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

by John Sutherland

  The novel centres on Rubashov a former party leader in an unidentified state – clearly the USSR. It begins with him being brutally woken from his dreams by the secret police and taken off for a months’ long interrogation. The novel was inspired by the 1930s Moscow show trials in which leader after leader appeared in court – apparently not coerced physically – to confess absurd capital crimes against the regime before being shot. Accepting their fate was one thing – but why had they accepted their guilt? In the novel, the interrogator Ivanov, a former friend, relentlessly brings Rubashov (who in point of fact was indomitably loyal to the Party) to a realisation that whatever his ‘subjective’ illusions, ‘objectively’ he is a traitor to the cause – specifically to ‘No. 1’ (i.e. Big Brother, Stalin, Hitler). Ivanov himself is liquidated, to be replaced by the more brutal Gletkin. Rubashov, his brain thoroughly washed, is duly shot. The novel had a powerful impact on thinking in the West – and, clearly, on his friend Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  After a year in the ‘Alien Pioneer Corps’, and a mental health breakdown (which may have been confected), Koestler was transferred to the Ministry of Information. Not all his information – such as his early publicity about the fact of the Holocaust – went down well. In 1943, he found time to write a third novel, Arrival and Departure. A sequel to Darkness at Noon, it takes the form of a prolonged psychoanalysis of Peter Slavek (‘slave’ and ‘Slav’ are evoked), a former revolutionary in Neutralia. Gradually he comes to terms with his serial betrayals, political compromises and guilt. Arrival and Departure, the first novel Koestler wrote in English (the language he came to admire for its having ‘no fat, only muscles’), was relatively unsuccessful.

  In late 1945 Koestler returned to Palestine – currently in turmoil. The result was his other major work of fiction, the roman à thése, Thieves in the Night (1946). The Koestlerian hero, Joseph, is rejected by a Gentile woman on seeing that he is circumcised. Joseph embarks on a voyage of discovery into his genetic origins in Palestine. He works on a kibbutz and, after this apprenticeship, throws himself into the Zionist struggle. The novel contains sharp satire of the British officials enforcing the Mandate and tendentious portrayals of the Arabs as – among other bad things – rapists and killers (centrally of Joseph’s lover, Dina). Joseph ends the novel a conscientious terrorist.

  Koestler became a British citizen in 1948. By now he had a new partner, Mamaine Paget (English despite her name – stunningly beautiful, inevitably) who became his second wife in 1950. They moved to France. Koestler was now not merely a defector from communism, but its most formidable foe. He edited a CIA-sponsored collection by prominent intellectuals similarly disaffected, The God That Failed (1949). It seemed at this point he might emigrate to the US, where he was now welcome. Instead he took up semi-permanent residence in London, now a wealthy man. In 1965 (Mamaine having died) he married his long-time secretary, Cynthia Jefferies and published two further novels, The Age of Longing (1951) and The Call Girls (1972), which are mere shavings from his workshop floor. The major works of his late period – The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, The Ghost in the Machine – are books which, each of them, would for lesser men have required a lifetime’s immersion in different disciplines.

  A powerful force in British and world debate, he was the prime example of Sartre’s auteur engagé. He remained, to the end, astoundingly wide-ranging in the issues and ideas he engaged with. Among other things he was a campaigner against capital punishment, and for the right to suicide. Terminally ill – but writing to the end – he committed suicide, persuading his luckless wife (decades his junior and in good health) to go with him. On the web, the paranoid suggestion that he was murdered by Mossad is rampant. Looking at his extraordinary life it may well be true.

  FN

  Arthur Koestler

  MRT

  Darkness at Noon

  Biog

  M. Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (2009)

  183. Anthony Powell 1905–2000

  The thing that counts in writing is staying power. It’s that, more than anything, that gives you a reputation.

  The first paragraph of A Question of Upbringing (1951), the first volume of Powell’s twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time sequence, opens with a London road-mending in winter. Nothing is happening: ‘The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes.’ The description meanders on for another 200 words, ending: ‘The grey, undecided flakes, continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in.’

