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

by John Sutherland

  The years 1910 to 1911 saw crisis and breakthrough. His mother fell ill with cancer. In Sons and Lovers, which he began writing at this time, Gertrude Morel is killed – humanely but graphically – by her son. Lydia Lawrence died naturally, but for her son, traumatically – more so since part of him wanted her death. Shortly afterwards, he became briefly engaged to a woman he had known at college. In winter 1911, his lungs again collapsed – dangerously. In his convalescence he dashed off The Trespasser for a new patron, Edward Garnett at Duckworth publishers. School teaching was now no longer an option. His near-death illness had branded him an infectious danger to the young (a charge which would recur, in other guises, throughout his life). He would now be an author, or nothing. As an author he had, one of Duckworth’s advisers said, ‘every possible fault’ and ‘genius’. The title pages of his fiction introduced what would be his public name from now on. He hated his birth-names. Baptism, like Resurrection, was, he had decided, something to be Lawrentianised. He would be ‘D. H.’ to the world and ‘Lorenzo’ to his intimates.

  Lawrence had resolved to travel and consulted a professor he had known at Nottingham for advice and addresses. Ernest Weekley was a Germanist and an etymologist. His wife, Frieda, born von Richthofen, was ten years younger than her husband and six years older than Lawrence. They had three children. At first sight almost, Lawrence and Frieda fell in love, and a few months later eloped. It meant the scandal of divorce and painful separation for Frieda from her children. There was no question who were the guilty parties – except, of course, that Lawrence did not see it as guilt. In Europe, with Frieda now beside him, he wrote ‘Paul Morel’ (as Sons and Lovers was called). Heinemann found the sex too hot for their list but Duckworth accepted the novel and published it in 1913 to strong reviews and modest sales. Lawrence was, at the same time, writing plays, essays and – most successfully – short stories, and forming long-lasting literary friendships: most significantly with Middleton Murry and his partner, Katherine Mansfield.

  Lawrence’s growth as a creative writer over these years was amazing. He was embarking on the project which would eventually see print as The Rainbow and its sequel, Women in Love (called conjointly, in their earlier form, ‘The Sisters’). He forged a new, hypersensitive ‘feminine’ technique for the project. Publishers, encouraged by the reception of Sons and Lovers, had taken notice of him and new friends and patrons were talking him up. He and Frieda had married four months before the outbreak of war. Lawrence was in no immediate danger of call-up – Kitchener did not need invalids, yet. But they would be confined to England for the duration of hostilities and, given Frieda’s nationality (the flying ace, the ‘Red Baron’, Manfred von Richthofen, was a distant relative), they would also be hard up. Lawrence’s response was to withdraw into the shelter of a utopian community: he called his ‘commune’ by the ancient Hebrew name (borrowed from one of his new literary friends, S.S. Koteliansky) ‘Rananim’. Primitive Teutonic elements were mixed in, most spectacularly the blood-mixing Blutbrüderschaft immortalised in the wrestling scene between Birkin and Crich in Women in Love. Rananim was set up in coastal Cornwall where, in one of the more comical episodes in a very uncomical era, he and Frieda were accused of signalling to U-boats with semaphoric underclothes on their washing line. Persecution as spies coincided with Lawrence’s prosecution as a pornographer when The Rainbow (1915), his finest novel to date, was confiscated and banned in September 1915. There was no great mobilisation of support from the enlightened – wartime was not propitious for the assertion of literary freedoms. Instead, his publisher, Methuen, meekly took their medicine.

  Lawrence was not meek, however, and forged ahead with Women in Love, whose manuscript was everywhere turned down. The novel was seen as dangerously unpatriotic. In its published form Lawrence would add, on the last page, what looked like sympathy for the Kaiser and his reported comment: ‘Ich habe es nicht gewollt’ (I didn’t want it). For Lawrence all this was proof that the tree of life, Ygdrassil, was dead in England. Vitality must be found elsewhere. It got worse. Following the Universal Conscription Act in 1917, as the war looked very grim for the allies, Lawrence was called up for a medical. Clearly unfit to serve in any capacity, he suffered the indignity of the digital-anal violation he later described, with undiminished fury, in ‘The Nightmare’ section of Kangaroo.

