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

by John Sutherland

  Johns fought in the doomed Gallipoli campaign, rising, if that’s the word, to the rank of Lance Corporal. After a bout of malaria he was commissioned in September 1917 into the Royal Flying Corps and spent some months in a training unit. Given the unreliability of the aircraft at the time, it was more dangerous than Passchendaele. In July 1918, he was posted to France to fly heavy bombers (the ugly DH4) and on 16 September his squadron took off for a raid on Mannheim. His plane was hit over Germany by ack-ack and brought down by attacking fighters. Johns’ rear gunner was killed and Johns himself was badly wounded and taken prisoner: there was considerable hostility to bomber crews among the civilian population (in the area Johns came down a whole class of Sunday school children had been killed). Such warfare was, even in wartime, regarded as criminal and Johns was sentenced to be shot. This was commuted and he was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp at Strasbourg and, after an unsuccessful attempt at escape, to a more secure installation at Ingolstadt. Here he served out the remaining weeks of the war, which ended on 11 November 1918.

  Johns had been wrongly listed as missing, presumably killed in action, and no correction was made. His return from the dead on Christmas Day 1918 was unexpected by his (still mourning) family. Had Johns actually been shot dead, the twentieth century would have lost a children’s writer second only to Enid Blyton in appeal. Interestingly, the event seems to have affected Johns himself. Biggles is always a fighter, never a bomber pilot – and his ace air skills are invariably used for defensive, not offensive, actions. After the war, Johns’ biographers drily note that ‘he did not want to return to work as a sanitary inspector’. He obtained a short service commission with the newly formed RAF and was entrusted principally with recruiting duties. In this capacity he rejected one ‘John Ross’ (Lawrence of Arabia). The rejection was subsequently overturned by higher-ups.

  In the postwar years the Johnses’ marriage broke down. Maude, the vicar’s daughter, denied her husband a divorce and his second, lifelong, union was unsolemnised, although ‘Doris May Johns’ passed as his wife. Her brother, Howard Leigh, would be the long-serving illustrator of the Biggles books. These were not written, however, until Johns was discharged from the RAF and had made a new career in aviation articles, principally for the juvenile market. Biggles took off in 1932, in Popular Flying, a magazine which Johns edited. ‘James Bigglesworth’ was born in India and educated in England. The first collection The Camels are Coming (1932) – Sopwiths, that is, not the humped variety – is closest to the author’s own war experience. Biggles is a young pilot, under the paternal care of the old hand, Mahoney. In this collection, he has his one love affair – with a woman who turns out to be a German spy. In the last story in the collection (‘The Last Show’), as the war is coming to its end, a battle-fatigued Biggles is on the verge of alcoholism.

  Biggles was a huge success and Johns turned out up to four full-length titles a year in the 1930s. Many of the stories recall First World War heroism. In those with a contemporary setting, Biggles is demobilised and runs an air company – while doing nation-saving undercover work for the country’s intelligence services (there is a lot of Buchan in these yarns). Biggles now, like William Brown, has his ‘gang’: Lord Bertie Lissie, the Hon. Algy [Montgomery] Lacey and – for proletarian colour – Flight Sergeant Ginger Hebblethwaite. No women are around. There is nowadays a lively web fanfic archive, fantasising sexual relations between Biggles and his pals.

  Johns made himself very unpopular with Whitehall by his constant – and shrewd – criticisms of Air Ministry and government policy. Pressure from high places led to his being fired from his editorships in 1939. On the outbreak of war, another Ministry, that of ‘Information’ (Propaganda was a word that only the Hun used), reinstated him as an advocate for the RAF. Biggles duly joined up, and did his bit to win the Battle of Britain. The Air Ministry humbly requested Johns to boost WAAF recruitment with a series heroine: he responded with ‘Worrals’ – Biggles in skirts. The War Office subsequently requested their own hero: Johns came through with the Commando ‘Gimlet’.

