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

by John Sutherland

  Heyer lost control of her weight in later years and was disabled by chronic ailments, which she wrote through indomitably, producing her novel-a-year at least. They remained in print – particularly after the paperback revolution of the 1960s – pulling in as much as £70,000 in a good year. Most were good years. She died of lung cancer in 1974 and after her death her husband saw through the publication of an incomplete historical novel, My Lord John (1975), set in the Middle Ages which was, he claimed, the period she had really wanted to get to grips with. Rougier died not long after his wife’s death. Their son Richard went on to be a famously witty judge.

  Heyer’s Regency fiction continues to have loyal readers and some eminent supporters – notably A. S. Byatt. Others, like Marghanita Laski, writing in the year of Heyer’s death, find the ‘universal blandness’ numbing and her novels comically sexless: ‘if ever Miss Heyer’s heroines lifted their worked muslin skirts, if ever her heroic dandies unbuttoned their daytime pantaloons, underneath would be only sewn-up rag dolls’.

  FN

  Georgette Heyer (later Rougier)

  MRT

  An Infamous Army

  Biog

  J. A. Hodge, The Private World of Georgette Heyer (1984)

  171. John Steinbeck 1902–1968

  A rather cagey cribber. Scott Fitzgerald on Steinbeck

  John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, northern California, of mixed Irish and German descent. His father was a local government official, his mother a teacher. Steinbeck recalls the Salinas Valley of his childhood in the opening pages of East of Eden (1952) as itself an Edenic place to start life. He also recalls the natal moment at which the writer in him was born, when, aged eleven, he was introduced to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur by his Aunt Molly. He pictures himself, a little boy sitting under a tree, ‘dazzled and swept up’ by the tales of knight-errantry. A romantic streak would colour his artistic make-up for the whole of his writing career – a career which can be seen as a long dialogue with other writers and thinkers. Steinbeck is the most creatively absorbent of novelists: fictional blotting paper. Alternatively, he is what Fitzgerald contemptuously terms him – a ‘cribber’.

  One can follow the track of that cribbing. In late adolescence, Steinbeck came under the spell of Jack London’s Martin Eden. Following London’s rugged lead, he dropped out of college at Stanford and went on the road as a hobo, making a fitful stab at running away to sea. His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), based on the adventures of the Elizabethan buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan, was an acknowledged homage to James Branch Cabell’s florid historical romances. In 1929 he was introduced to Hemingway’s work by his future wife, Carol Henning, who gave him a copy of ‘The Killers’. Romantic Cabell was thrown overboard: modernism had caught up with John Steinbeck. Put another way, he became ‘the poor man’s Ernest Hemingway’. Henning also introduced him to left-wing politics and he duly became ‘the poor man’s John Reed’ – for a few years. She can be seen as the political force behind Steinbeck’s early ‘strike novel’, In Dubious Battle (1936): one of Steinbeck’s manifest gifts was in devising sonorous titles; he never needed to crib in that department.

  There is only one recorded personal encounter between Steinbeck himself and Hemingway, in New York in the early 1940s. John Hersey, who set it up, records that the occasion was a ‘disaster’. Steinbeck had given fellow novelist John O’Hara a blackthorn stick. Hemingway grabbed the stick from O’Hara and broke it over his own head and threw the pieces on the ground, claiming it was a ‘fake of some kind’. Drink was probably behind his actions, but one is tempted to allegorise the episode as Hemingway protesting Steinbeck’s appropriation of ‘his’ style. That is how Steinbeck read the event, at least. According to Hersey, ‘Steinbeck never liked Hemingway after that – not as a man.’

  In 1930, Steinbeck, now resident in the unspoiled Pacific coast around Monterey, met his guru in the form of Ed Ricketts. A maverick marine biologist, Ricketts passed down to his disciple the biological materialism that was to run through all Steinbeck’s subsequent writing. Its most memorable expression is Rose of Sharon’s suckling the starving stranger at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. Ricketts convinced Steinbeck of the necessity of ‘non-teleological thinking’ – the wisdom of the mollusc. When not instructing, Ricketts was a drinking buddy and – Steinbeck’s latest biographer hints – there may have been something homoerotic between the men. Ricketts is portrayed as ‘Doc’ in Cannery Row (1945). With his premature death in 1948 (his car was hit by a train), there is an observable reverberation in Steinbeck’s writing – throughout life, he insisted that he was a ‘writer’ not an ‘author’. He was bereft.