  With the war over, and as soon as their passports arrived, the Lawrences took what would be a permanent farewell from his home country. He left, as a parting present, Women in Love: finally publishable, not yet appreciated. The remainder of his life was a pilgrimage in search of sun, elemental contact, or simply motility for the sake of moving (‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move’ opens his finest travel book, Sea and Sardinia, 1921). Health was another motive force. No word, certainly not ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’, frightened him as much as ‘tuberculosis’. Whatever his physicians said, he persisted in calling his chronic, ever worsening condition ‘bronchials’. The Lawrences voyaged and journeyed to and through Italy, Mexico, New Mexico, Australasia, Ceylon and the US. Novels, like Kangaroo, were hurled off in weeks not months. He was ever alert to the appeal of primitivism. But his ‘eye’ for small scenic detail is unrivalled among novelists. Botanists, zoologists and ornithologists might envy that eye. As David Ellis notes: ‘one critic has worked out that in his first novel, The White Peacock, 145 different trees, shrubs or plants are identified and 40 different kinds of birds.’

  Lawrence was, as ever, dependent on rich patrons. The kindest, richest and most useful was Mabel Dodge Luhan, who gave the Lawrences the run (and eventually the title deeds) of her Kiowa Ranch, in Taos. Lawrence’s ashes now repose there, reportedly. In his last phase, during travels to primitive places, he largely switched from earthy men heroes to airy women heroines (it is Lady Chatterley’s Lover, not ‘The Gamekeeper’s Mistress’). In 1925, while reading aloud his long short story about a magnificent stallion and his female rider, St Mawr, he spat up a gob of blood. The dreaded word was no longer avoidable, but such was his formidable vitality that he kept death at bay, defying the predictions of his doctors, for five more years.

  Lawrence and Frieda returned to Tuscany. His last years saw the completion, after three drafts, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover – his last English novel. Its plea for new, ‘hygienic’ sexuality was the more urgent given its author’s now years’ long impotence. Lawrence’s fiction is at its most interesting when he weaves the conflicting elements of religion and sex. Awaiting death, he produced his Gospel of St Lorenzo, ‘The Escaped Cock’, later retitled ‘The Man Who Died’. The first part of the story fantasises Christ (never named, and distinctly Lawrentian) coming back to life in the tomb where his corpse has been laid. No miracle, he has been ‘taken down too early’. An Aesopian prelude, which gives the piece its first title, describes a ‘dandy’ cockerel whose vital energies are tethered by the peasant (clearly Italian) who owns him. It escapes as Christ rolls away the rock from his tomb.

  Throughout life, the Eastwood lad in Lawrence had loved jokes about ‘cocks’. His first work is called the ‘white peacock’ because a man’s cock is the only part of the body which normally never sees the sun, even when he pees. It is the same naughtiness that led him to call the second draft of Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’. He had, all his life, been fascinated by one of the central paradoxes of the New Testament. When Christ is resurrected – not as a spirit but in the flesh (as will be all his followers) – what are the carnal implications? In the full version of ‘The Man Who Died’, the man goes on, after resurrection, to lose his virginity to a prophetess of Osiris. Both partners in the congress are religio-sexually fulfilled by their act. The story concludes with the ‘Man’ rowing away from the Temple where his flesh has truly ‘risen’:

  The man who had died rowed slowly on, with the current, and laughed to himself: ‘I have sowed the seed of my life and my resurrection, and put my touch forever upon the choice woman of this day, and I carry her perfum
e in my flesh like essence of roses. She is dear to me in the middle of my being. But the gold and flowing serpent is coiling up again, to sleep at the root of my tree.’

  ‘So let the boat carry me. To-morrow is another day.’

  As Anthony Burgess notes, Gone with the Wind ends with the same truism. There were, alas, very few days remaining for D. H. Lawrence.

  FN

  David Herbert Lawrence

  MRT

  Women in Love

  Biog

  J. Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: A Literary Life (1989)

  137. H. Bedford-Jones 1887–1949

  ‘King of the Pulps.’

  If writing fiction were an Olympic event, the smart money would be on Henry James O’Brien Bedford-Jones. ‘Henry James’ throws back a peculiarly unhelpful echo in this context. In full flow, in the 1930s, the heyday of the pulp magazines, HBJ had four typewriters rattling away on his desk, a dozen noms de plume, a regular annual output of a million words, and he clocked up a lifetime score of some 1,500 magazine stories and close on a hundred novels. No one will ever know precisely because no one can see any good reason for exhuming and counting the stuff.

