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

by John Sutherland

  FN

  Enoch Arnold Bennett

  MRT

  The Card

  Biog

  M. Drabble, Arnold Bennett: A Biography (1974)

  109. John Oliver Hobbes 1867–1906

  If the gods have no sense of humour they must weep a great deal.

  Pearl Richards was born in Boston, America. Her family was enriched by patent medicines, notably Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Pearl grew up deeply attached to her father, John Morgan Richards (1841–1918): a cultivated magnate, he purchased the Academy literary magazine (a precursor of the TLS) in 1896. The Richards family moved to London in 1868 and it was in that city the young girl spent her formative years. She was brought up in the style approved for upper-class English girls, attending boarding schools in Berkshire and at Paris. Her literary sensibility was remarkably precocious, her first story being published when she was nine.

  Richards was presented at court in 1886 and, aged nineteen, she married an English banker, Reginald Walpole Craigie (1860–1930), whom she had met in America. There was one child, a son, born in 1890, whom she had tried unsuccessfully to abort with a particularly violent bout of horse-riding. In the same year the couple parted. She did not give marriage much of a try but her partisans point out that he was drunken, unfaithful, and infected her with venereal disease. Whatever else, Craigie gave his wife the principal theme of her subsequent fiction – utterly wretched marriage and the rottenness of the male sex. The couple were eventually divorced messily, on the grounds of his adultery, in 1895. Three years earlier Craigie had converted to Catholicism. She took a lifelong vow of celibacy, as a conventual gesture. At the same period she resolved both to educate herself and to pursue a career in literature. She had earlier enrolled to study at University College London, the ‘Godless Place in Gower Street’, for whose English Department she retained a lifelong affection. In the divorce proceedings she had been accused of misconduct with a UCL professor.

  In 1891 she published her first novel, Some Emotions and a Moral. The story of an ill-assorted and mutually unfaithful marriage, the work is written with a light, worldly wise touch – and was very successful. Since it first appeared in Fisher Unwin’s ‘Pseudonym Library’, the author was obliged to devise a pen-name, John Oliver Hobbes. ‘John’ she took from her father, ‘Oliver’ from Cromwell, and ‘Hobbes’ from the author of Leviathan. No woman qualified. She followed up with other modish studies of sex and bohemian manners, dedicated to her view that ‘if the gods have no sense of humour they must weep a great deal’. Representative of this highpoint of her career is The Herb-Moon (1896), the story of the courtship between a young clerk, Robsart, and an older woman, Rose, whom he initially supposes to be a widow. In fact, she is married to a husband locked up in a lunatic asylum. After many years (and his winning a VC in the Indian Mutiny) they eventually marry. The odd title is a proverbial reference to long engagements. On the strength of such chronicles of sexual cross-purpose, her striking looks, her wealth, and her father’s literary clout, Hobbes became a fashionable London woman of letters. Her most enduring work is the pair of novels with a pronounced Catholic-Disraelian theme, The School for Saints (1897) and Robert Orange (1900).

  George Moore, with whom she was sexually (if chastely) and emotionally involved, represents Hobbes vindictively in his fiction. In later life she was – like Mrs Humphry Ward – a member of the Anti-Suffrage League and president of the Society of Women Journalists, 1895–6. She never enjoyed good health, and died young. A John Oliver Hobbes scholarship was established in her memory at University College London (even winners vaguely presume it is in honour of the author of Leviathan). Carter’s Little Liver Pills were designated a quack remedy (at least as regards the liver’s well-being) by the FDA in 1951 and have since disappeared from the drugstore shelves.

  FN

  John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie; née Richards)

  MRT

  The School for Saints

  Biog

  M. D. Harding, Air-Bird in the Water: The Life and Works of Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) (1996)

  110. Norman Douglas 1868–1952

  Caprese.

  There was a time when, in smart literary conversations, Norman Douglas was regarded as one of the smartest things going. Part of that smartness was his keeping, for the whole of his long depraved life, one jump ahead of the law. Douglas raised literary escapology to a Houdini level. He was caricatured everywhere in the fiction of his period. The most vivid portrait is the giggling, drunken, wicked, travel writer, with exquisite manners and frayed shirt cuffs, ‘James Argyle’ in D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Douglas was actually admired, when not despised, by Lawrence and unequivocally admired by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, and even Virginia Woolf. Graham Greene – in his Capri visits – reckoned him a ‘friend’. Joseph Conrad was a house guest and, on one occasion, helped save Douglas from arrest. Elizabeth David, another long-term Caprese, cooked for him, and picked up recipes from him. Echoes of Douglas’s one lastingly important novel, South Wind (1917), are thrown back everywhere in Aldous Huxley’s earliest work. Nabokov also admired Douglas and ‘Sebastian Knight’ has a newly published copy of South Wind on his shelves. James Joyce used Douglas’s non-fiction book on the street games of London children as a quarry for Finnegans Wake.

