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

by John Sutherland

  The manuscript he was working on, post-coitally, was An American Tragedy. It would be published, after the usual long quarrels with the publishers, in 1925. The idea for the novel was an actual murder. In 1906 Chester Gillette, a junior clerk at a skirt factory, impregnated a working girl, Grace Brown, thus foiling his aim to rise in life by marrying the boss’s daughter. He duped the mother of his unborn child with an offer of marriage, took her to an idyllic lake in the Adirondacks, and may or may not have clubbed her with a tennis racket and allowed her to drown. It is possible that at the last moment Gillette lost his nerve and did not intend to do it. But after huge publicity he went to the electric chair. Dreiser moved the action of An American Tragedy to the 1920s. ‘I call it an American tragedy,’ he explained, ‘because it could not happen in any other country in the world.’ America’s pervasive ‘tragic error’, he argued, was the belief that you could rise in life to fulfil your dream and were justified in whatever means you chose to do it – like clubbing an inconveniently fertile girl to death with a tennis racquet.

  At last Dreiser had hit the jackpot: the reviews were ecstatic. An American Tragedy sold more copies in a month than all his earlier fiction combined. And it helped rather than hindered that it was banned in Boston. It was, wrote one critic, the ‘Mount Everest’ of American fiction: at 400,000 words it was certainly mountainous. The publisher, Boni & Liveright, was obliged to bring it out in two volumes, even after Dreiser had shortened the text drastically. ‘What’s 50,000 words between friends?’ he is reported to have quipped.

  Mencken, until this point Dreiser’s stoutest friend, took exception to the verbosity. It was, he wrote, less a novel than ‘a heaping cartload of raw materials for a novel.’ The criticism ruptured the friendship between the men for a decade. Poor all his life, Dreiser was now, at the age of fifty-four, flush. He was able to run three or four women simultaneously – Helen was the only one who lasted – and build himself a country mansion in upper New York State. He called the place ‘Iroki’, Japanese for ‘the spirit of beauty’.

  In his last decades, Dreiser wrote little fiction and drifted towards socialism, deism and incorrigible pessimism. He wrote memoirs, of which Dawn: an Autobiography of Early Youth (1931) stands out, crusaded against literary censorship and stood –sometimes at personal risk – alongside the striking workers of America. During the Second World War he frankly expressed the hope that Germany would crush England, a country he loathed as heartily as Josef Goebbels. His wife died in 1942, but he did not remarry and left no (acknowledged) children. His last illness-racked years were spent in the warmth of southern California. One of his last acts was to join the Communist Party – had he lived, Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee would have had fine sport with him. His fellow ‘red’, and late-life friend, Charlie Chaplin read one of Dreiser’s militantly political poems (‘The Road I Came’) over the novelist’s coffin as it was lowered into the soil of Forest Lawn. It should have been Chicago.

  FN

  Herman Theodore Dreiser

  MRT

  An American Tragedy

  Biog

  Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey (1993)

  117. Zane Grey 1872–1939

  I love my work but do not know how I write it.

  Zane Grey was born in Zanesville, Ohio, a town named after his maternal grandfather. On his mother’s side, he could trace his ancestry further back to Mayflower days. Unsurprisingly it inspired a strong sense of his all-American heritage. Grey’s father was, rather less inspiringly, a dentist of undistinguished ancestry. A gifted athlete, as was his brother Romer, the young Zane (he wisely dropped the ‘Pearl’ his parents had lumbered him with) won a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. He graduated in 1896 with a degree in dentistry (having extracted himself from an awkward paternity suit – he had a weakness for women throughout life) and set up in practice in New York where, in 1905, he married seventeen-year-old Lina (‘Dolly’) Roth, an extraordinarily energetic woman, and an English major from Hunter College. She encouraged her dentist husband to write Westerns in the great tradition of James Fenimore Cooper – there was more gold in them thar hills than in the mouths of New Yorkers. In subsequent years Lina acted as Grey’s editor and literary agent. It was a full-time job. At the zenith of his popularity, sales of Grey’s Westerns in America were reckoned to be second only to the Bible. He was an unfaithful husband, but she tolerated his waywardness in return for her 50 per cent share of his royalties.

