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

by John Sutherland

  Biographers have looked, but there seems to have been no record of this event, and no committee of inquiry – invariably required when an expensive item of military property is destroyed in training. Would a trainee pilot (in a two-seater) have survived dismissal from the course for a manoeuvre which, as Faulkner implied, was carried out in a spirit of sheer devilry? Joseph Blotner, author of the immense biography which has biblical status among Faulknerians, concludes, grimly: ‘It seems clear that Cadet Faulkner did not crash. Did he ever fly?’ Probably not, Blotner intimates. He was what the cadets contemptuously called a ‘kiwi’ – a bird that never takes to the air.

  Faulkner graduated in November 1918, the same month, as he bitterly said, ‘the war quit on us’. For his return home to Oxford, Mississippi, he had bought himself an officer’s uniform, complete with pips and swagger stick (he would sport a military-looking trenchcoat for the rest of his life). He was still a cadet, and would not receive an ‘honorary’ lieutenant’s rank for two years. Impersonating an officer is a court martial offence – although in the chaotic demobilisation of millions no one in 1918 checked up on the bona fides of ‘Lieut.’ Faulkner. He was, however, a fake. He continued to elaborate his ‘war’ over the following years, developing a ‘mythical limp’ and alluding, vaguely, to broken legs in his ‘crash’. His friend and patron, Sherwood Anderson, was convinced Faulkner had a silver plate in his skull. As the decades passed, the warrior fantasy grew. Faulkner hinted, obliquely, at having seen combat over Germany. In 1943, sending a good-luck charm to a young relative who was training with the RAF, Faulkner said he would have liked to have sent his dog tags: ‘but I lost them in Europe in Germany … I never found them again after my crack-up in ’18’. There was no ‘crack-up’.

  After the war Faulkner drifted aimlessly. He drank heavily, visited brothels, and had a series of jobs, the longest lasting must have been as one of the least efficient employees in the history of the US Mail. He jacked that job in with the jaundiced comment: ‘I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.’ During this fallow period, he was writing (mainly poetry) and gathering ideas and creative energy. His first novel was written, he claimed, over a few weeks in 1925 in New Orleans, before departing on a tour of Europe. He was encouraged by Anderson, who was instrumental in getting it into print in 1926, with Boni & Liveright, an imprint which guaranteed influential reviews. Mayday, later retitled Soldiers’ Pay, covers three months (April to May 1919) and is an example of what the Germans termed Heimkehrliteratur – return-home fiction. British bestsellers in the genre were If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson and Sorrell and Son by Warwick Deeping. A deeply resentful genre, this variety of fiction depicts the shabby treatment the returned ‘hero’ receives from those for whom he has risked all. The resentment is graphically evident in Soldiers’ Pay (for which read ‘short-change’) in the return of the mortally wounded, DFC-decorated RAF veteran who is at the centre of the narrative:

  Donald Mahon’s homecoming, poor fellow, was hardly a nine days’ wonder even. Curious, kindly neighbors came in – men who stood or sat jovially respectable, cheerful: solid business men interested now in the Ku Klux Klan more than in war, and interested in war only as a matter of dollars and cents; while their wives chatted about clothes to each other across Mahon’s scarred oblivious brow.

  The story opens with three discharged veterans returning home by train. One is an air cadet, Julian Lowe (faintly symbolic name) who has never flown; the second, Gilligan, an exuberant doughboy infantry private; the third, Mahon, the horrifically wounded heroic pilot thought dead by his family and unfaithful fiancée in Georgia. Mahon, in his dying days, is taken charge of by Gilligan and a war widow Gilligan falls in with (and later falls in love with, as does the cadet). There is a supremely telling moment, early in the narrative, when Lowe – who has never seen the action he was trained for – regards the shattered body of Mahon and thinks: ‘To have been him! … Just to be him. Let him take this sound body of mine! Let him take it. To have got wings on my breast, to have wings; and to have got his scar, too, I would take death to-morrow.’ He speaks, one apprehends, for his author.

