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

by John Sutherland

  Murdoch invariably answered ‘The Tempest’ when asked, as distinguished writers routinely are, which was her ‘favourite Shakespeare’. It’s an elemental play and its dominant element is water. It opens with a vividly depicted shipwreck. All on board the vessel are drowned five fathoms deep – and subsequently emerge, Venus-like, reborn from the waves. They drown into life. The Tempest is conventionally seen as Shakespeare’s farewell to the London theatre which he had dominated for twenty years: it was his retirement play. Theatrical lore has it that Prospero’s valedictory speech, in which he breaks his staff and departs the island over which he has been sovereign ruler, allegorises the playwright’s formal retirement from his own little world – the Globe. It will be a solemn last few years. After Miranda’s marriage to Ferdinand, Prospero will:

  … thence retire me to my Milan, where

  Every third thought shall be my grave.

  As the biographers tell us, Shakespeare – still a hale fifty-something – was more of the Saga, live-it-up, party. No hair-shirts and hermit’s cave for Will in his retirement. He had left Stratford a humble glove-maker. He would return as a gentleman with a heraldic device over his front door. William Shakespeare Esquire had resolved fully to enjoy the remains of his day. Alas, that dreaded contingency intervened – typhoid, it is plausibly assumed, carried him off long ‘before his time’, aged a mere fifty-one. Legend has it that drink too may have played a part.

  In The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch’s allusion to The Tempest is constant but subtle. Charles Arrowby, the bumptious narrator, has an international reputation as director of plays for the London stage. As an actor, his most applauded performance was as Prospero, but Charles has no great fame in the acting department. He is now in his mid-sixties, and still at the top of his profession. But he has determined to retire while he still has life to live and energies to live it. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he chooses not to take up retirement there, but in a quiet village, Narrowdean, on the coast (which coast is never quite clear – Murdoch can be frustratingly vague about such details). He will, in the many years of his coastal seclusion, write his memoirs, ‘recollected’, as he fondly intends, in Wordsworthian ‘tranquillity’. ‘Wifeless, childless, brotherless’, Charles is entirely the captain of his fate. He manages his life, he likes to say. ‘A theatre director’, he tells us, ‘is a dictator.’ In German, the two terms are the same – Führer. Charles, little Hitler that he is (but not, for all that, entirely unlikeable), will direct the fifth act of the Arrowby drama as precisely and authoritatively as he has ruled over the West End theatre. The ‘contingent’ – those factors which not even dictators can control – intervenes. Serenely contemplating the ocean Charles sees a monster ‘rising from the waves’:

  I can describe this in no other way. Out of a perfectly calm empty sea, at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile (or less), I saw an immense creature break the surface and arch itself upward. At first it looked like a black snake, then a long thickening body with a ridgy spiny back followed the elongated neck … I could also see the head with remarkable clarity, a kind of crested snake’s head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to show teeth and a pink interior.

  Commentators of the Freudian persuasion have had a fine time with that last detail: opticians, too, might wonder about an OAP who can discern eye-colour and teeth at 500 yards.

  Charles is flummoxed. Is it hallucination, a trick of the eyes? A flashback to a bad trip taken, years ago, on LSD? Is he – horrible thought – losing his mind, and with it his ‘control’ over reality? The novel gives us no answer. Contingency never yields to analysis or explication. The monster returns once more in the narrative, but remains inexplicable. Monstrous contingency continues to invade the carefully blueprinted Arrowby retirement plan. One by one, characters pop up from his old life to plague his new life. They include actress-lovers, Lizzie Scherer and Rosina Vamburgh; theatrical colleagues, such as the servile and gay Gilbert Opian; Pere-grine Arbelow, who Charles callously cuckolded; and Charles’s cousin, James, mysteriously dismissed from the army in which he had risen to the rank of general and now, apparently, a Buddhist guru. Or, possibly, a pro-Tibetan freedom-fighter. Or, as it finally emerges, Charles’s saviour from the hell of himself. Things do not turn out as he plans. This is not a play he is directing – it is life. And life, even those last much-planned, carefully annuitised last years, defies direction.

