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

by John Sutherland

  When Jeffery was ten, the family moved to London, spending time at Lee in Kent, a county whose laureate he would later be. He left school early. From the first he aspired to be a writer, not a metal worker, and for a number of years sponged off his family, doing nothing. Finally, when his father encountered his layabout son emerging sleepily from his bedroom at noon (as he, the father, returned from his morning shift), there was a blazing row. It ‘ended by Jeffery being told that a job would be found for him with an engineering firm in Birmingham where he would be taught the useful craft of tool making’. He duly went off to lodge with an aunt; his brief experiences in the tool-making workshop were later romanticised in Beltane the Smith (1915). According to legend, a fracas with a foreman who called him a liar led to the apprentice being fired. A less legendary account has him being sent home for idling on the job. Observers record Farnol as being physically tiny (he wore size 5 in shoes throughout life) but ferociously physical by way of compensation. In later life he worked out with the age’s premier body-builder, Eugene Sandow, and mastered the many arts of fencing. His rapier technique was admired.

  For a while Farnol lodged again with his long-suffering family in London and studied at Westminster School of Art night classes. From childhood he had loved wood carving, particularly ships and dramatic scenes from history. But art did not pay; nor did model-making; or, at this stage, writing. In 1900 he married Blanche Hawley, the sixteen-year-old daughter of an American artist, over in England to visit relatives. She was, like him, diminutive (a ‘Pocket Venus’) and probably pregnant before the marriage. Neither family was informed of the event.

  Farnol borrowed £12 from his brother Edward, and emigrated to New York in 1902. Through the good offices of his artist father-in-law, the moderately eminent F. Hughson Hawley, he was employed there as a scene painter at the Astor Theatre. Farnol and Hawley, who had wanted better things for his daughter than an impecunious English dwarf with a paintbrush, quarrelled. The marriage broke up, temporarily, and Jeffery went off to slum it by himself in a ‘rat infested studio’ in New York’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’; a low period of his life, commemorated in The Definite Object (1917). He continued to write, doggedly, and in 1907 finally got a volume published, My Lady Caprice. It did not set the East River on fire. But it was over these tough years that he wrote the 200,000 words of his Regency romance, The Broad Highway: A Romance of Kent. No American publisher would take the manuscript on the grounds that it was ‘too long and too English’. Enterprisingly, Blanche sent it to her mother in England, who submitted it to Sampson Low, who accepted it with a £250 advance.

  Published in 1910, The Broad Highway went on to be a massive hit in the UK, and a year later in America, where it sold getting on for half-a-million copies. ‘Too English’ was now a strong selling point. Farnol’s narrative opens with a humorous ‘Ante Scriptum’ in which the author mulls over with a ‘companion of the road’ what kind of novel he shall write. The action opens in the Regency period with the reading of ‘Buck’ Vibart’s eccentric will. To one nephew, the scholarly Peter, he leaves ten guineas. To another nephew, the ‘rake’ Maurice, he leaves £20,000. Either nephew will be eligible for a half a million pounds, ‘if either shall, within one calendar year, become the husband of Lady Sophia Sefton of Cambourne’. Rollicking complications ensue. Farnol’s nimble picaresque, sword-clashing, and rose-tinted vision of the Regency period was much imitated – most profitably by Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland. Suddenly windfall-rich, the reunited Farnols returned to Britain and settled in a country house, Sunnyside, in Lee, Kent. Jeffery set to writing a string (eventually forty-strong) of ‘Regencies’, pirate tales and stories of the road. None achieved the runaway sales of The Broad Highway, although the Farnol name assured good sales right up to the time of his death. His theme – the pleasures of exuberant youth, usually in some romanticised past period of English history – never varied.

  Farnol was too old and too short-sighted, to serve in the First World War. Like other bestselling novelists, such as Hall Caine and John Buchan, he propagandised and reported from the Front, adding palpably to the pressure to get America into the fight. After the war, as a biographer records, ‘his fondness for gangsters and dandies did not always serve him well. He took into his employ a certain cad who robbed him of thousands of pounds over many years.’ A chronically quarrelsome man, he fell out with his surviving brother Edward (Ewart had been killed in the war). Persistently unfaithful, he divorced his first wife in 1938, marrying a younger woman, Phyllis, in the same year. They lived in Eastbourne until Farnol’s death, with one adopted daughter. His second wife completed his last novel, Justice by Midnight (1956), for those old enough to remember the author of The Broad Highway.