  One of the fascinations of Soldiers’ Pay is that Faulkner writes better as the novel progresses. Chapter 8, with its flashbacks to combat, and the dogfight which destroyed Mahon, is particularly impressive. One sees the emergence of the author of The Sound and the Fury (1929), three years later. The other fascinating aspect of Soldiers’ Pay is the light it throws on the schizoid quality of the novelist – all novelists – who can both be themselves and something beyond themselves. ‘Lies were important to Faulkner,’ Richard Gray observes. You could argue they are important to all novelists. Fiction and falsity are inextricable. Cadet Faulkner had been close enough to the real thing to smell it. It was close enough – if not for his personal military ambitions, then for his writing. And if some of the fiction washed back into his image of himself (a work of fiction for most men) it is a thing of little importance.

  FN

  William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner)

  MRT

  Soldiers’ Pay

  Biog

  J. Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (2 vols, 1974)

  165. Dennis Wheatley 1897–1977

  I have never yet met anyone who practised Black, or even Grey, Magic who was not hard up.

  Dennis Wheatley was born into one of the few branches of ‘trade’ traditionally regarded as a career fit for gentlemen. His father was a prosperous West End wine merchant. Dennis was the only son and was brought up in the expectation of his taking over the family business. The Wheatleys lived, comfortably but not ostentatiously, in Streatham. It was not – then or now – an address to boast about and Dennis, who had a broad streak of amiable snobbery in his make-up, aimed from his earliest years to leave the South London palais de dance, Lyons Corner House, and picture palace well behind him. But he was unhappy at his public school, Dulwich College (where, it’s nice to think, he was a near-contemporary of Raymond Chandler) and left after a year for the more bracing education offered by a naval academy. ‘He never shone academically,’ records his friendly biographer, which is an understatement. He never even mastered the art of spelling. He read fiction voraciously, however, and three novels shaped him: The Prisoner of Zenda, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Three Musketeers. His own fiction would ring innumerable changes on their adventure plots.

  On leaving school (no question of university) he spent a Lehrjahr in Germany, where he learned all about Hock and Moselwein and, it being 1913, witnessed the ominous militarisation of that country. On the outbreak of war, young Wheatley was among the first to sign up. He was also, fortunately for him, among the last to see frontline action. A series of cushy postings, unsought by him, as a junior officer in the Territorials kept him out of the fight until late 1917. After a few weeks in the trenches he was invalided back – it was not wounds, or gas, but his chronic bronchitis.

  Wheatley’s diary (his ‘fornicator’s game book’ he called it) records engagements with a startlingly large number of filles de joie during these years. Clap was always more of a wartime risk for him than the Hun. He was, meanwhile, conducting courtships with respectable girls, often two at a time, of his own – or preferably higher – class. Despite having all his teeth removed at an early age, rotted by his lifelong addiction to sweetmeats and dessert wine, he was dashingly handsome and man-of-the-worldish. During the war Wheatley also fell in with a male companion who would have a profound effect on him. On demobilisation they became inseparable friends. Eric Tombe, a self-professed decadent (an ‘intellectual sensualist’, Wheatley called him) introduced him to the occult and to interesting delinquencies of the Dorian Gray kind. Tombe was a confidence trickster and led his wine-merchant friend into dangerous places. He was eventually murdered, by an even shiftier rogue than himself. Wheatley immort
alised Tombe in the person of the devilishly good-looking, scar-faced vigilante, Gregory Sallust (‘Sexlust,’ to connoisseurs of Wheatleyism).

  Wheatley married in 1922, just after Tombe’s disappearance. (His decomposed body was discovered in a cess pit, a year later.) His bride was an heiress and a son, Anthony, was born soon after. It was a troubled period, with social upheaval in the air. Wheatley brandished, and actually fired, his old service handgun against strikers in 1926. To the end of his days he feared Red Revolution. His early novel, Black August, foresees Bolshevik takeover by 1960 (the novel clearly inspired Constantine Fitzgibbon’s much superior When the Kissing had to Stop) and in his best novel, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, Satan allies himself with the Kremlin, to bring about a duopolistic world dominion: for ever and ever. Wheatley had an instinctive sympathy with Oswald Mosley, but he was too old-school English, and inherently decent to join the BUF and kow-tow to that German riff-raff in ludicrous black uniforms. The plum-coloured dinner-jacket was Wheatley’s uniform. He took over the wine business on his father’s death in 1927 and brought flair to the company. Among other things, he takes credit for inventing what he calls the ‘Napoleon Brandy racket’ – very ancient, usually wholly faked up, liquor, in cobwebbed bottles. It was one of his finer works of fiction.