  Grey’s first novel Betty Zane (1903) was an act of homage to his Ohio ancestors. It was hard to write – he was never naturally fluent, and Dolly tidied his prose up – but it put him on the road. Supported by her savings, he gave up his New York surgery and moved to a cottage in rural Pennsylvania to concentrate on fiction. There was a ready market for Westerns in the East Coast’s booming story magazines aimed at the unhappily urbanised American male, frustrated men who subscribed longingly to Owen Wister’s belief that the West was ‘the great playground of young men’ and that the cowpuncher was ‘the last romantic figure on our soil’. Grey made his first momentous trip to Arizona in 1907, in the company of old-timer Colonel C. J. (‘Buffalo’) Jones, which blazed the trail for The Heritage of the Desert (1910). He went on to hit the jackpot with Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). The novel was bought by the top New York publisher Harper, after the proprietor consulted his wife on the matter. Throughout his career Grey’s publishers cannily partnered him with gifted illustrators such as N. C. Wyeth and Charles Russell; for this novel it was Douglas Duer.

  Riders has one of the best and most imitated openings in Western fiction. The narrative is set in the early 1870s and features a maiden in bondage, Grey’s standby scenario. Jane Withersteen is heiress to a vast ranch among the purple sage of the Utah–Arizona border. She is a Mormon (somewhat lukewarm in her faith, as it emerges) and is under siege from the lecherous ‘Elder’ Tull who wants her for his harem and his property portfolio. The action opens with a young ‘rider’ (cow-puncher) about to be whipped by Tull for the offence of being liked by Jane – a relatively mild punishment: Mormons, it is hinted, routinely castrate ‘Gentiles’ who hang round their women. Enter a lone rider, dressed in black, packing two black Colt pistols. His name is ‘Lassiter’. The stranger faces down Tull and his men and rescues Bern Venters from the Mormon lash. Lassiter is the archetypal lone wolf: middle aged, world-weary but alert, hard and lean as whipcord, a man of few words who is invincible in gunplay. A line of film stars, notably Tom Mix and Randolph Scott, made their careers playing Lassiter variants. The line can be followed through to Clint Eastwood, the last scene of whose last Western, Unforgiven (even down to the whipping), is the first scene of Riders of the Purple Sage. Hollywood, which has always been nervous of meddling in religion, habitually transformed Grey’s villainous Mormons to Indians.

  On the breakthrough success of his novel (the first Western to make the New York Times bestseller list) and the scores that followed, Grey went on to live a Hemingwayesque life, basing himself on the West Coast. Other than writing, his main occupations were big-game hunting, ocean fishing and world travel. He loved Santa Catalina, the island off the Southern California coast, handily close to Hollywood. His residence survives on the island as a thriving ‘Zane Grey’ pueblo hotel where the Western-styled rooms are named after various of his bestsellers. The bison he brought to the island still graze free. He also had a hacienda in Altadena, underneath the San Gabriels, where he could hear the coyotes howl by night; and hunting lodges in Arizona and Oregon, where the grizzly still roamed. His lifestyle required an incessant stream of fiction (and film rights) to support it. In all he turned out some fifty-eight full-length Westerns for which worldwide sales of 250 million are claimed. With 108 film adaptations of his stories, he tops the achievement of any other writer, in any genre.

  Although Grey killed wildlife joyously, with bullet, shotgun pellet and
barbed hook (in later life he would fish up to 300 days a year – giving the tuna a rest only when scrawling his daily 5,000 words), novels such as The Thundering Herd (1925) lament the wanton destruction of the American buffalo and The Vanishing American (1925) that of the American Indian. This elegiac mood is more pronounced in his later works, when the ‘frontier’ had reached the Pacific and was now only a myth – but a myth which his fiction burnished. Phenomenal though his earnings were, Grey ran through them as quickly as they poured in. By the mid-1930s, his popularity waned somewhat. His work did not lend itself to the new ‘singing cowboy’ style of new stars like Gene Autry. Ignoring his cardiac symptoms, he continued to over-exert himself. The heart, Grey maintained, was only a muscle and thrived on exercise. He was wrong, and died of a heart attack in 1939. His last words were, reportedly, ‘Don’t ever leave me, Dolly.’

