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

by John Sutherland

  He might have stayed a pilot all his working life but for two things: the Civil War and the fact that he was chronically nervous at the helm. As Bixby later said, ‘No sir, Sam Clemens knew the river, but being a coward he was a failure as a pilot.’ A school dropout Twain was also a draft dodger. The Civil War was not, he decided, for him. It was less ‘cowardice’ than rational judgement. Instead he tried silver mining in Nevada. There he struck it rich but – ‘a millionaire for two days’ – his claim was jumped. Finally he hit pay-dirt in San Francisco as a journalist. Here, in 1865, he had his first great stroke of luck. His comic sketch, ‘Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog’ became a nationwide hit. It’s a story about ‘the curiosest man about always betting’ who has a prodigiously athletic frog, ‘Dan’l Webster’. Having wagered $40, Jim, to his surprise, loses the bet. His crafty opponent – as a leaden belch reveals – has loaded down poor Dan’l’s belly with buckshot.

  After the fame of his frog tale, Twain had the Midas touch. ‘It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold,’ he later said. But Twain destroyed money. He built houses the size of castles and he had ‘a lifelong losing streak’ as an investor. He invented the self-adjusting suspenders (i.e. braces) and an early version of the Post-it – both were costly failures. He also sank the equivalent of $4-million in modern cash into a typesetting process which went nowhere. However, Twain was always able to write his way out of financial misfortune – his life is half a dozen American success stories. None the less the question remains: what makes Mark Twain the greatest American writer, the founder of his nation’s modern literature? One can answer with three words: voice, eye and attitude.

  First, voice: Twain’s art was honed at the lectern and in the saloon. He crafted American literature into something that is heard, as much as read. Huckleberry Finn (1884) carries a foreword warning the reader that ‘in this book a number of dialects are used’. No less than five versions of the ‘Pike County’ voice will be detected, he says. The novel demands a well-tuned ear. Huck’s own dialect has recently been the subject of controversy. Did Twain, as Shelley Fisher Fishkin has controversially argued, lift it from the African Americans he grew up with? Listen to the following famous sentence and judge for yourself (Huck is abasing himself to Jim, whom he has cruelly tricked):

  It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.

  Interestingly Richard Pryor, the stand-up comedian, acknowledged Twain as his inspiration. Mark Twain, we may say, made American literature talk – unlike, say, Henry James, who merely made it write.

  Secondly, eye: Twain’s first successful book was The Innocents Abroad (1869), and it was throughout his life his bestselling title. The account of an American’s (un)grand tour, the work’s proclaimed purpose ‘is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes’. His own ‘innocent’ American eyes, that is. As later works, notably A Tramp Abroad (1880) testify, it was a jaundiced gaze he cast on the world.

  This links to Twain’s attitude – ‘feisty’ is the appropriate word. Note, for example, the warning at the head of Huckleberry Finn: ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’ Take these three elements – voice, eye, attitude – and, as Hemingway argued, you have the essence of a national literature. After Twain no one could dismiss it as ‘English literature written in America’. It was itself. In his Nobel acceptance speech in 1954, Hemingway mused: ‘I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain.’ Why not? Because Twain was a ‘humorist,’ what Matthew Arnold (that arch-prig) called a ‘Yankee funny man’. No comic writer has ever won the world’s major literary prize, nor ever will. Stockholm has a poor sense of humour.

  FN

  Mark Twain (born Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

  MRT

  Huckleberry Finn

  Biog

  J. Loving, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (2010)

  66. B. L. Farjeon 1838–1903

  His mood (when it wasn’t irascible) was overflowingly generous. Eleanor Farjeon

  Farjeon’s father, Jacob, was a London ‘old clothes’ merchant, an orthodox Jew newly arrived in Europe from North Africa. Young Benjamin was brought up in poverty, ‘almost without education’, in Whitechapel, but ‘rigorously’ in the Jewish faith. At thirteen, restless under his father’s domestic discipline and having just read Bulwer-Lytton’s The Caxtons three times, he added a lofty ‘Leopold’ to his name and determined on authorship as his career, declaring: ‘I should be content to die if I had written such a book.’ He began working life as a printer’s devil at fourteen on the Christian Nonconformist newspaper at four shillings a week. Farjeon broke entirely with his family at the age of seventeen, and went off to make his fortune in the Australian goldfields, travelling steerage to Melbourne. An ‘atheist uncle’ staked him £50 to do so. He later moved on to New Zealand at the age of twenty-three, where he supported himself by journalism on the Otago Daily Times, under the editor and future Prime Minister, Julius Vogel.