  However resourceful he was, it was a bad time for high-priced luxury goods and the slump bankrupted the firm in 1932. His first marriage had failed (his adultery) and it was his second wife, Joan, who pointed out that people may have stopped drinking expensive plonk but they were still reading Edgar Wallace, the ‘King of Thrillers’. Wallace had died in 1932 and Wheatley perceived a vacancy for that throne, methodically setting himself up as ‘the Prince of Thrillers’. An astute merchandiser of consumables – whether in bottles, cases or hard covers – in liaison with Hutchinson, his lifelong publisher, he ‘pushed’ his first novel, The Forbidden Territory (1933), by means of 20,000 advertising postcards. In current terminology, Wheatley invented the mail shot. It worked for thrillers as well as it had for Beaujolais nouveau. The novel was reprinted seven times in the first seven weeks.

  The Forbidden Territory is a disciple’s updating of Wallace’s Four Just Men (itself an update of Dumas’s famous three). It introduced a crime-fighting, Commie-bashing, quartet headed by the aristocratic Duc de Richleau, the drawling embodiment of cosmopolitan and wine-bibbing cool. He has ‘devil’s eyebrows’ and a connoisseur’s taste for Imperial Tokay wine and Hoyo de Monterrey cigars – the characteristic whiff of a ‘Wheatley’. Richleau’s comrades include the subtle Jewish intellectual, Simon Aron and the supercharged all-American Rex Van Ryn. William Joyce (later ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, the Nazi radio propagandist) with whom Wheatley had a passing acquaintance, relayed the fact that Goering was a great admirer – alas, given Aron’s race, the books were banned for the larger German public. Joyce also told his Nazi superiors that Wheatley would make an excellent Gauleiter for London, after the country’s takeover.

  Once he had found his public, Wheatley varied his game skilfully. Black August (1934) introduced Gregory Sallust, and a run of eleven novels over thirty-four years. Other series heroes were Julian Day (suave diplomat) and Roger Brook (Wheatley’s Scarlet Pimpernel). In all his novels, Wheatley was at pains to introduce at least one ‘hot scene’ – typically a fragrant English maiden whose virtue is in peril from some foreign violator. The novel of Wheatley’s which endures is The Devil Rides Out (1934), in which Richleau et al. take on the Evil One himself. It would be the first of eight such occult romances. In them Wheatley drew on ‘research’, as he called it, about necromantic rituals, which were in fact picked up, second-hand, from personal acquaintance with Aleister Crowley (the ‘Great Beast’) and Montague Summers (the ‘Evil Priest’).

  There was a rage for detective fiction at the period, and in 1936 Wheatley pioneered the ‘Crime Dossier’ detective novel, with Murder off Miami. It arrived as a box containing physical ‘clues’ (cigarette ends, envelopes, etc.) with loose leaves of narrative in pseudo-documentary form. As a novelty, they sold brilliantly. The first cleared 200,000 copies and earned a laudatory third leader in The Times. By the time war broke out in 1939, Wheatley had restored his lost vintner’s fortune with fourteen bestsellers. Whatever the limitations of the novels, Wheatley had a remarkably fertile imagination. It had been recognised in high places and he was recommissioned, this time into the air force, and recruited to advise the War Cabinet on ‘Deception’. His papers, ‘for the eyes only’ of George VI and the Chiefs of Staff, were wildly fantastic, but not without a certain shrewdness. It was Wheatley who, as the German invasion seemed imminent, suggested turning round all the road signs in southern England. It created much confusion for the uninvaded British people. When the war was won, one of his papers suggested, the whole German male population should be sterilised in the interest of European peace. Joyce was right; he would have made a good Gauleiter.