  FN

  Pearl Zane Grey

  MRT

  Riders of the Purple Sage

  Biog

  Frank Gruber, Zane Grey: A Biography (1970)

  118. W. Somerset Maugham 1874–1965

  Lizard of Oz.

  According to his most recent biographer, Selina Hastings, Maugham was ‘for much of his long life … the most famous writer in the world’. The outline of that long and most famous life (but not all its secret chambers) is well enough known from Maugham’s own accounts – autobiographical and fictional. He was born in Paris, the belated fourth son of a staid British solicitor, in practice in the French capital. His early years – in which he was brought up as French – were, he always insisted, his happiest. That happiness ended with his mother’s death, in childbirth, when he was eight. Two years later, his father died. That loss young Willie could cope with. His mother, he said, not long before his own death, was the only person he had ever loved and her loss left a lasting wound.

  It was at this period that his lifelong stammer developed. In his autobiographical novel, Of Human Bondage, it is allegorised as a Byronic club foot. The ten-year-old Maugham, to all intents a little French boy, was transplanted to an uncle’s uncongenial vicarage in Kent and thence to the King’s School in Canterbury. He loved the cathedral – and he chose, at the end of his life, to be buried nearby – but, despite the influence of chapel, choirs and sermons, lost all religion while still at school. He was bullied and reacted by becoming a prize-winning swot. He was no good at team sports, although he was an athletic golfer and swimmer in later life, and at this period discovered he was bisexual. ‘I tried to persuade myself,’ he later said, ‘that I was three quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer – whereas really it was the other way round.’ His word ‘normal’ is telling. Throughout his life ‘an appearance of conventionality’, Hastings notes, was ‘all important’ to him. Appearance was as far as it had to go.

  Unconventionally, he did not go to university, but took a Lehrjahr, aged seventeen, in Germany before going to study medicine at St Thomas’s in London. Practice in the teeming slums, south of the river, laid the foundation for his first, Zolaesque, novel: Liza of Lambeth. The story of a factory girl, exploited, seduced, battered, abandoned, who dies in childbirth, it ends where Oliver Twist begins. Published in 1897 (the ‘year of jubilee’ as Gissing calls it in his Lambeth novel), it was well received and gave him an exit route from medicine. By then Maugham had discovered that his ‘real’ world was that created by his pen – a scalpel-like instrument in his hands. He would, in later work, ruthlessly anatomise friends and acquaintance, often cruelly: Aleister Crowley (the ‘Great Beast’) in The Magician or, most devastatingly, Hugh Walpole – whose reputation never recovered from his depiction as Alroy Kear – in Cakes and Ale (1930), a novel whose brilliance has faded for modern readers because Maugham so efficiently annihilated his subject. ‘He just looks on,’ said Joseph Conrad of Liza. The eye that looked on was cold and, in later life, was everywhere seen as reptilian: ‘The Lizard of Oz,’ Noël Coward called him. The lizard he most resembled, arguably, was the chameleon – Maugham was uncannily adept at changing his literary and theatrical styles to the changing moment and the ever-shifting preferences of his readers and audiences.

  After a couple of less successful novels he turned to Maupassant-like short stories and Ibsenesque drama. His first play, A Man of Honour (a ‘problem play’, as they were called, about a toff who marries a barmaid, with gloomy outcomes) was staged in 1903. For three decades thereafter the West End stage was, as Max Beerbohm joked, ‘Maughamised’. In 1908, he had no less than four plays running simultaneously. It made him very rich. His wealth was expertly looked after by the shrewdest of London agents, J. B. Pinker and a wise Wall Street admirer, whom he met on his first trip to America, in 1910. Maugham’s nomadism was by now established, as was his sexual adventurism. Wilde’s fate was still raw and Maugham (never a great drinker or roisterer) was discreet. He used ‘safe houses’ for casual sex and employed ‘secretaries’ for longer relationships. His appetite, one partner recalled, was ‘voracious’; his sexual demands ‘simple’.