  After the war, Biggles rather thrashed around – like many returned heroes. Most of his missions were as a vaguely defined ‘air detective’. A low point was Biggles: Foreign Legionnaire (1954). Johns himself was increasingly out of key with his time. A 1964 UNESCO survey identified Biggles as still the most popular juvenile hero in the world, but the formula was wearing very thin. In Biggles and the Deep Blue Sea (1968), the hero takes on a gang of slimy hashish-running Arabs. It was the summer of love when many teenagers were getting their kicks puffing rather than glorying vicariously in English pluck (the narrative also features a battle with a giant squid, straight out of Jules Verne). Johns died, making a cup of tea, halfway through his last, never to be completed, volume, Biggles Does Some Homework. It would have been 105 – an ace total.

  FN

  William Earl Johns

  MRT

  The Camels are Coming

  Biog

  P. B. Ellis and P. Williams, By Jove, Biggles! The Life of Captain W. E. Johns (1981)

  154. Phyllis Bentley 1894–1977

  Their cause was mine.

  Born and brought up in Halifax, Phyllis Bentley was the youngest daughter of a master dyer and finisher. Her mother was from another family enriched in the local cloth trade. Phyllis was brought up in a domestic environment which she called ‘essentially proper, essentially respectable, essentially middle-class’. Bentley got her school education, well away from Halifax, at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. After gaining a degree (external) from London University it was her plan to go into teaching. After some unhappy months teaching and volunteering locally, with wartime emergency, she went to work in the munitions industry in 1918, eventually gravitating to a post of administrative responsibility in the Ministry of Munitions.

  During the First World War she wrote her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories, The World’s Bane, published at her own cost in 1918. It sold wretchedly, as did Bentley’s follow-up titles, Environment (1922) and Cat in a Manger (1923). Depressing as the sales returns were, there were sufficient friendly reviews – and a native obstinacy – to keep her writing. Moreover, her father having died in 1926, it fell to Bentley to keep the family business afloat and care for her mother. Her career as a regional novelist was inaugurated by an invitation from the Bradford Mechanics’ Institute to lecture on the subject, and the event inspired her to start a densely local novel set in the West Riding about unhappy marriage. Indomitable pluck in the face of inexorable gloom would be the theme of much of Bentley’s subsequent fiction. The Spinner of the Years was published, after rejection by a string of publishers, in 1928. It earned words of praise from Arnold Bennett and – most gratifyingly – J. B. Priestley: England’s favourite Yorkshireman.

  More significantly for her career, Bentley’s historical saga, Inheritance (1932), was accepted for publication by the newly set-up and dynamic Victor Gollancz imprint. Gollancz – soon to establish the Left Book Club and become a major force in British socialism – was attracted by the echt working-class subject matter and he would be Bentley’s publisher for the rest of her long career. Meanwhile the family firm, E. J. Bentley & Sons, had been virtually ruined by the worldwide slump. The effect of the 1930s Depression was particularly harsh on the industrial heartlands of the North and its now massively unemployed population. ‘Their cause was mine,’ Bentley declares in her autobiography. Inheritance chronicles three generations of the Oldroyd and Bamforth families – the first of whom rise and fall (‘from clog to clog’) as their industry booms and busts over a century of existence. The love interest (master’s son falls in love with mill girl, the daughter of a radical; should he marry her or the daughter of a fellow Tory and millowner?) intertwines with social history. The early chapters of Inheritance, set in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, depict battles between modernisers and Luddites (Bentley is sympathetic to both sides). The Ten Hours Bill, the chilling effect of the A
merican Civil War, the gradual decline of the industry in the face of overseas competition and, climactically, the 1930s nail-in-the-coffin catastrophe are all chronicled.

  Inheritance represented a considerable effort of historical research by Bentley, undertaken in local archives and picked up from Halifax lore – so much so that it has often been prescribed as painless history lessons in schools. Bentley initially intended to finish the novel on her characteristic note of gloom, with the fall of the House of Oldroyd, but was persuaded to introduce a gleam of optimism by a friend’s forlorn ‘Give us some hope!’ The novel was a runaway bestseller – particularly among patrons of the ‘tuppenny’ cornershop libraries which dominated the distribution of popular fiction in the 1930s. Bentley was encouraged to continue with an Oldroyd trilogy (it was televised in 1967, giving the novels a second lease of bestselling life) and, having hit her groove, she never deviated from it. She followed with a string of some twenty works in a similar vein, with her hallmark regional setting and grim, but plucky, world view (e.g. A Modern Tragedy, 1934, another Great Depression saga).