  There were, of course, other production-line factories producing pulp: the Tom Swift franchise in the US, or Sexton Blake in the UK. But HBJ was a one-man factory – hence his kingly title. His name developed brand loyalty over the decades and he was paid well above the hack-rates of literary legend. As his biographer, Peter Ruber records: ‘During the height of the Great Depression, when even Bedford-Jones experienced setbacks and declining word rates, the editor of Liberty Magazine offered him a salary of $25,000 a year if he would write exclusively for them. He turned it down with a laugh. He was accustomed to earning $60,000 or more per year, which he needed to support his lifestyle, his family, several residences across the country, his book and stamp collecting. Anecdotes gathered around HBJ’s writing prowess: for example, ‘Henry can’t come to the phone,’ his wife is reported to have said on one occasion, ‘He’s working on a novel.’ ‘I’ll hold on until he’s finished,’ replies the caller. Ironic by nature, HBJ formally ceded his ‘royal’ title to Erle Stanley Gardner in March 1933, on receiving a complimentary copy of the other author’s first Perry Mason adventure, The Case of the Velvet Claws. The two men went on to be close friends.

  Often dismissed as the poor man’s Edgar Rice Burroughs (which is unfair), what HBJ most obviously aspired to be was the Alexandre Dumas of his day. Dumas, of course, favoured the factory system and, much to the chagrin of his ‘ghost’ Auguste Maquet, he gave no literary credit to his assistant, who had to wait for a 2010 film (L’Autre Dumas) to make his case. Dumas once wrote a novel in three days for a bet. HBJ did likewise, most days of the working week, for his living. Can one admire a writer who performs at this breakneck rate for anything other than his literary athleticism? Those who have read widely in HBJ’s pulpy corpus (there is no disgrace in having read only a small portion of it) have a high regard, as do I, for D’Artagnan (1928), one of his many Dumas hommages. The faux-scholarly preface conveys the slyness of HBJ, writing at his best and gently mocking his genre:

  This story augments and incorporates without alteration a fragmentary manuscript whose handwriting has been identified as that of Alexandre Dumas, and as such authenticated by Victor Lemasle, the well known expert of Paris. So far as can be learned, it has remained unpublished hitherto … The publisher, who is the owner of the manuscript in question, is of course fully informed as to what portion of this novel is from the pen of Dumas, and what from the typewriter of

  H. Bedford-Jones.

  Ann Arbor, April 1, 1928

  Had he stuck to one line of pulp, Ruber believes, HBJ would be better regarded than he is today – in the Rider Haggard class, perhaps. But he was too versatile for his own good as regards literary reputation. A random selection of his titles will give an idea of his range:

  ‘All Quiet on the Tanker Front’ (1943)

  ‘The Amazon Women’ (1939)

  ‘The Badman’s Brand’ (1928)

  ‘The Bishop of Somaliland’ (1936)

  ‘The Blind Farmer and the Strip Dancer’ (1940)

  ‘Blood of the Scanderoon’ (1931)

  ‘Bombs and Olive Oil’ (1943)

  The more you write, the less you have time to live. None the less, Bedford-Jones’s life – what little record of it survives – was eventful. He was born in Napanee, Ontario, Canada. The family was second-generation Irish and Henry’s father was a Protestant minister. He dropped out of college after a year and moved to Michigan where he found work as a newsman. He was naturalised as an American in 1908 and moved, a couple of years later, to Chicago. From there he again drifted on, around 1914, to Los Angeles.

  Wherever he went, HBJ wrote fluently and copiously for newspapers and magazines. His main outlet for short fiction was the Blue Book magazine, for whom he would eventually write some 350 stories and serials under a barrage of pen-names. There were numerous other outlets. The market for magazine fiction was ravenous, stoked by wood-pulp paper, steam presses and America’s high level of popular literacy. It was, for someone as good at it as HBJ, a rewarding line of work, if you could stand the heat – and he was pure asbestos. He was recruited into fast-order fiction as his main line of work by a patron, William Wallace Cook. Himself a prolific writer of dime novels and pulp fiction, Cook had written many of the Nick Carter (detective), Buffalo Bill and Klondike Kit stories and dime novels in the first decades of the twentieth century. The occasion of HBJ’s becoming Cook’s friend is told by Ruber: ‘When Cook’s first wife took ill and died unexpectedly, one legend recalled, he was too distraught to meet that week’s obligation of a 25,000-word novel. After the funeral, Bedford-Jones hastened home and wrote the novel under Cook’s name in a single draft, delivering it to the Post Office just before it closed. A week later Cook was surprised to receive an acceptance letter and check for something he knew nothing about. A grateful Cook introduced the young man to all the influential merchandisers of pulp in New York.’