  Douglas was born of mixed Scottish and German extraction in Austria. His mother was the daughter of a baron, his father a distinguished archaeologist, who killed himself chamois-hunting when Norman (the third son) was five. There was money as well as breeding in the Douglas family, deriving from cotton mills in Germany. He was educated at English schools although German remained his first language (of many) throughout life. As a prelude to a long career in sexual delinquency he was kicked out of Uppingham School, aged fifteen. He completed his education at a Gymnasium in Karlsruhe where, over the following six years, he embarked on a promising career in zoology. He was publishing in learned journals before he was twenty.

  Douglas’s first, life-changing, visit to the island of Capri, ‘Siren Land’, was in 1888, ostensibly to capture blue lizards. Reptiles were his special subject. In later life he affectionately called the children he abused ‘crocodiles’. Douglas resolved on a career which would enable him to travel and in 1893 he sailed through the necessary examinations and entered the British Foreign Office. His first posting was to St Petersburg. What might have been a promising start in life was dashed by his incorrigible sexual turpitude. He conducted affairs, simultaneously, with three aristocratic Russian women and impregnated one. He was lucky to escape with his life and prudently took early retirement. He had, fortuitously, just come into his patrimony. Now rich, he purchased a villa in Naples. The following year, 1898, he married a cousin, Elsa FitzGibbon – it was an inauspicious register office affair. She was pregnant and he feared he had contracted a dose of syphilis. The couple devoted themselves to travel, had two sons and many quarrels.

  The first year of the new century saw Douglas’s first literary production, Unprofessional Tales. It was written in collaboration with his wife in North Africa and published under the pseudonym ‘Normyx’. The dedication was to Ouida, a fellow lover of Italy. However, the Douglases divorced in 1904 on the grounds of her adultery – her protests about his pederasty did not hold up in court. Having disposed of his sons at British boarding school, Douglas then removed to Capri, where he built himself a villa. The publication of his successful travel book, Old Calabria (1915), coincided with the total loss of his fortune. For the second forty years of his life he lived by his pen and sponged his way to the comfortable lifestyle that was essential to him. In 1904 he claimed his sexuality had switched: from this point on his interests were exclusively pederastic.

  Douglas’s Mediterranean travel writing chimed with the public taste. But his career was more conveniently prosecuted in London, where he moved in 1910. From 1912 to 1916 he worked, as assistant editor, on Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. He was now a figure in li
terary circles and a sought after diner-out, relished for his naughtiness. The naughtiness went rather too far when, in 1916, he was arrested for indecent assault on a sixteen-year-old boy. The war years were not (as for D. H. Lawrence, whose Rainbow was on the censor’s bonfire) tolerant years for the sexually heterodox. Douglas, as he would always do, fled, ‘burning his bridges behind him’, as was his motto. He jumped his bail and escaped jail, later composing a mocking valediction: ‘Norman Douglas of Capri, and of Naples and Florence, was formerly of England, which he fled during the war to avoid persecution for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling.’

  Douglas returned, inevitably, to tolerant Capri. At this point, in 1916, he set to writing South Wind – his love letter to the island. What he particularly loved, and celebrated, was its ability to evaporate everything – particularly things like sex, religion and politics that so preoccupied the larger world – into airy unimportance.

  South Wind is a conversation novel – Peacock-like if one looks backward, Huxley-like if one looks forward in literary time. It is essentially plotless. There is some faint dribble of narrative towards a crime of violence which has no impact whatsoever. What stays in the mind, and can still delight, is the clever schoolboy flights of satire – as that on the island’s patroness of sailors, Saint Eulalia:

  She was born in 1712 at a remote village in the Spanish province of Estramadura. Various divine portents accompanied her birth. Her mother dreamed a strange dream about a sea-serpent; her father was cured of a painful gouty affliction; the image of Saint James of Compostella in the local church was observed to smile benignly at the very hour of her entry into the world. At the age of two years and eleven months she took the vow of chastity. Much difficulty was experienced in keeping the infant alive; she tormented her body in so merciless a fashion. She refused to partake of food save once in every five weeks; she remained immovable ‘like a statue’ for months on end; she wore under her rough clothing iron spikes which were found, after death, to have entered deeply into her flesh. She was never known to use a drop of water for purposes of ablution or to change her underwear more than once a year, and then only at the order of her confessor who was obliged to be in daily contact with her.

  South Wind came out in England in 1917, the grimmest, coldest year of the war: an event which, although contemporary in setting, it studiously makes no reference.

  After the war, with Capri as his base, Douglas toured the fleshpots of Europe. He had a profitable sideline in collectors’ editions of his monographs about Capri finely produced by his Italian publisher, Pino Orioli, famous as the publisher of the first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Orioli’s editions de luxe helped him get by, along with the odd annuity, legacy, and much cadging. Lady Chatterley irritated him intensely. In 1928, the year Orioli published it, Douglas brought out his privately printed booklet, Some Limericks, which comprised scabrous poems with mockingly owlish apparatus. When I was in the army, in the late 1950s, national servicemen were still merrily (and unknowingly) bawling out Douglas’s limericks. A particular favourite was:

  There was a young man from Australia

  Who painted his bum like a dahlia.

  Tuppence a smell was all very well

  But thruppence a lick was a failure.

  So much for Kangaroo.