  During the Second World War, Bentley served her country a second time, working in the American Division of the Ministry of Information. Over these years she wrote and published her critical monograph, The English Regional Novel (1941). It makes clear the kinship she felt, as an Englishwoman, a Yorkshirewoman and a woman writer, with the Brontës – particularly Emily. Like her, Bentley never married. She was awarded an OBE in 1970 to add to the honorary doctorate which the University of Leeds gave her in 1949. Halifax regards her as its most distinguished daughter.

  FN

  Phyllis Eleanor Bentley

  MRT

  Inheritance

  Biog

  E. Ford. ‘Phyllis Bentley: novelist of Yorkshire Life’, Contemporary Review, February 1997

  155. Dashiell Hammett 1894–1961

  Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons. Raymond Chandler

  Hammett was born in Maryland, of Catholic parents. ‘Dashiell’ was a maternal family name, a corruption of ‘De Chiel’. His father was by turns a clerk, a salesman, a streetcar conductor and – most continually – a drunk. There were three children. Hammett was educated in Baltimore, a city (‘Poisonville’ he later called it) he loved not at all. He left high school at fifteen (some accounts claim thirteen) when – his father failing to do so – he was obliged to provide for the family. He worked as a newsboy, railroad messenger and stevedore. He learned to drink heavily and caught the first of many doses of venereal disease.

  From 1915 to 1918, Hammett was employed as a Pinkerton detective agent in Baltimore – three years which supplied the raw material for thirty years of writing. In 1918, he joined the US Army. During the remaining months of the war he served in a home posting in the motor ambulance corps. It was at this period that he contracted the TB and early onset emphysema which plagued his later life. He was discharged in May 1919, with the rank of sergeant and a 25 per cent disability pension. In spring 1920 he left for the West Coast (whose climate was kinder to his lungs) where he worked again for Pinkerton. One of his assignments was the notorious Fatty Arbuckle case in 1921. In the same year he married a nurse, Josephine Nolan, who had attended him in hospital and whom he had got pregnant. They went on to have two daughters.

  In 1922 Hammett’s TB flared up and writing was the only occupation he could handle. His first ‘Continental Op’ story was published in Black Mask in October 1923. The ‘Op’ is ‘fat, fortyish and the Continental Detective Agency’s [i.e. Pinkerton’s] toughest and shrewdest operator’. Around him, Hammett constructed formulaic stories featuring crime detection, gang-busting, locked room murders, and high order physical violence – all narrated in cool, laconic, disillusioned, waste-no-words style. He had created a dialect for the ‘hard-boiled detective novel’: a genre at the other end of the spectrum from the cosy English ‘Colonel Mustard in the library’ crime novel.

  In 1926 Hammett separated from his wife and children on medical advice: he was infectious. Although his doctors’ prognoses were gloomy Hammett threw himself into a productive burst of writing over the next four years. In 1929 he published his first book, Red Harvest. Initially it was called ‘The Cleansing of Poisonville’ and featured the ‘Continental Op’. It was followed by The Dain Curse (1929). Both books sold well and on the strength of their success Hammett abandoned his family and moved, with a girlfriend, to New York, where he was fashionable enough to be taken up by the New Yorker, Algonquin Hotel, set. The kind of novel he had patented was not just profitable, it was smart. The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930, a runaway bestseller which was reprinted seven times in its first year. It introduced the San Francisco PI, Sam Spade – a man who looks ‘rather pleasantly like a blond satan’. Hammett followed it in 1931 with an even better novel, The Glass Key. Its title comes from Alice in Wonderland and the novel portrays a through-the-looking-glass world in which politics and gangsterism are inseparable. The story is told by Ned Beaumont, a cold-eyed gambler on a lifelong losing streak. The Glass Key was the author’s personal favourite of his works.