  FN

  John Jeffery Farnol

  MRT

  The Broad Highway: A Romance of Kent

  Biog

  J. A. Salmonson, ‘The life and times of Jeffery Farnol’ (http://www.violetbooks.com/farnol-bio.html)

  127. E. M. Forster 1879–1970

  Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order.

  Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex life as, say, slutty Lydia Bennet? E. M. Forster was a virgin until the age of thirty-nine when he had his first ‘full’ sexual experience (a ‘hurried sucking off,’ his most recent biographer, Wendy Moffat, informs us) with a passing soldier on a beach in Alexandria. By that point, five of Forster’s six novels were written and the last, A Passage to India, drafted. Until he was thirty, with his oeuvre behind him, he did not, he later confessed, ‘know exactly how male and female joined’. ‘Muddle and mystery’ between the sheets as well as in the Marabar caves.

  Does a writer’s carnal experience matter? D. H. Lawrence, the most unzipped of British novelists, believed it did. His chauvinist sneer at Austen as a ‘narrow gutted spinster’ indicates that some rumpy-pumpy would have done wonders for her fiction. Of Forster, Lawrence told Bertrand Russell, ‘Morgan sucks his dummy – you know, those child’s comforters – long after his age.’ He should, one deduces, have graduated to his grown-up sucking earlier, for the good of English literature.

  Moffat had first access to Forster’s recently (2008) derestricted diaries and plunged up to her armpits in them. Her thesis is that Maurice – the Bildungsroman in which Forster chronicles his own homosexual ordeal – is ‘his only truly honest novel’. The other five avoid the point. For Moffat, the primal moment in Forster’s life was when the over-mothered five-year-old discovered that by rubbing his groin against tree trunks, while picturing his tutor’s moustache, he could perform the child’s ‘dirty trick’. It might, one supposes, explain something about the wych-elm and the pigs’ teeth in Howards End. Forster’s progress in self-abuse is tracked by the indefatigable Moffat to its heroic heyday, when he did it ‘thrice in one afternoon’ in his eighty-second year, when – despite the trauma of two prostate operations (brought on by ‘excessive masturbation,’ his doctor gravely informed him) – ‘the worm that never dies’ gave its ‘last wriggle’. At prep school, a callous classmate yelled out: ‘Have you seen Forster’s cock? A beastly little brown thing.’ At the same school, Forster was abused by a passing paedophile who afterwards proffered a compensatory shilling, which was politely declined. At his public school, Forster was derided as a ‘cissy’ – that most hurtful objurgation in the schoolyard lexicon.

  King’s College Cambridge was, by contrast, a haven. What was ‘cissy’ at Ton-bridge School was ‘hellenism’ among the more refined spirits where Morgan found lifelong friends, but no sexual fulfilment – impossible, of course, in a world terrorised by the Wilde scandals. Forster was also inhibited by ineradicable delicacy. Unlike Lytton Strachey – who gloried in the word – he would not even spell out ‘bugger’ in full in the diaries Moffat has pored over. Forster lost his faith at Cambridge (too little ‘fun
and humour’ in the gospels) and found a warm place with the Apostles. Their ethical creed, expounded by G. E. Moore, would sustain him. It was at Cambridge he discovered what ‘friendship’ – homosexuality without sex – could be.

  After graduation, Forster took the Edwardian Grand Tour with his mother, the redoubtable Lily. ‘Gide hasn’t got a mother!,’ he once complained, in reference to the franker author of Si le grain ne meurt. But views from pensione rooms and longest journeys furnished what he needed for his annus mirabilis, 1904, when three of his novels were substantially composed. At twenty-five he found his life ‘rather sad and dull’. He had, he felt, passed ‘the romantic desirable age’ in a condition of lust-racked virginity. He resolved to smoke in public on the grounds ‘it gives a reason for you’. Whether it was the cigarettes or not, at this point in his life, partners began to figure. First was Syed Ross Masood, a Muslim Indian – their relationship was ‘joyful but inconclusive’.