  There were, however, other gurus to follow. Steinbeck’s path crossed in the 1930s with that of the mythographer, Joseph Campbell, who introduced him to Jungian symbolism. In the seigneurial tradition of the West Coast sage, Campbell cuckolded his disciple: Steinbeck lost a wife – his first of three – but gained a literary device. The turtle which crawls across the road at the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath should have ‘Ricketts’ emblazoned on one half of its shell and ‘Campbell’ on the other. Campbell’s thinking rings out from what is the most quoted of Steinbeck’s ‘philosophical’ pronouncements: ‘The new eye is being opened here in the west – the new seeing. It is probable that no one will know it for two hundred years. It will be confused, analyzed, analogized, criticized, and none of our fine critics will know what is happening.’

  The Pastures of Heaven (1932) followed an immersion in Winesburg, Ohio. Sherwood Anderson did for Steinbeck’s artfully fragmented narrative structure what Hemingway had done for his literary language. Thus Steinbeck was finally primed for his first great work – and sales success – Of Mice and Men (1937). The tragic story of the vagrant farm-workers Lennie and George elicited accusations of downright plagiarism from Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote indignantly to Edmund Wilson:

  I’d like to put you on to something about Steinbeck. He is a rather cagey cribber. Most of us begin as imitators but it is something else for a man of his years and reputation to steal a whole scene as he did in ‘Mice and Men’. I’m sending you a marked copy of Norris’ ‘McTeague’ to show you what I mean. His debt to The Octopus is also enormous and his balls, when he uses them, are usually clipped from Lawrence’s ‘Kangaroo’.

  On his part, Edmund Wilson thought that Steinbeck’s next great work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) owed more than it should to the ‘newsreel’ sections of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, which came out the year before. Woundingly, even Steinbeck’s former high school teacher, Miss Cupp, gave it as her opinion that The Grapes of Wrath was not an ‘authentic’ book. Whatever the cavils, the epic journey of the Joads in their Hudson truck along Route 66 to the false Eden of southern California had the good luck to coincide with Roosevelt’s New Deal. No novel since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was more effective in, temporarily, touching the American social conscience. It headed the bestseller list for two years and earned Steinbeck the 1940 Pulitzer Prize. In England it inspired what an unimpressed Graham Greene called a ‘fetish’ for Steinbeck – something akin to whips, rubber and bondage: low things of that kind.

  During the Second World War, Steinbeck put his pen to his country’s service. He proved himself a distinguished war correspondent and wrote a propaganda novel, The Moon is Down (1942). It was commissioned by the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) and celebrates heroic civilian resistance against Nazi occupation in Norway. When Steinbeck visited Scandinavia after the war, it was to be greeted with a headline: ‘John Steinbeck, all of Denmark is at your feet.’ In Sweden he was told that The Moon is Down had ‘fired the confidence’ of Scandinavian freedom-fighters ‘during the war’s darkest hours’. Gratitude was in order, and would be richly repaid in 1962 with the world’s highest literary award.

  Steinbeck himself pointed to some odd inspirations with his next major work of fiction, East of Eden (1952). He had, he confided, drawn on the Book of Genesis and Henry Fielding. Cain, Abel and
murder among the furrows one can see; Tom Jones and Blifil, it must be said, seem planets away from the fratricide of Cal and Aron Trask in the bean-fields of Salinas Valley of the pre-First World War years. He called East of Eden ‘my first book’; it is certainly his longest. It returned to the bestseller lists in the twenty-first century when Oprah Winfrey endorsed it.

  Steinbeck divorced his second wife in the same year Ricketts was killed. His marriage to his third wife, Elaine Scott (herself recently divorced from the film actor Zachary Scott), coincided with a new, and highly remunerative, line of Hollywood work. Steinbeck did the screenplay for Elia Kazan’s Brando-starring Viva Zapata! (1952). Kazan also did the James Dean-starring adaptation of East of Eden (1955). The association with Hollywood’s sexiest ‘Method’ actors kept sales of all Steinbeck’s work healthy. So too did the fact that his fiction was being prescribed at high-school level, particularly the novella-fable, The Pearl (1947) – one of Steinbeck’s most tediously Campbellian efforts.