  Alzheimer’s, alas, destroyed the fine mind which created The Sea, The Sea. As her husband John Bayley records, poignantly, in her last days she gazed not at the sea, wary of monsters that might rise up, but at the Teletubbies.

  FN

  (Dame) Jean Iris Murdoch (later Bayley)

  MRT

  The Sea, The Sea

  Biog

  P. J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001)

  217. Frederik Pohl 1919–

  The most consistently able writer science fiction, in its modern form, has yet produced. Kingsley Amis

  No author has been so much inside the confines of his genre as Fred Pohl, nor, given his great age, so long inside it. If there is a twentieth-century incarnation of science fiction (SF) – as H. G. Wells was its nineteenth-century incarnation – Pohl is it. His father was a ‘plunger’, a ne’er-do-well salesman who dragged his family all over the country. There were times in Pohl’s childhood ‘when we lived in suites in luxury hotels and times when we didn’t live anywhere at all’. After the age of seven, Fred was brought up in ‘Depression Brooklyn’ which, despite ‘the money having run out’, he recalls as, culturally, a ‘warm place’. The moment when ‘the irremediable virus entered my veins’ was in 1930 when ‘I came across a magazine named Science Wonder Stories Quarterly, with a picture of a scaly green monster on the cover’.

  A clever boy, Fred got a place at Brooklyn Tech, aged twelve. The school was dedicated to the ‘revolutionary concept’ that the educational system could produce the technologists the twentieth century needed. Financial difficulties meant his dropping out, aged fourteen before he could contribute to that grand vision. His parents had separated the year before, his ‘plunging’ father having taken ‘one shortcut too many and wound up in trouble with the law’. Technology lost out. In his early teens Pohl was involved in the hobbyist world of SF fanzines and was fanatical about movies. It was, he recalls, the era of ‘films for everyone’. The silver screen was the only escape on offer from the grey reality of the hardest economic times in history. Two films were formative on young Fred: the afterlife fantasy Death Takes a Holiday (1934) and the Wells/Korda collaboration, Things to Come (1936) – ‘greater than Metropolis, more meaningful than 2001’. These works penetrated into ‘the deep-down core of my brain’. At the same period Pohl was what he calls a ‘Boy Bolshevik’. Much of the SF of the 1930s was, he maintains, leftist: proto-revolutionary. He proudly carried a Young Communist League card for four years and volunteered to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to fight in Spain, but was rejected as too young and too useless. But his spirit was willing.

  SF was, by the late 1930s, mobilised in terms of fiercely competitive ‘clubs’. Pohl’s club was ‘The Futurians’. It brought him into fruitful connection with, among others, Isaac Asimov (about whose more florid imaginings, Pohl – an ironist by temperament – has always had serious misgivings). Another Futurian with whom Pohl had the most collaborative relationship of his career was the gifted Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923–58). Aged eighteen, Pohl was ‘sampling the mixed diet of the freelance writer. Your time is your own. But it is the only thing that you own that you can sell.’ Selling science fiction was easy. This was the ‘high autumn of the pulps’. Some ‘pulpsters’, Pohl recalls, could turn out 10,000 words a day, under a battery of pseudonyms. But the whole payment budget for a magazine could be under $200 an issue. Slowcoaches went hungry; it was a hot-house genre.

  Pohl made his first of five marriages in 1940 (the last, his longest, to Elizabeth Anne Hull, an academic and science fiction expert, has lasted since 1984). He was i
nducted into the US military forces ‘on April Fool’s Day, 1943’ and served until November 1945 as a sergeant in the air corps weather service, looking up at the empty skies, appropriately enough. After the war, and again remarried, he took up work as a literary agent. Asimov was one of his early clients. He achieved, as he ruefully recalls, the quite amazing feat of going broke as a literary agent. A second divorce, and the need to coin some cash (specifically to clear $30,000 in accumulated debts) drove him back to writing and editing SF. Thank God for those hardships. The 1950s represent the highpoint of Pohl’s writing: it was over these years, in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth, that he produced his classic SF satires on Eisenhowerian consumerism and ‘mature’ capitalism. The Space Merchants (1953) began as the short story ‘Gravy Planet’. It constructs, wittily, a world in which corporate business has taken over the functions of government and advertising the function of news. It’s done, like all Pohl’s work, with a strong storyline and a Hemingwayesque economy of phrase. All those years writing fast for the pulps had impressed on him indelibly the need to keep the reader turning pages before going to the drugstore to get another title by the same author. Kingsley Amis pronounced The Space Merchants to be the best SF novel ever written. It has my vote as well.

