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

by John Sutherland

  Bainbridge claimed not to have read anything from Graham Greene onwards. Strong storylines, tinged with black coups de théâtre were her way of doing fiction. Her career, she always said, took a leap forward when Karl Miller wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books in 1974, hailing her as ‘possibly the least known of the contemporary English novelists who are worth knowing’. Miller dearly wanted The Dressmaker (1973), her Liverpool novel, to win the Booker, but was outvoted on the 1973 panel. He was still upset at the injustice a quarter of a century later. The novel stands out for at least a couple of reasons. It opens in a wartime Liverpool home, occupied entirely by women. ‘Nellie had her hair net on and her teeth out,’ opens an early scene and the novel recreates, with uncanny solidity, a house in which the inhabitants have their night-time ‘cat’s lick’ in a washer-repaired tin bowl in the scullery before sharing beds ‘for warmth’. The crux of the narrative concerns the young Rita’s love for an American serviceman – suggestive of young Beryl’s involvement with Franz.

  Her fiction output falls into two distinct parts. The first half of her career was devoted to what A. N. Wilson calls ‘deftly distorted autobiography’ – narratives which drew on her own life, more or less closely. In the second half of her career she moved into historical fiction of a quirky and speculative kind. No historical novelist has less of what Scott called ‘Dryasdust and Smellfungus’ about her. She kicked off in this new style with Young Adolf (1978), which speculates a possible visit by Hitler to his Irish sister-in-law, Bridget Hitler, in Liverpool in 1912. It is a series of comical misadventures and ends with him returning to Austria, vowing revenge, and the resolve ‘to grow a moustache’. Subsequent subjects included the sinking of the Titanic, Every Man for Himself (1996) which had the good luck to coincide with James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar-winning movie; Dr Johnson as seen through the jaundiced eye of Mrs Thrale’s daughter, According to Queeney (2001); Master Georgie (1998), a Crimean war novel; and The Birthday Boys (1991), about Scott of the Antarctic’s failed last expedition. These novels scooped up prizes and brought in steady cash rewards for her and Duckworths. She was awarded a DBE in 2000 and a consolatory Booker (second-class) in 2011.

  I can’t – to pick up Lynn Barber’s epigraph – say I knew her, but Bainbridge used to cut through the Camden lane where I live on her way back from Sainsbury’s. A couple of times I helped her with her bags. Sometimes her lungs, weakened by sixty years of smoking, gave out and she would slump on a doorstep and exchange a few words with a local tramp, Tom. Apparently Yeats’s poetry was a favourite topic of conversation.

  FN

  Beryl Margaret Bainbridge (Dame)

  MRT

  The Dressmaker

  Biog

  Guardian, obituary, 2 July 2010 (Janet Watts)

  257. Malcolm Bradbury 1932–2000

  The British provinces had been swallowing me like an eiderdown.

  Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of an LNER railway executive. He was shunted around in his childhood, partly thanks to the Luftwaffe, partly to chronic ill-health, and partly to his father’s cross-country job. He grew up in Nottingham, and was one of the very first grammar-school boys to benefit from the new Butler Education Act. Had he been born a year earlier, English literature might well have lost a distinguished novelist. He describes his adolescence with an irony just this side of self-contempt – a familiar flavour in his work: ‘in addition to haunting the coffee bars of Nottingham, shouting about Sartre and nibbling the ears of leggy girls named Ernestine, I had spent three years being a student at a certain nameless English provincial university. A strange youth, who wore pink intellectual shirts and clip-on bow ties that kept falling off suddenly into cups of black coffee, and spent most of those three years writing a novel, about, of course, an English provincial university.’ The nameless place of learning was the University College of Leicester. It was, as he says, horribly unfashionable: a dimness made no brighter by Kingsley Amis’s using the College (a converted lunatic asylum, opposite the municipal graveyard) as Jim Dixon’s detested place of employment. Lucky for some.