  Hammett moved on to Hollywood, and even bigger paydays. Here, momentously, he fell in with Lillian Hellman, a writer for MGM and a budding playwright. She was twelve years younger than he. Their relationship lasted until his death, although after 1942 it is recorded as having been asexual. Hired as a writer for Paramount, Hammett set up house in the Sutton Club Hotel, where he wrote The Thin Man (1934). He was, in Hellman’s words, ‘the hottest thing in Hollywood’. He drank deep with Faulkner and Nathanael West and gained a reputation as a philanderer. He had his own limousine and a black chauffeur, ‘Jones’ – and, of course, Hellman. Nora and Nick Charles (the ‘thin man’ and his wife) represent a glamorised version of their sophisticated café life: all martinis, silk sheets and wisecracks. Hellman too would become ‘hot’ after her hugely acclaimed play, The Little Foxes, was produced on Broadway in 1939. But Hammett’s literary activity effectively finishes at this point. Over the next few years he was still wealthy from film and radio options on his work, but he was often drunk and missed deadlines. He was now manifestly alcoholic and in early 1936 was hospitalised for several weeks. He whiled away the boredom of sobriety reading Karl Marx.

  He had belatedly divorced his wife in 1937, but he and Hellman chose not to marry. Both of them were radicalised by the Spanish Civil War. Hammett carried the brand of the ‘premature anti-Fascist’ for the rest of his life – something that haunted him in the witch-hunting 1950s. Bravely, Hammett helped organise screenwriters and spoke at communist rallies. In 1941, the second film version of The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston, was released. A highpoint of film noir, it is as faithful to the original novel as the moralistic code of Hollywood allowed.

  In 1942, after several attempts, Hammett rejoined the army, aged forty-eight, and served as a military journalist. He was discharged in September 1945, as before with the rank of sergeant: he was not officer class. After the war, in New York, his drinking again spiralled out of control until he finally went on the wagon in 1948. Drunk or sober, he was paralysed by writing block and it was his daily habit to spend hours uselessly at his typewriter. He made no progress with his last work, Tulip, which was abandoned around 1952–3. In 1951, he was sent to prison for six months for refusing to testify in a communist-hunting trial. He was fifty-seven years old and tubercular. For the rest of his life, he was persecuted, unmercifully, by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for unpaid taxes. The TV and radio networks dropped his serials under pressure from right-wing groups, and his income fell drastically. He had a heart attack in 1955 and died six years later of lung cancer, tended faithfully by Hellman who, after negotiation with the IRS, inherited his copyrights. His family got nothing.

  Raymond Chandler, in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, observes that ‘Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corp
se; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.’

  FN

  Samuel Dashiell Hammett

  MRT

  The Glass Key

  Biog

  R. Layman, Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett (1981)

  POSTSCRIPT

  156. Lillian Hellman 1905–1984

  Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented,’ changed his mind.

  Lillian Hellman made her name as a dramatist, scriptwriter, helpmeet to Dashiell Hammett and – in her later years – a memoirist. She may also be claimed, if in a very minor and dubious way, for fiction. In the second of Hellman’s three autobiographical volumes, evocatively entitled Pentimento (1973), she recalls her years of engaged political activism in 1930s when she was a doughty fighter against European fascism. Pentimento was a bestseller and film rights were acquired. One chapter – some fifty pages in the book – was adapted into the film Julia, three years later and was very well received and garnered Oscar nominations. It was everywhere accepted as fact, not fiction. The narrative, in both versions, chronicles a friendship in adolescence between Lillian (played in the film by Jane Fonda) and ‘Julia’ (played by Vanessa Redgrave). The relationship is passionate. ‘I have had plenty of time to think about the love I had for her,’ Hellman muses: ‘too strong and too complicated to be defined as only the sexual yearnings of one girl for another. And yet certainly that was there. I don’t know, I never cared, and now it is an aimless guessing game.’