In a striking parallelism with Ballard, Aldiss traces the origin of his creativity to childhood trauma. In late life, under therapy, as his second marriage was crumbling, he ‘recovered’ a primal memory, in which, aged three, his father – enraged by the baby’s yowling – had held him out of a window. Infant Aldiss ‘died’ from shock and had to be resuscitated. ‘That brutish act had its effect on my mental development … [it] caused me.’ More importantly, it caused the author in him: ‘I wrote SF because I suspected the world was not as others saw it.’ Aldiss was awarded an OBE in 2005 and deposited his literary remains at the Bodleian, the library of a university he never attended and which to this day regards SF as something sub-literary – unless, of course, written by C. S. Lewis.
FN
Brian Wilson Aldiss
MRT
Hothouse
Biog
B. Aldiss, Bury my Heart at W. H. Smith’s: A Writing Life (1990)
237. Elmore Leonard 1925 –
I’m not gonna say anymore than I have to, if that. Chili Palmer
The greatest American novelist never to be mentioned in the same breath as ‘Nobel Prize’, Leonard was born into a Catholic household in New Orleans. His father was employed by General Motors (motto: ‘What’s good for GM is good for America’) whose work eventually brought the family to the company’s home town, Detroit, in the early 1930s. This was where Leonard stayed for most of his long life – although his speech, as interviewers noted, retained a southern lilt. When asked why, in old age, he had not moved to more clement climes – say Florida (where novels like Stick (1982) and LaBrava (1983) are set) or southern California (where Get Shorty (1990) and Be Cool (1999) are set) he says: ‘Because I know all the streets now, and I’m too old to learn the streets anywhere else.’ A more likely reason is his ‘biblical’ tribe of children (five), and (too many to count) grandchildren – and, as it happens, he just likes the grimy, run-down, once booming, city.
Leonard’s lifelong love-affair with gunplay (or, more properly, the idea of it) was triggered shortly after his arrival in Detroit in the early 1930s. A journalist interviewing him in the 1990s noticed in his study a photograph of the young Elmore, ‘dressed in a cap and suit, foot on the step of a curvy-bumpered car, brandishing a gun’. It’s a child’s re-enactment of the famous pose struck by Bonnie Parker, made famous the second time around in the 1960s movie, Bonnie and Clyde. Leonard confirmed the allusion, adding: ‘There is something about that time which affected me. It was said that there were probably twenty bank robbers for every doctor in America then, and I was certainly aware of the desperadoes. I was aware of what was going on with Bonnie and Clyde, and Pretty Boy Floyd. It was in the papers all the time. They were all killed, but the important ones were killed in 1934.’ In Leonard’s latest phase, with novels such as The Hot Kid (2005) and Up in Honey’s Room (2007), he returns to the Bonnie and Clyde era which so entranced him as a boy.
The Leonard household was wholly uncriminal, mildly bookish (his mother was a Book of the Month Club subscriber) and Leonard credits his sister with getting him to read avidly. At school he was nicknamed ‘Dutch’, after a now long-forgotten professional baseball pitcher. Leonard was obsessed with baseball, almost as much as with gangsters, and ‘Dutch’ stuck. He graduated from high school in 1943, and was recruited into the Navy ‘Seabees’ – construction battalions. He wanted to be a marine, but his eyes were too weak. In 1946, on the GI Bill, he studied English and Philosophy at the University of Detroit. By the time of his graduation in 1950, he was already married to his first wife, Beverly. He worked for a while as a copy writer for an advertising firm – which he hated. He was getting up at five to write fiction – which he liked. He had composed a couple of ‘literary things’ at university, but couldn’t get them past quibbling editors. There was, he correctly anticipated, less quibble downmarket and he began writing Westerns on the Max Brand model. He had studied Hemingway’s short story, ‘The Killers’, and absorbed its laconic style, letting the white space between words do the hard work, letting the dialogue do the talking and letting the narrative hang on the page.
