to the stage (only one notch above taking to the streets) in 1857 as ‘Mary Seyton’, and specialised in playing older women.

  She was, however, young and comely when off-stage. In 1860, a Yorkshire ‘admirer’ gave her money to quit the boards and write an epic on Garibaldi. Safe enough occupation for a respectable mistress, he must have thought – even if the fellow was an Italian revolutionary. Instead, she sensibly wrote a sensation novel, Three Times Dead, published in 1861. Through it she became acquainted with the I
rish publisher John Maxwell, proprietor of the Welcome Guest magazine. Exit Yorkshire admirer: enter London patron.

  Braddon’s great triumph came with Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the serial rights for which were bought by Maxwell. The two became lovers and Braddon’s first child by her new ‘admirer’ was born in 1862. Lady Audley’s Secret was published in volume form by another publisher, William Tinsley, and set Braddon up for life. It likewise set up Tinsley, who built a villa at Barnes shamelessly called ‘Audley Lodge’ on the profits. The plot is succinctly summarised by Elaine Showalter: ‘Braddon’s bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband number-one down a well, thinks about poisoning husband number-two and sets fire to a hotel in which her other male acquaintances happen to be residing.’

  Braddon’s own marital problems were not as easily managed. Maxwell had five children, and a wife currently residing in an Irish lunatic asylum; he was also deeply in debt. A bestselling author in his bed and in his columns was a godsend. In 1874, when the first Mrs Maxwell died, Braddon was free to marry her publisher, and went on to bear him another six children, while continuing to be his principal commercial asset. Revenue from Braddon’s fiction installed their growing family in a fine country house. The couple rode out the inevitable scandal when it was revealed to the world that they had been living, and breeding, in sin for ten years – although their servants resigned en masse.

  In the mid-1860s, Braddon’s price peaked at a massive £2,000 per novel, with a rapid string of bestsellers such as Aurora Floyd (1863), John Marchmont’s Legacy (1863), Henry Dunbar (1864) and Birds of Prey (1867). Her output was prodigious, and in addition to her other labours she edited, or ‘conducted’ several magazines. Many of her novels were dramatised, and she wrote plays herself. She was a top favourite with the circulating library subscriber; with the railway reader (by 1899, fifty-seven of her novels had appeared in yellowbacks for the traveller); and with the lower-class market for whom she wrote in penny journals. Braddon drove herself too hard, and suffered a stroke in 1907, but none the less kept on writing. Her final life tally is some eighty titles, of which Lady Audley’s Secret was never out of print during her lifetime and became a bestseller again, with the vogue for Victorian sensation fiction in the 1990s.

  FN

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon (later Maxwell)

  MRT

  Lady Audley’s Secret

  Biog

  R. Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1979)

  64. Samuel Butler 1835–1902

  Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.

  The author of two of the most un-Victorian novels of the Victorian period, Butler was born the son and grandson of Anglican grandees. His childhood, and its patriarchal tyrannies, are recalled in that of Ernest Pontifex, in the The Way of All Flesh (1903). Butler went to Shrewsbury School and formed there the two great loves of his life: Handel and Italy. He left Cambridge in 1858 with a first-class degree in Classics and a lifelong distrust of academic institutions. He declined the destiny intended for him – holy orders. To save the family’s blushes, Samuel was sent as far away as earth permitted, to raise sheep in New Zealand. In the five years (1859–64) that he was there Butler proved a resourceful emigrant, doubling his capital.

  Pastoral leisure allowed Butler to read widely – he was an early convert to Darwin. He returned to London in 1864, rich enough to be free of his family (why, he once wondered, were there not orphanages for those luckless children who actually had parents). He took up bachelor rooms near Fleet Street and remained there the rest of his long life. In his mature years Butler dedicated himself to painting, music and writing. It was an enjoyable course of life – and a good vantage point from which to snipe at the hated Victorian establishment. In 1865 he published a typically provocative pamphlet, arguing that Christ had not died on the cross, merely fainted (the idea was later picked up by D. H. Lawrence in The Man Who Died, 1929). He and a close friend, Henry Festing Jones, allegedly shared the sexual favours of the same woman by weekly calendar arrangement.

  Butler’s Swiftian reflections on the hypocrisies and moral contradictions of Victorian England were published, at his own expense, as Erewhon (1872). Set in New Zealand, the hero Higgs, accompanied by a native, Chowbok (George Lucas evidently read the novel, in creating Chewbacca), journeys over a mountain range to a country called Erewhon – where everything, like the name, is back to front. Crime is regarded as an ailment, and is humanely treated, while illness is regarded as a crime, and punished. The young are instructed in colleges of Unreason and the presiding deity is the goddess Ydgrun (i.e. Mrs Grundy). Higgs escapes by balloon. The satire also plays with Butler’s prescient idea that in the future machine intelligence will outstrip human.