  It was, as it turned out, lucky for Bradbury. Leicester was where – across the way from the English department – British sociology was happening. The embryo of anti-heroic Howard Kirk, Bradbury’s most famous character, was formed over his three years there. He was already, while still an undergraduate, having his comic papers published in Punch. Most importantly, Leicester bequeathed him the raw material for his first novel, Eating People is Wrong (1959). Unlike his comrade-in-fiction, David Lodge, Bradbury would go on to be the most wandering of scholars. Having picked up his first at Leicester, he did an MA at Queen Mary College, London. Then came a spell in America which, as he recalled, liberated him forever from the cultural fug of the British provinces. That ‘forever’ might, he knew, be quite short: from earliest childhood Bradbury had been sickly and it was expected that he would never live to any age. But an innovative heart operation in 1958 was deemed to be successful and promised a longer, if not a lengthy, span of life. One wonders whether the extraordinary hurry of his career originated with the sense of a ticking enemy in his breast – like Ransome in Conrad’s story, The Shadow-Line.

  Bradbury married in 1959, the year that Eating People was published. But the critical year in his view of the world was 1956 – the year of Suez and the Hungarian Uprising. It was in this year that ‘barbarism’ won. The old ‘gentle’ (as Orwell called it) English liberalism went under for ever. Forster’s wych-elm was felled. Bradbury’s title picks up a line in a Flanders and Swann song. After 1956, ‘eating people’ is OK (it’s what Howard Kirk does). The hero of Eating People, Professor Treece (based on the academic who, as it happened, taught me as well as Bradbury) is a liberal who – young as he is by professorial standards – has outlived his moral age. He is historically irrelevant. The Professor Kirks will eat him alive – and do.

  After a brief stopover at the University of Hull, Bradbury moved on to Birmingham as a lecturer in American literature (the Americans, with money distantly supplied by the United States Information Service, were encouraging the setting up of the subject in the UK. The CIA was behind it all with the worthy aim of wresting the intellectual high ground from the Communists). There he found himself the only lecturer under forty, alongside David Lodge. As Lodge recalls: ‘Edith Wharton, writing in her memoirs of her friendship with Henry James, says, “the real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching searchlights”. I often had that experience with Malcolm.’

  In 1965 Bradbury went on to the gleamingly ‘new’ University of East Anglia, at Norwich, one of the campuses created by the Robbins expansion. Building new institutions of higher learning was gruelling work and his early novels came out at long intervals. Stepping Westward (1965) revolved around his life-expanding visit to America. His major novel was his third, The History Man (1975), set in the new university of ‘Watermouth’. The ‘man’ of the title is Professor Howard Kirk, sociologist: amoral, brilliant, destructive, unstoppable, the man of the future – God help us all. Bradbury is fascinated, as a rabbit by a stoat, at what Kirk and his kind represent. He offers a Treecian vignette of himself in the novel:

  The door of a room adjoining opens a little; a dark, tousled-haired head, with a sad visage, peers through, looks at Howard for a little, and then retreats … this depressed-looking figure is a lecturer in the English department, a man who, ten years earlier, had produced two tolerably well-known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern.

  Since then there has been silence.

  Bradbury stayed on at Norwich, now writing more fluently, but never with quite the impact of his earlier campus fiction. With Angus Wilson he set up a pioneering creative writing course at UEA (Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rose Tremain are distinguished alumni) and did effective, and lucrative, T
V work. The History Man, starring Anthony Sher, was a high point in 1980s small-screen drama. He toured, indefatigably, for the British Council and produced a good novel on the subject, Rates of Exchange (1983). He was a loved teacher, a distinguished scholar, a valued mentor of young novelists and, one is told, a self-sacrificingly good parent. His weak heart finally caught up with him at the age of sixty-eight – years later than his doctors had earlier predicted. He was knighted in the year of his death: he would have made a good comic novel out of that.

  FN

  (Sir) Malcolm Stanley Bradbury

  MRT

  The History Man

  Biog

  ODNB (David Lodge)

  258. V. S. Naipaul 1932–

  Everything of value about me is in my books.