  Where, the reader wonders, is all this going? Nowhere very quickly, it’s safe to assume, like the hole in the road. But the effect is instantly hypnotic. No writer in English is more the master of the slow tempos of life than Powell. Afternoon Men, his first published novel, is the chronicle of city fellows with huge expanses of postmeridian time, and nothing to fill it with – except, of course, cocktails, gossip and another cocktail. It captures, as in a sealed capsule, the feel of the dull leisure of the high inter-war period. What was unstoppably coming, of course – and one feels the imminence gathering through the ‘Dance’ sequence – was another ‘Great War’, even more cataclysmic than the last. That would be a happening.

  Anthony Powell was the only child of a distinguished soldier and a mother, some fifteen years older than her husband. He was officer class; she had her roots in the landowning classes of England. Somewhat perversely, he grew up prouder of his Welshness (his surname, he ordained, should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘Noel’ and not ‘towel’). At Eton he fell in with Henry Green and Cyril Connolly and at Balliol College, Oxford, with Evelyn Waugh, as one of what would later be called the ‘Brideshead Generation’. One of Powell’s critics wittily retitles his great work ‘A Dance to the Eton Boating Song’. Stylish ennui was the approved attitude and Powell, like Connolly, would be a connoisseur of the corrosive ‘enemies of promise’, his chosen terrain being the ‘acceptance world’. The term is derived from city jargon for ‘selling short’ – i.e. money for jam.

  He left Oxford – though in one sense he never did – with the de rigueur ‘gentleman’s third’ in history and drifted to London, as if drawn by a magnet. ‘I am a metropolitan man,’ he once said of himself. He joined the publisher Duckworth where his father had ‘friends’. One of his early signings was Evelyn Waugh, whose Decline and Fall would influence his own work. Afternoon Men came out under the Duckworth imprint in 1931, to be followed in quick succession by Venusberg (1932) and From a View to a Death (1933). They are, all of them, wittily dispirited versions of ‘the way we live now’ – or, more precisely, how Powell’s class lived. In December 1934 (always his favourite month – he liked the gloom) Powell married Lady Violet Georgiana Pakenham, an offspring of the English Catholic aristocracy. The couple would have two sons. Was the marriage happy? ‘I should like to say more about Powell’s marriage, but I can’t,’ his biographer sighs.

  In 1936 Powell left Duckworth for a short spell of scriptwriting in Los Angeles. It did not please, although it was remunerative. On the outbreak of war, he gave up writing for the duration. After a false start in the infantry – for which years of indolence had rather unsuited him – Powell found his niche in ‘intelligence’, working as a liaison officer with expatriate allies from occupied countries in Europe. He was demobilised in 1945 with the rank of major, a chestful of decorations, and a sense of vague remorse that he had had such a cushy war – and, as he said, a very ‘boring’ one. One of the allusions which comes up, time and again, in the wartime volumes of Dance is from Alfred de Vigny’s ironically titled Servitude et grandeur militaires. The French poet served in the army for fourteen years without seeing any action whatsoever. Powell’s father had seen real action in the earlier war.

  In 1948, he
fell, as he always did, into a comfortable berth as the Times Literary Supplement fiction review editor. In 1950 he inherited a fortune from an uncle he barely knew. Money, too, always seemed to fall his way, and enabled him to move into a fine country house, The Chantry, in Somerset. Another bequest, when his father died, in 1959, insulated him against the inconveniences of post-war austerity. Financial security also enabled him to embark on his grand project, A Dance to the Music of Time, and to take his own time doing it. The sequence was launched in 1951 – the year of the ‘Festival of Britain’ which, in his prelude to his grand project, The Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh portrays as the end of English civilisation. Under his series hero’s less jaundiced, but equally gloomy eye, Powell surveys fifty years of England. The viewpoint is conservative, like Waugh’s, but less irritably so. Powell rarely put people’s backs up. ‘Tony is the only Tory I have ever liked,’ said George Orwell – someone who elsewhere repudiated everything Powell’s class stood for. The design is loose-knit. Characters drift in and drift out with no more purpose than jellyfish in the ocean stream. Nothing is hurried – but time passes and things do happen. The reader is given the task of assembling, rather than being told, what is going on. The Acceptance World (1955) opens, typically, with a lavishly slow motion description of a seedily genteel hotel, some fortune-telling, and an uneventful tryst between the unsinkable Uncle Giles and his nephew Nicholas – neither of whom has what Othello calls ‘occupation’. This life-drift only makes sense in terms of Jenkins’s antagonist, Widmerpool, the ‘getter on’, a coming man who – inevitably – will die a lord. Should one strive, or let life happen and observe it, ironically, keeping afloat as best one can?