His work sold. ‘I’ve always been successful’, he says. Two of his early stories were optioned (at $5,000 apiece) for what became very superior movies in the new ‘psychological Western’ mode: The Tall T (1957) – bungled stagecoach robbery, and 3:10 to Yuma (1957) – honest guy has to take a criminal to justice in Yuma, with the criminal’s gang likely to get to him before the train arrives. In both, Leonard builds up a complex interfusion of hero and villain. It is handled even more successfully in the finest film adapted from his Westerns, Hombre (1967), another bungled stagecoach robbery. The story for Hombre was published in 1961, when Leonard was moving away from the Western into crime-writing – his true métier, as admirers believe – although the motive was commercial. Boots and saddles had worn out their charm in Hollywood – smart thrillers were very much in. As a crime writer, Leonard mingled his existing style with that of George V. Higgins, the Boston-based author of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Even more than Hemingway, Higgins’s narrative pivoted on terse dialogue and ultra-tight plotting, making the reader work hard to fill the gaps. There was also a new street crudity of diction. Leonard’s mother was appalled: ‘Why don’t you write those Westerns any more?’ she asked, ‘they were so nice.’
Leonard’s early crime novels were set in Detroit – the ‘city primeval’ as he called it. The best is 52 Pick-Up (1974) – businessman has fling, is blackmailed by sadist crook and goes vigilante, ingeniously. Leonard’s later fiction roams far from Motown. Glitz (1985), the first of his novels to make the New York Times bestseller list, is set in Atlantic City and Puerto Rico; Maximum Bob (1991) in Palm Beach. Pagan Babies (2000) switches between Rwanda and Detroit. All, however, have Leonard’s hallmark crispness and – the later works particularly – a play of enigmatic comedy over the action, however brutal. It creates a distinctive taste.
One work of Leonard’s is different, though. Touch was written in 1977, but held back for ten years lest, as his publishers feared, it contaminate the tough-guy Elmore Leonard brand. He had been a heavy drinker for many years and was out of control by the early 1970s. He bobbed in and out of AA, and finally took his last drink at 9 o’clock, on 24 January 1977. His first marriage collapsed at the same time. Touch seems to return to the faith of the author’s childhood. A young Michigan man, it seems, can make the blind see and perform miracles. He works with alcoholics: poor sods who need miracles, if anyone does. Touch can be glossed as a public vote of thanks to the ‘fellowship’ – AA. A ‘recovering’ Leonard remarried twice, the third time after his second wife died of cancer. He did not, as he says, like being single. Leave that to his heroes, like Stick.
Leonard’s genius extends beyond what is found on the pages of his books. Uniquely, he inspires film directors and stars to their best work. Directors such as Budd Boetticher, Barry Sonnenfeld, John Frankenheimer, Martin Ritt and Steven Soderbergh make up a distinguished roll call, as do the Leonard movies they have done. Paul Newman and Richard Boone, playing against each other, have never given better performances than they did in Hombre. Leonard sharpens things. The director with whom Leonard has collaborated most fruitfully is Quentin Tarantino, in Jackie Brown (1997) – the novel was called Rum Punch (1992). Tarantino’s masterwork, Pulp Fiction, can be read as an extended and subtle homage to Leonard. Among the most distinguished of his literary admirers is Martin Amis, who is on record as thinking that alongside Leonard, even Raymond Chandler looks clumsy – rather like saying Nureyev can’t dance or Glenn Gould can’t play. Leonard good-naturedly side-steps such encomiums: ‘I don’t have all the words like Martin Amis. He uses words I’ve never heard of; ones I’ve never seen on paper.’
FN
Elmore John Leonard, Jr
MRT
52 Pick-Up
Biog
P. Challen, Get Dutch! A Biography of Elmore Leonard (2000)
238. Flannery O’C
onnor 1925–1964
I live mainly in my work.
O’Connor’s biographer, Brad Gooch, takes as his epigraph the author’s wry put-down: ‘There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.’ Poultry were, in fact, a very big thing in O’Connor’s life. Not least because, as she said (wry as ever) the birds did not know she was a writer. When O’Connor was just five years old, the Pathé News company dispatched a cameraman from its main offices in New York City to film a ‘buff Cochin bantam’ that she had, reportedly, taught to walk backwards. ‘From that day,’ she recalled, ‘I began to collect chickens.’ In later life her preference extended to the collection of more exotic fowl – particularly peacocks.