  He was also cultivating himself as a man of wealth and taste. He could indulge his interests and ‘collect’ – particularly Impressionists, with whose techniques he felt an affinity. In 1911 he began writing the one work of his fiction which is sure to last, Of Human Bondage (1915). It tells the story of Philip Carey, and follows, with some dramatising variation, the course of Maugham’s own life from his mother’s premature death to his medical training. As a young man, Philip falls in with Mildred, a waitress, later a prostitute. Sex is typically a trap in Maugham’s narrative, and invariably finds a man’s Achilles heel (most vividly for the clergyman, Davidson, in ‘Rain’, who sets out to save Sadie’s soul, cannot resist her body, and cuts his throat, post coitum). It is plausibly assumed that Mildred was based on one of Maugham’s young male lovers. Maugham himself was ‘trapped’ – as he plausibly claimed – into marriage by an alimony-wealthy divorcée, Syrie Wellcome. The quarter of him that was not gay always enjoyed the occasional brief fling with women. Syrie got pregnant by him twice, declined to have their second child aborted, and demanded marriage. Maugham resentfully acquiesced. Marriage was one thing, Syrie would discover; married life something else.

  ‘Passionately patriotic,’ the forty-year-old Maugham volunteered for the Red Cross in 1914, and was then recruited as an agent in Britain’s embryonic secret intelligence service, spying for his country in Switzerland and Russia. His cold eye made him good at the great game. He carried a pistol in his pocket and this most exciting phase of his life inspired the post-war ‘Ashenden’ stories which, in turn, inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

  At this period, he was making his first exploratory trips to the Pacific and the Malay states, east of Suez. It would be one of his richest territories – for the Paul Gauguin bio-novel, The Moon and Sixpence (1919), and his short stories, most famously ‘Rain’ and ‘The Letter’ (both multiply filmed). He finished the war with a bad dose of TB, which required a year’s sanatorium treatment. He was, by now, living by expensive arrangement apart from his wife and new-born daughter (named after his wretched heroine, Liza), with the first of his ‘secretaries’, the American Gerald Haxton. Haxton was charming, alcoholic and sexually mischievous – a thorough-going ‘cad’. As the film director George Cukor said, ‘he kept Maugham in touch with the gutter’. Maugham was merely a visitor to such low places. After the war, he took up residence in a Moorish palace – the Villa Mauresque, on the Riviera, which would be his home for forty years. After Haxton drank and smoked himself into terminal TB, he installed another long-term secretary, Alan Searle – rougher trade, but more serviceable to the now ageing writer: the ‘ideal nanny’ one visitor called Searle.

  Between the wars, film adaptations added to Maugham’s fabulous income. He wrote as diligently as he had done when hard up, ‘unable to persuade myself,’ as he said in his memoir, The Summing Up (1938), ‘that anything else mattered’. A contingent important thing was his reputation as a writer and it infuri
ated him in late life when he was ‘only’ awarded a Companion of Honour, instead of the Order of Merit received by E. M. Forster. That mattered. The Depression, thanks to his American financial adviser, did not affect his prosperity, or the luxurious life that was now necessary to him. It did not, however, put him above world-historical events and he was obliged to decamp to the US during the Second World War.

  Afterwards he returned to his Riviera villa, surrounded by one of the world’s best private art collections. That world – including Winston Churchill, a leader of it – came to him, nowadays. English morality (his sexual preferences were by now an open secret) kept him in a state of semi-exile from what had never really been his homeland. He visited England regularly until the publication of a late-life memoir, Looking Back, in 1962. It was judged ungentlemanly in its attack on the recently dead Syrie, and led to his being ostracised by fellow members of the Garrick. It devastated him. ‘Alone with Alan, he wept and wept … the two of them returned to the Mauresque … and Maugham never came to England again.’ Three years later he died, aged ninety, mad, raving and wretched.

  FN

  William Somerset Maugham

  MRT

  Of Human Bondage

  Biog

  Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (2010)

  119. John Buchan 1875–1940

  He does not like to hear about his own books; he refuses to be classified as a literary man. Taffy Boulton, an Oxford contemporary