  About the same period, Farjeon began to write fiction. Everyone who knew him at the time was struck by his dynamism. ‘He splashed you with his exuberance,’ recalled one friend. From the first, the dominating influence was Dickens, whose disciple he proclaimed himself. In 1866, his story of a Melbourne street arab, Grif, enjoyed considerable success. The vagrant hero is closely modelled on Jo, the crossing-sweeper, in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852), even down to the catchphrase: ‘He wos wery good to me, he wos.’ Passages such as that below, echoing Jo’s response to the oleaginous Chadband, would verge on plagiarism was not the imitation so reverently offered:

  He had attended some meetings of the Moral Bootblacking Boys’ Reformatory, and had heard a great deal about morality; and, albeit he would have been considerably perplexed if he had been asked to define the meaning of the word, it could not but be presumed that he had been much edified by the moral essays and exhortations to which he had listened. And yet his mental condition, when he came away from those meetings, was one of perplexity. He could not see the connection between morality and a bellyful of food. ‘It’s all very well,’ he would mutter, ‘for them coves who’s got lots to eat and drink to talk about morality; but what good does it do me?’

  In 1868, Farjeon returned to England, encouraged by a letter from his idol, offering to accept ‘any original communication’ in All the Year Round. Enough said. Over the following ten years, he turned out a stream of novels, mostly with the publisher Tinsley. They show the strong influence of Dickens, Walter Besant and Wilkie Collins. The most interesting of them, Aaron the Jew (1894), is a powerful indictment of anti-Semitism in the 1870s. Farjeon wrote other novels on the topic of the Jew in England, for example, Solomon Isaacs (1877) and Pride of Race (1901).

  In 1877 he married Margaret, the daughter of the American actor, Joseph Jefferson. She was a Protestant. Farjeon did not himself convert to Christianity, but neither did he impose Judaism on his children. In later life he gave crowd-pleasing readings of his short pieces (most popularly, extracts from Grif) in America, following, again, the example of his mentor Dickens. He died comfortably off in Hampstead.

  His daughter, the well-known children’s author Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965), evoked her father’s household vividly and his personality fondly in A Nursery in the Nineties (1935). Especially poignant is her description of his waning grip on public popularity at the turn of the century as dementia clouded his once lively mind.

  FN

  Benjamin Leopold Farjeon

  MRT

  Aaron the Jew

  Biog

  ODNB (William Baker)

  67. Ouid
a 1839–1908

  Je n’écris pas pour les femmes, j’écris pour les militaries. Ouida’s boast

  Ouida’s French-sounding nom de plume – and the social plumage it suggests – derives from a childhood corruption of her Christian name. She might, less happily, have been ‘Lulu’ or, perish the thought, ‘Lou’. She was born, humbly enough, Maria Louise Ramé at Bury St Edmunds, where her Guernsey-born father, Louis Ramé, was a teacher of French. Her mother (née Sutton) was as English as Suffolk mutton. M. Ramé gave his quick-witted, artistic and precocious daughter an unusually good education for a country girl of her background but paternal care he did not give. In the 1860s he went off to Paris and – as Louise liked to think – disappeared during the upheaval of the 1871 Commune. Or he may just have walked out on what had proved an uninteresting entanglement in the English provinces. Ouida could never bring herself to believe that.

  In 1859, while staying in Hammersmith, Louise was introduced to Harrison Ainsworth, one of the great men in the London literary world. He was kind to her and she sent him a short story ‘Dashwood’s Drag: Or the Derby and What Came of It’ for his magazine. Ainsworth liked it immensely and took a score more of fashionably ‘fast’ stories from the young authoress. He also took, in serial form, her first novel – Held in Bondage (1863), the story of Granville de Vigne, the heir to £20,000 a year, a superb sportsman, and a general swell. Aided by his ‘inseparable’, Vivian Sabretasche, Granville sets out to win the reigning beauty, ‘the Trefusis’. Complications ensue.

  Now ‘Ouida’, she went on to produce her perennial bestseller, Under Two Flags (1867). The Hon. Bertie Cecil of the Life Guards flees England to protect the honour of a lady and enlists in the Chasseurs d’Afrique, where he performs prodigies of valour against Arab rebels and incurs the implacable enmity of the sadistic Colonel Chateauroy. In a tremendous final scene he is saved from execution by Cigarette, the gamin camp follower who loves him madly, and who throws herself into the hail of firing-squad bullets meant for his breast (ballistically improbable – romantically beautiful).

  Ouida was now the belle of literary London. She removed, with her mother, to Italy, residing in the Langham Hotel when in London, where she reserved a whole floor, and styled herself ‘de la Ramée’. Self-promotion always came easily for her. She created a fascinating and glamorous image in the minds of her English readers and sensational rumours attached to the mysterious Englishwoman with the French name. There were also absurdly high claims made for her romantic fiction. Even Henry James claimed to admire her ‘artistry’.