  In later life, Powell’s closest friend was Malcolm Muggeridge, a former comrade in army intelligence and now the editor of Punch. Powell was recruited to the magazine in 1953, as literary editor, on the then huge salary of £1,500 p.a. Alongside Dance, which he completed in 1975, Powell kept private journals which, when published in 1982, revealed an increasingly bilious temperament. His last novel, The Fisher King, came out in 1986. He turned down a knighthood – even though it was offered by a Conservative administration. It would, probably, have looked paltry alongside his wife’s lineage – or perhaps too Widmerpoolian. He left over £1.5 million on his death and a fictional sequence to rival Balzac’s.

  FN

  Anthony Dymoke Powell

  MRT

  The Acceptance World

  Biog

  M. Barber, Anthony Powell: A Life (2004)

  184. Ayn Rand 1905–1982

  If any civilisation is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

  If there were an award for the most influential bad novelist in literary history, Ayn Rand would be a contender. A woman of ferocious competitive instinct, she would be furious if she did not also win that award. Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was born, Russian Jewish, in St Petersburg in 1905. Her father ran a pharmacy business. The Rosenbaums were relaxed about religion but 1905, the year of Alisa’s birth, was a bad year to be Jewish as pogroms raged across Russia. The year 1917 was an even worse time to be bourgeois. The Bolsheviks seized their pharmacy and the Rosenbaums were forced to flee to the Crimea. With the success of the Revolution they returned to Leningrad, as it now was, where Alisa studied philosophy at university. She came to loathe Communism and was developing a lifelong interest in Nietzsche – not a favourite of the party.

  Granted a lucky visa to visit relatives in the US, she fled the USSR for ever in 1926. An astonishingly enterprising woman, she settled in Hollywood to become a screenwriter – in a language not her own, and a society of which she knew very little, and a medium which had only just discovered ‘talkies’. She changed her name to Ayn Rand, married (a pliant young actor, Frank O’Connor, of no talent whatsoever), became a US citizen in 1931, and made a living for herself in films, a business never easy to thrive in. It helped that she was – if not filmstar-beautiful – strikingly handsome and unafraid to use her body in pursuit of higher things. Her career took its definitive turn in 1932 with the anti-Soviet screenplay, Red Pawn, for Josef von Sternberg. The film was never produced but got her noticed. Hereafter her writing was ferociously free-enterprise. She was, it was later said, a ‘hob-nailed Reagan’. Gordon (‘greed is good’) Gecko was a Pinko alongside Ayn Rand. She wrote an autobiographical novel about the horrors of the Soviet Union, We the Living (1936), and a Huxley-style dystopia, Anthem (1938). The dystopia is better, but neither is good. Both are pure Ayn.

  She was politically active during the war years and brought out her first bestselling work of fiction, The Fountainhead, with its architect hero (based on Frank Lloyd Wright), Howard Roark, in 1943. He embodied her fanatic belief in individual heroism. A film, starring Gary Cooper, was made in 1949. Inevitably she was called as a friendly witness in the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations into ‘Red’ infiltration into Hollywood. Now well off with the royalties from The Fountainhead, Rand was formulating her views into a sub-Nietzschean philosophy she called ‘Objectivism’, founded on a belief in ‘Rational Selfishness’.