O’Connor was born, raised and lived her life Catholic in what she liked to call ‘the Protestant South’. Throughout her life she attended mass daily. Her fiction is as Catholic – if differently so – as that of Graham Greene or François Mauriac, her most admired fellow novelist. In O’Connor’s Deep South, Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, were only a notch or two above Jews and Negroes in the social pecking order. Legislation such as the outrageous Convent Inspection Bill (designed to check that the Church was not into the kind of white slavery popularised by Maria Monk) was still on the books – if no longer in force – at the time of O’Connor’s birth. She was born in Savannah, Georgia, a town for which she had no affection in later life – not that she did for any city. Of her state capital, she wisecracked: ‘My idea about Atlanta is to get in, get it over, and get out before dark.’ At least she never, like another Southern novelist, pictured it burned to the ground (‘I sure am sick of the Civil War,’ she once said – and sick of novels like Margaret Mitchell’s as well). None the less, memorials of the ‘war’ were unforgettably all around her as she grew up. She was christened Mary Flannery O’Connor, her middle name that of a Civil War hero. Why were Southern novelists so good? she was once asked. ‘Because we lost,’ she briskly replied.
She was brought up under the protective wing of her redoubtable mother, the aptly named Regina. Her father, the royally henpecked Ed O’Connor, was a failed businessman, brought low by the Depression and chronic illness. Even so the family survived the awful decade of the 1930s more comfortably than some. ‘There is,’ Flannery’s biographer records, ‘no evidence that O’Connor’s childhood was troubled’. In 1938, when she was twelve, the family moved to the family dairy farm, Andalusia, at Milledgeville, which Regina ran efficiently and profitably: there was still money in staples like milk and beef but not – with the boll weevil raging through the fields – cotton.
Incorrigibly self-deprecating, O’Connor records herself as having been ‘a pidgeon-toed, only-child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. She attended convent school and recalled resolving ‘to stay aged twelve for life’. She divulged virtually nothing of her adult inner life to posterity. She may have been sexually nervous, inclined to chastity on religious grounds, or bisexual (although she is recorded as thinking lesbianism ‘unclean’). A college acquaintance observed that ‘O’Connor never seemed interested in the opposite sex’, or her own. Her biographer suggests that ‘O’Connor expressed her inner life through her birds.’ She was fascinated by the magnificent fan displays of the peacock and liked being pictured posed alongside her prize specimens.
She entered the Georgia State College for Women in 1942, aged seventeen. A high-performing student in the classroom, she wrote and drew cartoons for the college newspaper, graduated in 1945 and – considering a career in journalism – went on to postgraduate study at Iowa. Momentously, she became involved in that university’s creative writing programme – at the time the best in the country, under the charismatic Paul Engle. He encouraged her to write and her early exercises in short fiction were passed around by discriminating judges able to help her on her way. Embarking on a writing career, she adopted the androgynous pen name ‘Flannery’. Of the alternative, ‘Mary O’Connor’, she inquired quizzically: ‘Who’s going to buy the stories of an Irish washerwoman?’ Her narratives all revolve around male characters, and inevitably ‘Flannery O’Connor’ (like Harper Lee) was routinely mistaken for a man.
While at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Connor was already immersing herself in religious commentary: Aquinas, Simone Weil, Teilhard de Chardin were of particular interest to her. ‘I read a lot of theology,’ she said, ‘because it makes my writing bolder.’ She read it typically at night, before going to bed. The next formative step in her career was a fellowship at the Yaddo writers’ colony in New York State in 1948. She was there at the same time as Patricia Highsmith, currently working on her first novel, Strangers on a Train. O’Connor was meanwhile working on the short story, ‘The Train’, which would form the first chapter of her first novel, Wise Blood. She did not, like Highsmith, join in the high jinks and ‘always left before they started to break things’, but it was at Yaddo that she met Robert Lowell. A fellow Catholic, Lowell talked her work up (which was welcome) and went so far as to claim that personally she was a saint – a compliment which O’Connor found extremely distasteful. Acquaintances thought ‘she fell’ for Lowell. His wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, described O’Connor spitefully as ‘plain’ and ‘whiney’ – which adds to the suspicion that something may have been in the air.