  In 1871 a short-lived affair with a Florentine aristocrat – in which she behaved absurdly – provoked the revenge novel, Friendship (1878). She was by now settled with her mother in a villa in Florence. Here, for a few years, she lived very well. She was an idealist of sorts. She loved dogs and campaigned against vivisection. She wrote sympathetically on behalf of the oppressed Italian peasantry, in novels such as A Village Commune (1881): Ouida was no friend to Communitarianism, which, she believed, was socialism with another name. But she wrote intelligently about international politics, supporting the Boers’ struggle in South Africa. Satires such as Moths (1880) showed her to be sharp-eyed about European aristocracy.

  By the 1890s, Ouida had outlived her vogue. Glamour such as hers did not age well. Nor had she looked after her copyrights. Her last eighteen years were passed in increasing penury and she died in virtual destitution, aided by a tiny Civil List pension. She remained, however, indomitably proud and furiously spurned Marie Corelli’s attempt to publicise her plight in the ‘gutter press’ London papers. She also remained an animal lover: at the time of her death she had, it was said, more dogs than readers. Louise de la Ramée died at Viareggio, Italy, of pneumonia. She is commemorated by a monument – a watering trough for her four-legged friends – in Bury St Edmunds, a town she herself never commemorated in her cosmopolitan, high-flown, Ouidaesque fiction.

  FN

  ‘Ouida’ (Maria Louise de la Ramé(e))

  MRT

  Under Two Flags

  Biog

  E. Bigland, Ouida: The Passionate Victorian (1951)

  68. Thomas Hardy 1840–1928

  Hanged Woman

  Nineteenth-century novelists were fascinated by hangings. Walter Scott secured a good window place, at some personal cost, to observe, at leisure, the public execution of the grave-robber, William Hare (of Burke and Hare) in 1829. There are plenty of stringings-up and enough drawing-and-quartering to satisfy even Brave-heart-lovers in the Waverley novels. Bulwer-Lytton’s most notorious novel is about a hanged man, Eugene Aram, which pioneered a school of fiction, the ‘Newgate’ novel, based on the lives of notorious murderers hanged by the neck at Tyburn.

  Thackeray attended one such public execution of François Courvoisier in 1840. Like Scott, he purchased a window view. He was appalled by the merriment of the crowd, but transfixed by the grisly ‘second murder’. Courvoisier, a valet who had cut his master’s throat, claimed to have been inspired to his crime by reading Ainsworth’s novel, Jack Sheppard, which climaxes with the hero being publicly hanged where Courvoisier himself would swing. A passing remark in Thackeray’s ‘On Going to See a Man Hanged’ (1840), about how the doxies serving spectators in back-alleys around Courvoisier’s execution did not exactly remind him of Dickens’s virtuous Nancy, sparked off a furious row with the other novelist. Dickens was also fascinated by hanging (in Oliver Twist both Fagin and Sikes are ‘stretched’) and wrote about the repulsive but irresistible attraction of public execution. He introduces a hangman – who ends up hanged – in Barnaby Rudge.

  Great Expectations opens with the encounter between Magwitch and Pip, which will determine Pip’s life, on the Romney marshes. An image forecasts the future of both the escaped convict (ultimately sentenced to hang) and Pip (‘born to hang’, as Mrs Joe thinks):

  On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered, – like an unhooped cask upon a pole, – an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again.

  George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, climaxes at the scene of a public hanging. One could go on – and doubtless, in a Ph.D. dissertation, some scholar has. But of all the great novelists of his time, Hardy qualifies as the most thoughtful, and most morbidly sensitive, spectator of hangings. They feature prominently in his fiction. Hanging is central to the short stories ‘The Withered Arm’ and ‘The Three Strangers’. Once read, one will never forget the rabbit (‘hanged by the leg’) squealing night-long in Jude the Obscure, nor Little Father Time and his two siblings hanged by the neck, on the clothes-hook in the lodging-house wardrobe. In Far from the Madding Crowd, after shooting Troy, Boldwood rings the bell-pull at vast red-bricked Dorchester Gaol, alongside the gateway where he expects to meet his end. Boldwood is actually reprieved – unusual in Victorian England – perhaps because the young Hardy was prevailed on to sweeten his ending by his editor.

  Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the story of a murderess who is hanged at Wintoncester, the ancient capital of Wessex, after preparing herself (‘pure woman’ that she is) on the sacrificial slab at Stonehenge:

  Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.

  ‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they a
rose, joined hands again, and went on.

  This is a long shot – just as memorable are Hardy’s close-ups of the hanged body; ‘the line the colour of an unripe blackberry’ on the corpse’s neck, for example. Hardy knew what he was writing about. He had witnessed two hangings in his youth that stayed with him all his life and the more famous of the two inspired Tess Durbeyfield. When he was sixteen, as Hardy recalled, seventy years later: ‘I am ashamed to say I saw [Martha Browne] hanged, my only excuse being that I was but a youth and had to be in the town at that time for other reasons … I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’