  He left with the rank of acting Wing Commander. Now very rich, he retired to a fine country house where he collected fine wine, furniture, stamps and books. He would clock up some seventy-five thrillers by the time of his death. He loathed the Labour government (‘half way to communism’) – and its 19 shillings in the pound taxes – but was too patriotic to retreat into tax exile. By the 1960s his novels were very old-hat. But New Age obsession with the occult revived interest in him. The Devil Rides Out was picked up by Hammer Films in 1968 with Christopher Lee, as a superbly OTT Richleau, and a script by Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend, source-text for the 2007 zombie film). The Hammer adaptations kicked off a Wheatley cult, including, along with the diabolist nonsense, the preposterous The Lost Continent. It was made of seaweed, floated in the Sargasso Sea, and was infested with monstrous crustaceans and cannibalistic descendants of marooned pirates. The studio ran out of money halfway through, and had to do desperate things with papier mâché.

  Wheatley, a firm believer in reincarnation, had at least one second life. He died, full of age and money, indomitably ‘jolly’ to the end (he wanted a gigantic champagne party for his ‘return’, rather than a wake for his departure), leaving a fortune of some £80,000.

  FN

  Dennis Yates Wheatley

  MRT

  The Haunting of Toby Jugg

  Biog

  P. Baker: The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (2009)

  166. Elizabeth Bowen 1899–1973

  I am fully intelligent only when I write.

  Stephen Spender and his wife were on visiting terms with Elizabeth Bowen during the war years, when the poet and novelist were both London fire-watchers. Natasha Spender liked to recall a supper party with Bowen in early autumn 1940, during the Blitz. The guests had adjourned to the balcony, overlooking Regent’s Park, to smoke their after-dinner cigarettes in the warm night air. As the bombs rained down on the city, Bowen turned to her guests and stammered: ‘I really do apo-apologise for the noise.’ War, she confided to Virginia Woolf, made her feel ‘vulgar’. Few presented loftier defiance to the Hun, even when, as happened two years later, a V-1 landed on the balcony where Bowen and her guests had been standing on that earlier evening.

  War was the soundtrack to her life. She was born, Anglo-Irish in southern Ireland, during the Boer War. She was a teenager during the First World War. The Irish Civil War raged around her beloved ‘Big House’, Bowen’s Court, in the early 1920s. It, unlike others, was spared the Republican torch. She worked for the Ministry of Information (Orwell’s ‘Minitruth’) when not an air-raid warden, in the Second World War. Her last novel, Eva Trout, or, Changing Scenes, was published in 1968, as the B-Specials ran riot, the Provisional IRA was born, and another Irish war broke out. By now her Big House was rubble.

  Her stammer, unlike the stutter, a physiological defect, she plausibly ascribed to ‘psychic’ causes. The only child of a grossly broken family, she was also a displaced person most of her life: yet, paradoxically, an extraordinarily serene one. If there is a word which
describes her (ignoring, for the moment, Virginia Woolf’s deadly accurate ‘horsefaced’), it is hauteur. She was the only child of a prosperous Dublin lawyer. The Bowens traced their line back to the Cromwellian beginnings of the ‘Ascendancy’. Their fine country seat had been erected in 1775 and was the enduring love of Elizabeth’s life. When, in later life, she decided to write a memoir, she called it Bowen’s Court (1964). Elizabeth’s father suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown when she was six. Elizabeth and her mother moved to poky lodgings in Hythe, on the south coast of England. Here, her mother died of cancer five years later.

  A remote committee of aunts then took charge. The distress echoes through her fiction – most incisively in The Death of the Heart (1938) in which Portia, the pubescent heroine, finds herself the ‘odd’, orphaned child, prey to any sexual predator or victim of any negligent guardian. Bowen once said she wrote to ‘feel grown up’. Doubtless she smoked her sixty cigarettes a day for the same reason (few pages carry a stronger whiff of nicotine than hers): a bewildered child is always somewhere in the background.