  HBJ’s middle years, in the 1930s, were tormented by an ugly divorce. Concerned that his youngest son was being maltreated by his first wife, he had the boy abducted. The mother then had him prosecuted for kidnapping – a serious offence following the sensational Lindbergh case. Getting the charges dropped (with the help of Erle Stanley Gardner – a lawyer as well as King of Pulp II) cost a fortune. HBJ wrote through the crisis, at the usual dizzying speed. Only diabetes, in the last five years of his life, slowed him down. In this handicapped state he concentrated on his rare-book collection and, having written so furiously, gently read his way into well-earned rest.

  FN

  Henry James O’Brien Bedford-Jones

  MRT

  Take your pick

  Biog

  Peter Ruber, Darrell C. Richardson and Victor A. Berch, King of the Pulps: The Life and Writings of H. Bedford-Jones (2003)

  138. Vicki Baum 1888–1960

  It was all quite different in America.

  A German – later American – popular novelist who ranks in her own language with such bestsellers as Erich Maria Remarque, Hans Fallada, Erich Kästner and Leon Feuchtwanger, Baum was – unlike them – consistently successful in English translation. Her cosmopolitan melodramas profoundly influenced Hollywood cinema in the 1930s, especially in collaboration with Greta Garbo (another glamorous expatriate) who starred in Grand Hotel in 1932. It was from Baum’s book that Garbo took her famous declaration, ‘I want to be alone.’ This novel and its follow-up Shanghai ’37 (1939) established the vogue for sprawling Narrenschiff melodrama with modish settings and vaguely pessimistic mood. Arthur Hailey’s Hotel is a bastard offspring, best avoided.

  Baum’s origins were Austrian bourgeois-Jewish. Her original vocation was music: while still a teenager she performed as a harpist in Viennese concert halls. Musical milieux (and unhappy harpists) would recur in her later fiction. Baum moved to Germany around 1912 on receiving a contract to
play with the Darmstadt city orchestra. She had married her first husband, Max Prels in 1906. Prels is described as ‘a Viennese coffee-house habitué and sometime contributor to literary magazines’. After her marriage, Baum began to write stories, some of which were published under her name, others under Prels’s name. Her first published novel, Frühe Schatten (a chronicle of adolescent Weltschmerz) was published in 1914. It made no mark.

  Baum divorced Prels and married Richard Lert, the conductor of the Darmstadt orchestra, around 1916. The marriage was happy and Baum abandoned music for motherhood. The couple, along with the German population as a whole, suffered financial hardship during the First World War. Baum’s first husband, Prels, was meanwhile working for the Berlin publisher, Ullstein, and amicably furnished an introduction for his ex-wife. Having given up the harp for good, Baum now resolved to write full-time. During the war years and early 1920s she duly churned out a string of undistinguished ‘entertainment novels’ – romances aimed at the young adult woman reader.

  Proficient as she was at this line of work, Baum was not by nature a hack. Thomas Mann was her idol. Her technique in her mature fiction derives from the critical doctrine of Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’, hyper-realism). On the strength of Stud. chem. Helene Willfür (1928), a New Woman novel with a well-researched scientific background, Baum was awarded an exclusive contract by Ullstein. Her fiction was serialised, and her glamorous image publicised, in Ullstein’s Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, which, in the 1920s, boasted the largest magazine circulation in the world. It was in the BIZ pages that Menschen im Hotel (1929), i.e. Grand Hotel, was first published. Ullstein’s publicity made much of Baum’s working in a Berlin hotel to gather material, as had Arnold Bennett at the Savoy for his hotel novel, Imperial Palace. Grand Hotel’s success was boosted in the American market by a Broadway adaptation, which ran for 257 nights. The American publisher, Doubleday, subsequently invited Baum to New York to promote their translation of the novel and by July 1931, Grand Hotel had sold 31,000 copies and topped Publishers Weekly bestseller list.