  The collaborators’ Gladiator-at-Law (1955) switched the satire to a world in which law simply existed to further corporate interests. The Pohl–Kornbluth twenty-third century fantasy Wolfbane (1959) has not held up so well, but it seems clear that sardonic Kornbluth added something necessary. One of the other writer’s works in his own right, the short story ‘The Marching Morons’ (first published in the magazine Galaxy in 1951), is routinely voted one of the best works ever in the genre. The hero, John Barlow, goes into suspended animation and wakes, centuries in the future, to discover that (thanks to the inverse relationship of intelligence to procreation of children) the moronic have inherited the earth: idiocracy rules. After Kornbluth’s premature death in 1958, the razor’s edge is less apparent in Pohl’s work, although A Plague of Pythons (1964), which fantasises dictatorship via metempsychosis, is as good as anything he has written. The work, like Fahrenheit 451, can be read as an allegory of a world sofa-bound by the miracle of TV and the vicarious pleasures it provides, while the buttocks expand into uncontrolled obesity.

  Two factors redirected Pohl’s career as the decade came to an end. One was the collapse of the wholesaler and distributor, the American News Company, in 1957, which decimated the pulps and SF magazines. The other was the death of Kornbluth. Pohl had some intellectual sympathy with the so-called ‘New Wave’ which transformed SF in the 1960s and 1970s, elevating the genre (as its practitioners fondly hoped) to new levels of literariness and cultural respectability. As an adviser to Bantam Books, Pohl actually promoted the careers of experimentalists such as Samuel R. Delany – a writer who has been seriously compared with James Joyce. But it was not Pohl’s kind of SF, nor could he love it. His later years were devoted to the ‘Heechee’ series, whose central concept (reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke) is of benign aliens, leaving blueprints wherewith humans can themselves progress towards the stars.

  Pohl has won every honour his genre has to offer: many more than once. A thoughtful practitioner, he wonders: ‘I have committed my life to science fiction. It is fair to ask why. I mean, I’m smart enough. I could have had several quite different careers, and some of them, at least at the time, looked a lot more attractive in terms of dollars and pride. When you come right down to it, is making up lies about things that have never happened really a respectable way for a grown man to spend his days?’ ‘Why, sure,’ he answers. On the basis of the classics he and Kornbluth have given us, one is inclined to agree.

  FN

  Frederik George Pohl, Jr

  MRT

  The Space Merchants

  Biog

  F. Pohl, The Way the Future Was (1978)

  218. J. D. Salinger 1919–2010

  There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.

  Salinger, in conversation with the New York Times, 3 November 1974

  When he died in 2010 Salinger’s obituaries had been held in reserve, unchanged, for decades. That written in the Guardian, for example, was by someone who had predeceased the novelist by many years. Recluses are not unknown in literature, but few have been as puritanically reclusive as Salinger – a man ‘famous for not wanting to be famous’. Jerome David Salinger was born in New York. His father was well off and Jewish, with second-generation roots in Lithuania – a country whose brutal pogroms enriched twentieth-century American fiction with Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Nathanael West and Jacqueline Susann. The American Academy of Literature should raise a monument in Vilnius. Once arrived in the land of the free Sol (Solomon) Salinger ran an imported kosher cheese and ham business. It was a cheap luxury which, with skilful management, weathered the 1930s Depression. The Salingers enjoyed an affluent Manhattan life – not least their pampered only son, ‘Sonny’.

  Legend (never contradicted by her son) had it that Salinger’s mother, Miriam (Marie) Jillich Salinger, was of Scottish/Irish extraction – and that she might even have been disowned by her family for marrying a Jew. In fact Miriam came from a prosperous German American family, who had done well in Iowa. She was a Gentile, but so relaxed were Sol and she about religion that there was no friction. Young Salinger was brought up secular and it was not until much later in life that he found his gods – idiosyncratically. They would not be Jewish gods; he was not one of those who grow back to their roots.