  She propagated her views in her massive sermon to the world, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. The novel revolves around the idea of the wealth-creators (i.e. moguls, magnates and millionaires) of the US following the corrupt example of their workers – trade unionising and going on strike. The capitalistic Atlas shrugs off the burden of making himself rich, and the mass of the population (‘grabbers’) descend into the dystopian chaos they have brought on themselves with their irrational demand that the state look after them. The moral, as one disaffected blogger puts it, is that ‘Poor People Are Lazy Assholes.’ Close on 1,200 pages long (200 of which were an appended politico-philosophical manifesto), Atlas Shrugged was not your ordinary popular novel and reviews were scathing. Robert Kirsch declared in the Los Angeles Times that ‘It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum.’ But the charismatic Rand had access to the new medium of TV talk shows and used the exposure to popularise her novel and its message. She lectured indefatigably on its Objectivist themes. The first 100,000 copies, published on 10 October 1957, gradually cleared. Then cleared again and again. American sales of 5 million were clocked up by 1984.

  Rand’s Objectivism took the philosopher-hero John Galt’s oath (‘I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine’) and his iconic ‘sign of the dollar’ as its prime articles of faith. Rand herself affected personal jewellery emblazoned with the same sacred $. As Rand’s ideas percolated into orthodox republicanism, the coherence of her group broke up. Her younger disciple, and designated heir, Nathaniel Branden, had been her lover for many years. He committed the treachery of falling in love with a younger, more beautiful, someone else. His disgrace and public ejection from her inner council was shattering to the movement as a whole.

  In later years, Rand became ever more strident in the expression of her Objectivist doctrines and died of a heart attack, having survived lung cancer (she was a chain smoker), aged seventy-seven. She was buried in the Kensico cemetery, Valhalla, New York: alongside the casket was a six-foot-tall floral display in the shape of the sacred dollar.

  FN

  Ayn Rand (née Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum; later O’Connor)

  MRT

  Atlas Shrugged

  Biog

  A. C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (2009)

  185. C. P. Snow 1905–1980

  Snow thinks of himself as a novelist. F. R. Leavis

  Viewed from one angle C. P. Snow ranks as the most honoured author of his age. The reverse shot sees him as the most overblown. He went to his grave loaded with lifetime awards; a CBE (‘a fairly high one’), 1943; a knight, 1957; a life peer, 1964; but, for all the gongs and ermine, any reputation as a novelist worthy of posterity’s attention has gone to the grave with him. Two phrases he put into circulation
survive him: ‘the corridors of power’ and ‘the two cultures’. Snow was the second of four sons of a clerk in a Leicester shoe factory – a passionate church organist, serial adulterer, and a weak man. Charles’s background was, in his phrase, ‘petty bourgeois-cum-proletarian’. His subsequent career, he resolved, should be anything but petty. Snow’s first twenty years are a parable of Smilesian self-improvement: he was a ‘flier’. The clever boy in a backstreet family, he won a grammar school scholarship; he left at sixteen, but studied by night for entrance to university. At London University he got ‘a good first’ and an MSc in chemistry, followed by a studentship at the Cavendish, Cambridge, a laboratory ‘stiff with Nobel Prize winners’.

  Among these giants of science, young Snow did research on the ‘infra-red spectra of simple diatomic molecules’, which led, in 1930, to a college fellowship and a stipend of £750 a year. It was an extraordinary achievement, but – in the final analysis – Snow was at best a ‘competent’ (his word) scientist among the best in the world. There was, thankfully, the second culture to fall back on. Snow had from his early years aspired to rank with ‘the great Russian and French writers’: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Balzac. He made his first stabs at fiction with potboilers – detective and SF novels – but ‘genre’ was for second-raters. Snow always aimed at the peaks. Settling into his groove he began his eleven-strong sequence, Strangers and Brothers, in 1935. The long life history of Lewis Eliot is patently autobiographical and has easily identifiable characters from public and university life. Its composition would jog along until 1970, keeping company with its author’s rise in the world.