  Scandinavia paid its wartime debt to Steinbeck with the award of the Nobel Prize in 1962. It was the period in which the new Jewish school of New York fiction (Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Malamud) was ascendant. The New York Times hailed Steinbeck’s achievement with a breathtakingly denunciatory editorial, questioning the mental abilities of the Swedish judges. In the same paper Alfred Kazin did an op-ed entitled ‘Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?’ It was less the laureate’s wreath than a toilet seat which his country placed on John Steinbeck’s brow. Steinbeck duly made his acceptance address a counter-attack on ‘an emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches’. Fight back as he might, the Prize was dust in his mouth. He wrote no more fiction – and, once the champion of the Hoovervilles, his politics wavered rightwards. Notoriously he supported Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam policy and did some of the frontline reporting he had done in the Second World War. His health was not up to such exertions, however, and he died prematurely of heart failure before witnessing the squalid flight of his country’s helicopters from Saigon, wretched Vietnamese hanging on to the landing skids. Unluckier, even, than the Joads.

  FN

  John Ernst Steinbeck III

  MRT

  The Grapes of Wrath

  Biog

  J. Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995)

  POSTSCRIPT

  172. John Hersey 1914–1993; John O’Hara 1905–1970

  Stylish decency. John Clute on John Hersey

  Thoroughly obnoxious. Jonathan Yardley on John O’Hara

  The two Prufrocks swelling the scene in the epic blackthorn-stick contest between Hemingway and Steinbeck warrant a mention. Between them, the quartet represents four distinct adaptations of the realist traditions of American fiction. John Hersey was born in China, the son of Christian missionaries. He returned with his family to America, aged ten, and went on to study at Yale. Unprivileged, Hersey worked his way through university with menial jobs on the side. He completed his studies at Clare College, Cambridge (on full fellowship).

  He worked briefly as a secretary to Sinclair Lewis, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, after graduation – but disliked the man. His gifts as a journalist were recognised early and in his mid-twenties he was recruited by Time magazine. By the end of the 1930s he was running their Chinese bureau (Hersey was fluent in Mandarin from childhood). He made his first, of two, marriages in 1940. He was an intrepid war reporter during the Second World War, covering the Allied invasion of Italy, being downed four times while flying in combat zones and witnessing, from the frontline, the bloody marine invasion of Guadalcanal. Although never uniformed, Hersey saw more battle than most soldiers; and risked his life more than most. Unsurprisingly he came to hate war.

  Hersey is sometimes claimed as the father of ‘New Journalism’. He can as easily be portrayed as a pioneer of docufiction or, what he called ‘the novel of contemporary history’. Fiction, Hersey believed, ‘is a clarifying agent [that] makes truth possible’. His first effort in this clarifying genre was A Bell for Adano, published while the fighting was still at its height, in 1944. A mixture of war reportage (it began as a factual article in Life magazine), propaganda and fiction, A Bell for Adano was a bestselling book, a hit Broadway play, and a big-budget film (1945). It opens with the stark declaration: ‘Major Victor Joppolo, U.S.A, was a good man.’ Joppolo is an officer in ‘Amgot’, the ‘Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory’. His assignment is the Sicilian coastal village of Adano. Joppolo (Italo-American and bilingual) establishes himself as Adano’s benign Duce. A ‘good man’ – and a married man – he has an affair with a local girl (something that involved Hersey in a libel suit when the wife of the officer on whom Joppolo was based read the book).

  Hersey reserves his greatest savagery not for the Fascists, who are buffoons, but for the American commander in chief, ‘General Marvin’ (i.e. General George S. Patton). ‘I can tell you perfectly calmly,’ the narrator declares, ‘that General Marvin showed himself during the invasion to be a bad man, something worse than what our troops were trying to throw out.’ The novel is glued together by Joppolo’s efforts to acquire a bell for the church of San Angelo, to replace the one taken away for scrap metal during the war. A Bell for Adano won a Pulitzer prize. A year later, an assignment from Life magazine brought Hersey to occupied Japan. There he came across a document by a Jesuit missionary who had survived the atom bomb and he tried to interest the New Yorker in an article. Earlier he had written the story of torpedo boat PT109, and a certain Lt. John F. Kennedy, and was in good standing with the magazine. After much agonising, the editors William Shawn and Harold Ross decided to commission a 31,000-word piece, which would occupy the whole of their cartoonless 31 August 1946 issue.