  Considerable stir was caused in 2008 by Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul. That loaded word ‘Authorized’ usually translates in biographer-speak as ‘flattering’, but that was spectacularly not the case here: there were so many warts in Patrick French’s portrait one could barely see the face. Why, people wondered, did Naipaul collaborate in a biography which he must have known would raise howls of execration against him? ‘Frank’ – that is, amazingly indiscreet – interviews were granted his Boswell and French enjoyed wholly unhindered access to the archive – some of which (his dead wife’s diaries, for example) not even Naipaul had ever cared to look at. Moreover, no injunction was laid on the finished text. It is like Dorian Gray allowing his picture to go on display at the National Portrait Gallery – and then attending the private view. It’s a relevant analogy. Like Oscar Wilde, Naipaul – for his own obscure motives – always sets out to scandalise, and he manoeuvred his biographer as, notoriously, he manoeuvred his would-be acolyte, Paul Theroux, author of the mortally wounded memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998). Naipaul loves to cast a dark shadow of himself over all who come into his orbit. Biographers, on their part, labour to cast light on their subject. Naipaul wins this particular battle. At the end of years’ research French found himself, as the world has found itself, struggling, baffled, in the shadow of this majestic, but impenetrably enigmatic writer.

  Few writers have trudged a harder road to the Nobellist’s podium. Born the descendant of ‘indentured’ (i.e. enslaved) workers, in an alien island in the Caribbean, Naipaul won a scholarship to Oxford, driven to excel by his journalist father. He encountered racism every inch of the way. ‘Where are you from?’ asked the don examining his thesis – before failing it. Vidia was only middlingly successful at university, and later at the BBC, but careers were irrelevant. He wrote all the time, so intensely that he would routinely wear out the nibs of his Parker 51 pens. Eventually the quality of that writing shone through. The breakthrough came with what is still his most-read work, A House for Mr Biswas (1961).

  Literary achievement, and that biggest of prizes (the Nobel), warranted full biography, but what outraged readers were the moral monstrosities laid bare by the biography which ensued. Naipaul’s unashamed depiction of himself, for example, as a ‘prostitute man’. Why? Because, he confided, his wife Patricia, who had loyally supported him for four decades, ‘did not attract me sexually at all’. She was, he coolly declared, ‘the only woman I know who has no skill’. Readers of Guerrillas (1975) will recall Jane’s description of her husband: ‘He was excited only by prostitutes, swiftly bought and had; with Jane he was finished in a second, preferring more usually to be “tossed off”.’ If this is self-revelation, it is not something many novelists would divulge to a prurient world. Unless, that is, you despised the prurient hordes. Naipaul, we learn, knew many women. His long-serving mistress, Margaret Gooding, was both sexually attractive and – to employ his word – skilled. Her relationship with Vidia, however, ruined her life. He seems, if we credit his authorised biographer, not to have cared. Her utility for him was that he could ‘mistreat’ her. ‘Many of the gruesome sexual depictions in the novels,’ French records, ‘were not the work of imagination, but drawn from his life with Margaret.’ Field work. Pat, the wife, died lingeringly of cancer in 1996, aware she was unloved and betrayed. ‘On the day after he cremated his wife,’ French bleakly notes, ‘V. S. Naipaul invited a new woman into her house.’ It was a prospective second wife – but not Margaret, the long-serving mistress: she was, we are told, cast off.

  If there were a Nobel Prize for rudeness, Naipaul would win outright. Indian by genetic origin, he sees the subcontinent as one great, uncleaned, lavatory (‘Indians defecate everywhere’). Trinidadian by birthplace, he rarely mentions the West Indian island other than to insult it. Asked why he left, he says ‘to join civilisation’. Africa? ‘Black men assuming the lies of white men’ (a disgusted authorial aside in A Bend in the River, 1979). Not that civilised England escapes his lash. Observing on a wall the graffiti ‘Keep Britain White’, he would, he blandly joked, insert a comma after ‘Britain’ and add an ‘s’ to ‘White’. The jest, bitter as it is, reminds one that Naipaul is a wit in the Oscar class, as well as the word which rhymes with ‘wit’ – king-sized. He is also, one concedes, a supremely great novelist.