  Butler went on to produce a torrent of works of a hyper-rationalist tendency, and one supremely eccentric Bildungsroman, The Way of All Flesh. Begun in 1873, this work, which flays the age in which Butler found himself, was not published until the year after his death. In the novel, Ernest Pontifex, born in the same year as Butler, is mercilessly tyrannised by his clergyman father and bullied at Roughborough School. He studies at Cambridge with a view of taking orders in a Church in whose religion he does not believe. By a series of misadventures, and total innocence about sex, he is convicted, while serving as a curate in London, of indecent assault. Disastrously, his lusts inflamed by the easy conquests retailed to him by his best friend, he mistakes a girl who won’t for a girl who will:

  Then it flashed upon him that if he could not see Miss Snow he could at any rate see Miss Maitland. He knew well enough what he wanted now, and as for the Bible, he pushed it from him to the other end of his table …

  About ten minutes after we last saw Ernest, a scared, insulted girl, flushed and trembling, was seen hurrying from Mrs Jupp’s house as fast as her agitated state would let her, and in another ten minutes two policemen were seen also coming out of Mrs Jupp’s, between whom there shambled rather than walked our unhappy friend Ernest, with staring eyes, ghastly pale, and with despair branded upon every line of his face.

  Six months later after release from prison – and no longer a member of decent society – Ernest is free, at last, to grow up and become a rational, and joyously un-Victorian, human being. He has realised the importance of being un-earnest.

  Butler’s last years were passed in furious quarrels on evolution and freethinking, in which he attacked the orthodoxies of his time and rode his various hobbyhorses, such as his belief that a woman had written The Odyssey.

  FN

  Samuel Butler

  MRT

  The Way of All Flesh

  Biog

  P. Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography (1991)

  65. Mark Twain 1835–1910

  I am not an American. I am the American.

  Among all the nation’s writers, Mark Twain has the firmest hold on the national epithet. From Theodore Roosevelt onwards, American presidents have routinely salted their oratory with down-home Twainisms. Harry Truman had a framed Twain quotation on his desk – ‘Always do Right. It will Please some People and Astonish the Rest’ – alongside ‘The Buck Stops Here’. On the 2008 election trail, Barack Obama routinely reached out to ‘our greatest American satirist’ (and, it may be noted, the creator of the only classic American novel with a mixed-race hero, Pudd’nhead Wilson). There is, in fact, something presidential about Twain himself. ‘The Lincoln of our Literature,’ William Dean Howells called him.

  Great American writers elbow each other aside to aver Twain’s supreme greatness. ‘Mark Twain’, declared Eugene O’Neill, ‘is the true father of all American literature.’ ‘Mark Twain is all of our grandfather [sic],’ concurred William Faulkner. ‘All modern American literature’, said Ernest Hemingway, ‘comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.’ Norman Mailer turned it around neatly by noting that
much of what Mark Twain wrote had clearly been lifted from Norman Mailer.

  The universal panegyric highlights a strange paradox. How can a writer have achieved such eminence with such a small number of incontrovertibly great works? One of his biographers, Jerome Loving, in an otherwise laudatory account, is surely correct in pointing out that ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is possibly the most overrated work in American literature.’ Even Hemingway’s ‘one book’ was dropped, mid-composition, for five years and picked up to be hurried, hugger-mugger into the feeblest of concluding chapters. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), the first American novel to deal unsentimentally or unbigotedly with race, was written during the turmoil of one of Twain’s insolvencies and is marred by unliterary distractions. As for the rest? The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) are charming amusettes (to borrow Henry James’s term) but no one suggests they are in the Moby Dick or Scarlet Letter class. Dickens published twelve novels any one of which can be argued to vindicate his status as Britain’s greatest. Where are Twain’s dozen? What makes him the ‘father’ of American fiction? What makes him what H. L. Mencken called ‘the archetype of Homo Americanus’?

  The second question is the easier to answer. Twain’s life is a parable of the American belief that anyone can make it in that country – any pauper can end up a prince. Born in Florida, Missouri, the son of an unlucky storekeeper, young Sam L. Clemens was lucky to make it through infancy – most of his siblings didn’t. His father’s insolvency (they were, at their lowest point, reduced to just one slave) and premature death kicked Sam out of school at eleven, to earn a pittance as a printer’s devil. Fortunately for American literature, he was not good enough at that line of work to prosper. In his early teens, he struck out from Hannibal, Missouri (immortalised as ‘St Petersburg’ in Huck Finn), to make his fortune importing coca leaf from South America. He might have become the Pablo Escobar of his day, had he not met the legendary Mississippi pilot, Horace Bixby. The romance of the great river, its raffish steamboat life and its eerie call – ‘mark twain!,’ i.e. two fathoms of water beneath us – occupied him for four years.