  Salinger was strongly attached to his mother (he dedicated The Catcher in the Rye to her) and she was indulgent where other parents might have wielded the rod. Young Sonny was expelled from his exclusive private school for lack of industry. He was then enrolled in a military academy in Pennsylvania, which he liked – although he punished it as the original of Pencey in Catcher. He graduated in 1936 – at the same age as Holden Caulfield. He then enrolled in New York University but dropped out after a year. This was now his wayward pattern. His father sent him off to Poland, ostensibly to learn about canned picnic ham. If Sonny learned anything from this episode, his biographer laconically observes, it was that ‘Pigs’ were not for him. His father could forget any fond ‘Salinger and Son’ fantasies. More to the young man’s taste was Vienna, where he spent some months before the outbreak of war, perfecting his German and, it is deduced, falling in love.

  What did Sonny (later ‘Jerry’) want to be? Either an actor (his powers of mimicry and range of voice were much noted) or a writer. With a view to the latter he enrolled in a creative writing class at Columbia where, momentously, he came under the wing of a teacher, Whit Burnett, who edited a literary magazine, Story, on the side. Burnett had a remarkable eye. Story ‘discovered’ Mailer, Capote, Tennessee Williams and Salinger. At the age of twenty-one, after Burnett gave him his start, Salinger was precociously publishing in ‘slicks’ (glossy magazines – not ‘pulp’) such as Collier’s Weekly and Esquire, and had his eye on the big one, the New Yorker. He finally got there in 1941, only to have his smooth upward path interrupted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  At this stage of his life Salinger was a handsome, ironic, wisecracking, ladies’ man. The lady he fell in love with was Oona O’Neill, daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning dramatist. She was, like all the women in his life, markedly younger than him (sixteen to his twenty-two), a predilection he shared with Charlie Chaplin, who eventually snatched Oona away. Salinger’s fiction is fascinated by the young, a year or so either side of puberty (Holden Caulfield, Seymour Glass, Esmé, Franny) and this fascination inspired Norman Mailer’s acrid crack that Salinger’s is ‘the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school’. He certainly left it in April 1942 when he was drafted and, after some intense lobbying (‘I want to be an officer so bad,’ he confessed) was commissioned as an infantry counter-intelligence officer. The army needed fluent German speakers. The war did not distract him from what he really wanted to be, however. For
some time he had been writing stories based on a character called ‘Holden Caulfield’, with the sense ‘he deserves to be a novel’. In 1944 Lt Salinger was posted to England. His unit, the 12th Infantry Regiment, landed on Utah Beach in the invasion and suffered extensive casualties. It suffered even more in the pointlessly bloody Hürtgen Forest battle and the Battle of the Bulge – more casualties, it is estimated, than any other infantry outfit. His biographer titles the chapter dealing with Salinger’s war, ‘Hell’. He won five battle stars and a decoration for valour.

  Salinger had a bloody war – much bloodier than Mailer’s, who hardly saw a shot fired in anger. But unlike Mailer, he never spoke or wrote about his frontline experiences, nor about the effect which the liberation of Dachau concentration camp had on a Jew, all of whose Viennese-Jewish friends, he discovered, had perished in the Holocaust. It was, his daughter later recalled, ‘the unspoken’, the unwritable, the irremovable. One recalls the last line of Catcher, ‘don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.’

  After the war, Salinger penned two breakthrough stories for the New Yorker, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’. Both can be read as tinged with something his generation of exhausted warriors had never heard of, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder – earlier called ‘shellshock’). Both stories expressed longing for childhood/adolescent worlds, a world Kenneth Slawenski calls ‘children ice skating and little girls in soft blue dresses’. Three years later, The Catcher in the Rye would confirm this psychological retreat into the childhood past. Holden’s three-day escape into New York, published in 1951, became wildly popular in the youth-rebellion decade of the 1960s, but is actually rooted in the year 1936–7, when Salinger was sixteen and the nightmare still to come invisibly in the future. These time settings are routinely overlooked by readers.