  With the success of Howards End, Forster found himself a celebrity, rich but still virginal. There occurred at this point the event he describes (in his preface to Maurice) as life-changing. On a visit to the sexual anarchist Edward Carpenter, the sage’s partner, George Merrill, tapped him, ‘just above the buttocks’. It seemed, he said, ‘to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts’.

  Forster had a goodish First World War as a ‘searcher’, tracking down, from the accounts of the wounded, soldiers ‘missing in action’. The work took him to Alexandria. Here he came into contact with the poet C. P. Cavafy – a more modern, less inhibited Hellene than had ever come his way at Cambridge. Sexually, Forster’s life began at forty. With the young Egyptian, Muhammad al-Adl, he had his first ‘anxious but very beautiful affair’. Moffat’s description of the breakthrough moment is a good example of her no-nonsense style: ‘Mohammed gave Morgan a “sudden hard kiss” and after “a gruff demur” leaned back, untied his linen trousers, and let Morgan masturbate him. This was a milestone. The struggle was over.’ And so, alas, were the novels. There followed a second visit to India and a Hindi ‘boy’, Kanaya, to match the Muslim. (Moffat, who spares us nothing, records that this was an occasion when Forster ‘penetrated’, deviating from his preferred pattern.)

  ‘The middle age of buggers,’ Virginia Woolf confided to her diary (with Forster in mind) ‘is not to be contemplated without horror.’ But it was Woolf, not Forster, who killed herself. The event, Forster confided to his diary, ‘turned my shit pale green and almost scentless’. Forster’s later years proved anything but horrific. A younger set of gays, led by the über-louche Joe Ackerley, created a new network of friends – to whom he was a Gandhiesque icon. He stood fast during the Second World War, articulating the liberal ideals for which Britain was fighting in noble broadcasts and essays. His last years were passed in the comfortable berths of a residential fellowship at his alma mater, King’s, and the cosy arrangement he set up, in joyous criminality, with the love of his life, the metropolitan (married) policeman, Bob Buckingham, twenty-three years his junior. He was, reportedly (although, luckily for him, no one did report him), happy and, at last, a practising homosexual. But no longer a practising novelist. He suffered a stroke and died in Cambridge.

  FN

  Edwin Morgan Forster

  MRT

  A Passage to India

  Biog

  P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster (2 vols, 1977, 1978); W. Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (2010)

  128. Mazo de la Roche 1879–1961

  Other women change their names.

  A pioneer of the romantic ‘saga’ for mainly women readers, de la Roche’s sixteen-strong Jalna/Whiteoaks sequence is reckoned to have sold over 11 million copies worldwide. Roche was born at Newmarket, Ontario, in rural Canada, the only child of a dry-goods salesman. Aiming higher in life, she added a French prefix and some aristocratic class to her name. ‘De la Roche’, as she now called herself, was brought up near Toronto, with many moves of childhood residence (the father’s business never thrived) and lived most of her adult life in the company of a cousin, Caroline Clement, who had been adopted by Roche’s parents. De la Roche and Clement themselves adopted a pair of orphans during their years together. They were also ardent dog lovers – and, possibly, commentators have speculated, lovers. There is some dispute, and fierce refutation, as to whether de la Roche might not have been a ‘child molester’, Clement being an infant when their relationship began.

  De la Roche was for some years a student of art and began writing for the magazines in the early years of the twentieth century. Her first volume, a collection of linked short stories, Explorers of the Dawn, was published in 1922. The idea for ‘Jalna’ (the grand home through many generations of the ‘Whiteoaks’ family) came to her while spending some time in a summer cottage by a landed estate in Ontario. It was, of course, a fantasised vision of her own non-existent aristocratic background. Jalna (1927), a runaway bestseller in America, Canada and England, was the first of sixteen novels in the series, culminating with Morning at Jalna (1960). Nine of the series deal with the years after the late 1920s, the remainder range backwards into the family’s past. The dominant character is the hundred-year-old matriarch, Adeline.