  In 1937, offences against minors (including, by way of variety, infant girls) forced Douglas out of Italy, with only an hour to spare. More painfully, the Second World War forced him back to London. He was now a much-faded figure on the literary scene and wretched on the short rations allowed even a gentleman like himself. After the war he returned, gratefully, to Capri, where he lived out his long vicious life, crippled in his last years by arteriosclerosis. He died, apparently from a self-administered overdose of drugs: excess had always been his style. According to Time magazine, he died ‘in penury in a rented villa’. In fact he was still, from various sources, pulling in £1,000 a year – which probably counted as penury to Norman Douglas. There are two versions of his last words. One has it that they were ‘love, love, love’. Another, more plausible, is they were: ‘Get these fucking nuns away from me.’

  FN

  George Norman Douglas(s)

  MRT

  South Wind

  Biog

  M. Holloway, Norman Douglas: A Biography (1976)

  111. Booth Tarkington 1869–1946

  Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy.

  Tarkington is a famous novelist whose actual name is everywhere forgotten. Echoes of his grandiloquent prose (in Orson Welles’s fruity baritone and filmic montage) have kept his work, if not its author, fresh and alive, while contemporaries like Winston Churchill (the other one, the American who wrote novels) – judged greater in their time – have faded utterly. Booth Tarkington was Indiana-born (a ‘Hoosier’) and a lifelong booster of the region, particularly his native Indianapolis which changed during Tarkington’s lifetime from a quiet rural town to an industrial powerhouse – this is the background to George Minafer’s ‘comeuppance’, and his family’s decay, in the last scenes of The Magnificent Ambersons (1918). Tarkington’s first novel – not his best but his most characteristic – was The Gentleman from Indiana (1899). His father was a lawyer, later a judge, and his pedigree was locally ‘magnificent’. Like the Ambersons, the Tarkingtons were among Indianapolis’s ‘top 500’. Booth’s unused forename, ‘Newton’, honoured an uncle, currently Governor of California.

  Tarkington attended Princeton where he enjoyed king-of-the-campus status: he was voted most popular man in his 1893 class. A fellow student recalled him as ‘the only Princeton man who had ever been known to play poker (with his left hand), write a story for the Nassau Lit (with his right hand), and lead the singing in a crowded room, performing these three acts simultaneously.’ Such ambidexterity rarely makes for academic achievement and Tarkington did not graduate (although in the years of his fame Princeton would award him two honorary degrees). He tried public life, unsuccessfully, and was, for one term in 1902, a State Representative in the Indiana government. He married twice; the only child to his marriages dying early. The vicissitudes of childhood would be a principal theme in his best-known and bestselling fiction.

  Tarkington had his first bestseller with Monsieur Beaucaire (1900), a ‘no man is a hero to his valet’ spoof on the current American rage for historical fiction. His hero is an aristocrat who disguises himself as a barber. The novel was made into a successful silent movie, with Rudolph Valentino and later into a 1940s comic vehicle for Bob Hope. Tarkington’s stories slipped very easily onto the screen – it was a major source of his large income in later life. But he had even greater success with his comic epics about the trials of youth. Adolescence, the awkward years between childhood and adulthood, was a psycho-genetic category invented in America at this period by G. Stanley Hall. Tarkington popularised it in Penrod (1914). Penrod Schofield – invariably accompanied by his dog Duke, and latterly with his gang: Sam Williams, Maurice Levy, Georgie Bassett and Herman (the second Jewish and the last black) – is an eleven-year-old rebel against the middle-class values of his Midwest family and community. His little battles are narrated in arch-ironic style by Tarkington. Penrod clearly draws on Tom Sawyer and just as clearly inspired Richmal Crompton’s Just William (1922). Addressed principally to adult readers, both depictions of juvenile machismo exude tolerant adult amusement at the barbarism of the young male child in Western civilization. Penrod inspired the sequels Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jashber (1929).

  Tarkington continued this bestselling vein with Seventeen (1916). With eighteen-year-olds (and, after 1917, American boys) dying by the hundred thousand in France in 1914–18, his idylls offered escape to a safer, if imaginary, world. Adolescence agonistes of a more tragic kind is portrayed in Georgie Minafer of The Magnificent Ambersons (1918). This novel made up a trilogy with The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1924) and earned Tarkington two prizes and a front page on Time magazine
in 1925. Like everyone else, the young Orson Welles read them admiringly.

  Around this period Tarkington was losing his sight, and his later novels – none of which enjoyed the success of the earlier – were dictated. Royalties and film rights enriched him and allowed him to indulge a taste for English eighteenth-century painting and fine furniture for his mansion in Indianapolis. He was increasingly right-wing in later years, conceiving a violent distaste for FDR, the New Deal, and virtually everything that happened after 1929 – not least to his beloved Indianapolis. It is this lifelong visceral antagonism to change, together with a fatalistic acceptance of it, which gives eloquence to such speeches as Eugene Morgan’s – the Henry Ford ‘man of the future’ – in The Magnificent Ambersons. The speech is delivered, verbatim, by Joseph Cotton in the Welles-directed film:

  ‘I’m not sure [George] is wrong about automobiles,’ [Eugene] said. ‘With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization – that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess.’