  Ostensibly reportage, Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ employed the narrative techniques of fiction. It follows the experiences of six survivors – all intensively interviewed by the author: a clerk, a doctor, a tailor’s widow, a German priest, a surgeon and a Japanese Methodist minister. The interviewees were chosen to overturn the monolithic image of the subhuman ‘Jap’ promulgated during hostilities. The descriptions of the physical effects of the ‘Bomb’ were horrific: melted eyeballs, bone-rotting radiation sickness, and – the image that went around the world – a victim whose only relic was a shadowy profile on a wall; the rest of him vaporised. The New Yorker sold out in hours and reprinted several times to meet demand. In some quarters (notably his former employer, Time) Hersey was regarded as perniciously leftist. Undaunted, he followed up his Goyaesque ‘Horrors of War’ mission with The Wall (1950), a novel based on the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, while the world – and Stalin – watched.

  Hersey returned in 1950 to his alma mater, Yale, as the master of Pierson College, and later a professor. He opposed the Vietnam War, and marched against it, activism which displeased his Ivy League employers. He continued to write novels, the best of which is The War Lover (1959). Set in one of the many ‘Mighty Eighth’ air force bases in England, the ‘war lover’ of the title is Buzz Morrow, a B17 (Flying Fortress) pilot, who drops deadly cargoes of high explosive on civilians in Germany with extraordinary skill and daring. He is brave, but borderline psychotic. But is that, Hersey’s novel ponders, the whole nature of ‘bravery’? The War Lover is not quite Strangelove but notches better than Memphis Belle. It was filmed, starring Steve McQueen as Buzz, in 1962.

  Hersey divorced, married again, had five children in all, and died at Key West where he and his wife shared a compound with his friend, the African-American novelist, Ralph Ellison. He was fondly remembered by generations of students at Yale. Writing his obituary, John Clute discerned a core of ‘stylish decency’ running through everything Hersey did – one could raise the epithet to ‘nobility’.

  Stylish decency was never the calling card of John O’Hara. Words like ‘oaf’, ‘lout’ and ‘brute’ attach themselves to him, particularly in his drinking days. ‘A strange, unpleasant man,’ one critic
calls him. Paul Douglas, the Hollywood star, once grabbed O’Hara by his necktie and made a good attempt at throttling him, after an especially obnoxious piece of drunkenness. Many wished Douglas had succeeded.

  O’Hara was born an Irish Catholic, the oldest of eight children of a surgeon, in the small Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Pottsville. He recalls his upbringing in the short stories collected as The Doctor’s Son (1935) – there are particularly vivid descriptions of the 1919 flu epidemic. Intransigent from youth onwards, he was expelled from three schools – the last for drunkenness. His father died when John was twenty, which meant he could not, as planned, go to Yale. It embittered him for life (Ernest Hemingway suggested, sarcastically, that writers should chip in for a ‘fund’ to send him there to stop the bloody man complaining). Suddenly penniless, another no-good ‘Mick’, for a couple of years he jogged along with menial work (‘soda jerk’, gas meter reader, gardener) until, aged twenty-three, he landed a job as a journalist. It was the post-Prohibition era, and the jazz age; there was lots of easy money and easier morality. O’Hara was a facile reporter and got work from top papers in Philadelphia and New York. He also lost many of those jobs for drunkenness – and often nasty drunkenness. He married and divorced soon after, in 1933.

  O’Hara had had stories taken by the New Yorker, which led him to think he might do something more ambitious in that line. Down to his last three dollars, he holed up in his New York lodging and set to writing a full-length novel to keep the wolf from the door. It was called Appointment in Samarra – the title borrowed from an oriental fable popularised by Somerset Maugham: a merchant’s servant sees ‘Death’ in Baghdad looking at him fixedly, and assumes he is soon to die. He tells his master: ‘I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.’ The merchant subsequently asks Death why he threatened his servant in Baghdad. Death replies: ‘That was not a threatening gesture … I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’ Kismet.