  Aimed principally at the woman reader, the Jalna saga was partly inspired by Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and it bequeathed richly to the later emerging genre of multi-episodic radio and TV soap opera. Following the success of her series, de la Roche and Clement lived in style in Britain until 1938, when the author’s bad health, and fears about coming war, returned them to Canada. During their residence in the UK, they were frequent guests at Windsor – someone there evidently liked the novels.

  FN

  Mazo de la Roche (born Mazo Roche)

  MRT

  Jalna

  Biog

  J. Givner, Mazo de la Roche: The Hidden Life (1989)

  129. Daisy Ashford 1881–1972

  My own idear is that these things are as piffle before the wind. Mr Salteena, being stoical in the face of disaster

  Surveying the large outlines of nineteenth-century fiction, one is struck by a singular gender difference. Women novelists tend to start early in life – often long before they become women – as if somehow born to the job. Men rebound into writing fiction later in life, typically after failing in, or defecting from, other more ‘serious’ jobs. Women novelists in the nineteenth century are – many of them – spectacularly precocious. Writing is not a last, but a first resort. One thinks of Grace Aguilar penning her first play at the age of twelve. Or Mary Shelley, composing Frankenstein at the age of seventeen. Or Jane Austen, reading out first drafts of ‘First Impressions’ to her family (father prominent, one likes to imagine, nodding appreciatively at the Mr Bennet jokes). And, of course, the sisters in Haworth – pre-pubescent – weaving their magical Angrian and Gondalian webs of narrative. What impels them to do it? To please their fathers, or father-figures, is the answer that the psychobiographers suggest. It’s very plausible. If true, the clinching example of girl’s fiction as a paternal offering is Daisy Ashford, the youngest novelist ever to achieve worldwide fame.

  Daisy was brought up in Lewes, Sussex, into a prosperous and numerous Catholic family. As a nine-year-old girl she wrote novels after tea and before bedtime (a strict 6 o’clock) for the delectation of her father, a Civil Servant in the War Office: a readership of one. He copied the stories out for her, in a more legible adult hand, but retained her turns of phrase and orthography. Given the size of the Ashford brood, Daisy clearly won more than her fair share of paternal attention. Before she could put pen to paper, she dictated her first story to her father, ‘The Life of Father McSwiney’, which she composed, aged four. Daisy’s mature oeuvre includes ‘The Hangman’s Daughter’, ‘Where Love Lies Deepest’, and the novel on which her fame rests, The Young Visiters.

  The Young Visiters was published in 1919 by Chatto and Windus, as a curiosity, with an introduction by J. M. Barrie, who – manu
script in hand – vouched for the bona fides of the ‘nine-year-old authoress’ and that the work was ‘unaided’. The Chatto editor in charge of the project, Frank Swinnerton, himself a novelist, interviewed the now fortyish author before giving it the go-ahead. She was, he recalled, ‘shy, giggling and tremendously excited at the prospect of being published’. Miss Ashford daringly asked Swinnerton for as much as £10. Chatto came through, voluntarily, with £500 and eventually paid thousands more. As the Daily Mail recorded, one half of London was laughing over The Young Visiters in 1919. The other half was impatiently waiting for the next edition to be printed, so they could get hold of the work that everyone else was in fits about.

  Miss Ashford wrote nothing more after going to board at a convent school aged thirteen, in Haywards Heath. Fiction was put away with other childish things. She married a farmer, ran a hotel, and had children of her own. Doubtless she told a rattling good bedtime story. Her identity as the authentic author of a work, often considered a fake because it was so good, was confirmed, at the end of a long and useful life, in 1972, in a Times obituary. The flavour of the romance is given in the first paragraph:

  Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him. He had quite a young girl staying with him of 17 named Ethel Monticue. Mr Salteena had dark short hair and mustache and wiskers which were very black and twisty. He was middle sized and he had very pale blue eyes. He had a pale brown suit but on Sundays he had a black one and he had a topper every day as he thorght it more becoming. Ethel Monticue had fair hair done on the top and blue eyes. She had a blue velvit frock which had grown rarther short in the sleeves. She had a black straw hat and kid gloves.