In 1951, aged twenty-six, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, the same disease – for which there was no cure – that had killed her father in 1941. It meant a life of progressive invalidism at Andalusia, in the care (devoted but over-bearing) of her mother. After seven years perfecting her ‘opus nauseous’, O’Connor published Wise Blood in 1952. In a later preface (1962), she asserted it was ‘a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui’ – an interpretation which most readers may find a bit of a stretch. As the novel opens, it is 1947. Hazel Motes (the biblical allusion to eyes is meaningful) has come back from the war but we know nothing of his four years’ service for his country other than that the army ‘sent him half way round the world and forgot him’. He was wounded, and the shrapnel still in his body is poisoning him. Motes is first encountered on the train back to Taulkinham, Tennessee, wearing a suit of glaring blue, with the price tag attached ($11.98), and a ‘fierce black hat’. He is resolved to be a preacher. Religion is buzzing around in his head ‘like a wasp’. The problem is, he ‘doesn’t believe in anything’.
Hazel solves the problem by establishing the ‘Church of Truth without Jesus Christ Crucified’. He preaches his Christless Christianity from the hood of his beat-up car, ‘a rat-colored machine’.
He recruits two disciples: one is an idiot boy, Enoch Emery, who has ‘wise blood’ but an unwise head. A guard at the local zoo, Enoch is obliged (to promote a King-Kong style movie) to make himself even more ridiculous in a gorilla suit. As an act of devotion, he steals a holy relic for Hazel from the city museum – an Egyptian mummy (‘a dead part-nigger shriveled up dwarf’ is te recipient’s blunt description). Hazel’s other disciple is a pubescent, underage nymphomaniac, Sabbath Lily Hawks, who affords him cheaper relief than the local whorehouse (a setting which, as unkind male critics pointed out, did not show O’Connor at her most knowledgeable). In the climax of the story, Hazel blinds himself with quick lime, mortifies his body with barbed wire, and puts sharp stones in his shoes. Why? he is asked. ‘To pay’ is his reply. He finally dies of starvation in a ditch.
O’Connor called Wise Blood ‘autobiographical’. It’s a difficult comment to make sense of, but easier than the instruction mentioned earlier that the work should be read as comedy. The novel was published in 1952 to largely perplexed reviews (‘Southern Gothic’ was not yet an established genre) and a surge of scandalised protest in Milledgeville, where bookstores sold it in brown paper bags. A disapproving Regina stopped reading at page 9. The American publishers who, like other novelists, had great faith in O’Connor, sent a proof copy to Evelyn Waugh in the h
ope that, as a Catholic, he would recognise its genius. He replied, frigidly: ‘If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ T. S. Eliot (Anglo-Catholic, and a Southerner by birth) was also shown the text, with a view to Faber publishing it, and returned it with the observation ‘my nerves are just not strong enough’.
O’Connor had some unsatisfactory close relationships with men, one of whom reported that kissing her was like kissing a skeleton. She had a long, intimate correspondence with Betty Hester, who was alcoholic, lesbian and chronically suicidal. Hester went so far as to say she loved O’Connor but the relationship never went beyond the intimacy of letters. By 1954 O’Connor needed a cane to walk with and by the end of the decade crutches. A novel took her seven years of grinding work – but at least it could be said that this was three times the pace of her fellow Southern novelist, Katherine Anne Porter, who took twenty-four years over Ship of Fools. Short stories took O’Connor less time and she turned out a couple of volumes’ worth from the mid-1940s on, with smart titles such as: ‘You Can’t Be Any Poorer than Dead’, ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’, ‘The Artificial Nigger’ and, her most famous work in this area, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’. By the time of her second, and last, novel in 1960, O’Connor was, with Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Porter, a dominant Southern fiction voice: the leader of a school where women, unusually, shared the lead.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 91