  But which, then, are Naipaul’s great novels? The verdict among his admirers would probably be split between A Bend in the River (1979), In a Free State (1971) and Guerrillas (1975). The last is the most complex of the three and, following the rules of Naipaul’s unusual literary game, the most successful. Like much of his fiction, it has a hard kernel of historical fact, laced with acidic contempt. The self-named ‘Michael X’ (in imitation of the American Malcolm X) was born Michael de Freitas, of mixed race, in Trinidad. Another of his self-awarded names was the Muslim ‘Abdul Malik’. After fleecing various rich bien pensant dupes in the UK (John Lennon, famously), and falling foul of the law, Michael X fled back to Trinidad as a quasi-revolutionary leader. Among the ‘commune’ he set up there was an English convert, Gale Benson, the daughter of a Tory MP. She was murdered, hacked to death like a side of beef. De Freitas was convicted of the crime and hanged in 1975. By the contortions of West Indian jurisprudence, it was the British legal authorities that mandated the execution. A fascinated Naipaul wrote a long essay on the subject, ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’ (1980), and used him as a central character, Jimmy Ahmed, in Guerrillas.

  The novel complicates things beyond the historical record, however. It is set on an unnamed West Indian Island, manifestly Trinidad, polluted – atmospherically and socially – by a multinational bauxite mining company. The three principals are a white South African intellectual, exiled for his black-liberation sympathies; his mistress, an upper-class white woman, Jane; and Jimmy Ahmed, on the run from the UK, where he is wanted for rape. The title – Guerrillas – is ironic: these are not freedom fighters – they are degenerates. The irony permeating the whole novel is implicit in the first sentence: ‘After lunch Jane and Roche left their house on the Ridge to drive to Thrushcross Grange.’ The allusion is mischievously obvious. Jane [Eyre] and Roche[ster] leave for the house which represents civilisation (as opposed to the savagery of Heathcliff’s house in Wuthering Heights). The first Mrs Rochester, we recall, originated in the West Indies. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s Jane, Naipaul’s Jane will end up anally raped and murdered by her super-potent lover. Everything, every value – moral, spiritual, ideological – is decayed. Naipaul contrives a landscape which breathes irremediable corruption:

  The cleared land had been ridged and furrowed from end to end. The furrows were full of shiny green weeds; and the ridges, one or two of which showed haphazard, failed planting, were light brown and looked as dry as bone.

  Looking at it through the car window, Jane says: ‘I used to think that England was in a state of decay.’ Roche replies, ‘Decayed from what?’

  The rules of the Nobel Prize decree that the prize shall be given for literature of an ‘idealistic’ nature. Wherein lies the idealism in Naipaul? Not, clearly, in any political, religious or social system, but in the quality of
his prose. In ‘Literature’ itself. It is both a noble, and a profoundly dispiriting, verdict on the human condition.

  FN

  (Sir) Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  MRT

  Guerrillas

  Biog

  P. French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (2008)

  259. Sylvia Plath 1932–1963

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  I do it exceptionally well.

  Plath’s short life has been subjected to more biography than any other Anglo-American writer of the period. Literary interest focuses principally on her poetry, but in the days before her suicide she published a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Tepid reviews, it is suggested, may have been one factor in her decision to destroy herself. Plath was born in New England. Her father, Otto, was an immigrant to the US; her mother Aurelia’s parents had emigrated from Austria. Germanic ancestry, and war guilt, would haunt their daughter. It is expressed most brutally in the poem ‘Daddy’ (1962), in which Otto is transmuted into an SS officer. The heroine of The Bell Jar also has a vaguely Jewish name, Esther Greenwood (an Anglicisation of ‘Grünbaum’).