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

by John Sutherland

  Many reprints of The Turner Diaries were called for. Skinheads pored laboriously over its pages, their lips moving as they struggled with the occasional polysyllable such as ‘Hebrew’ or ‘miscegenation’. It sold, over the years, half a million copies, mainly through non-bookstore outlets. Famously, Timothy McVeigh – who sold the Diaries, cut-price, at gun shows, where military hardware could be bought, few questions asked – had seven, strategically highlighted, pages of the novel in his getaway car from the Alfred P. Murrah building bombing. One such passage instructed: ‘The real value of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties.’ The novel was plausibly linked to many other acts of domestic terrorism with huge psychological impact. Pierce blandly disowned them each and every one. It was ‘only a novel’, as Jane Austen would have said, but it sold particularly well among serving soldiers and vets, he was always pleased to note.

  Even more poisonous than The Turner Diaries was the follow-up, Hunter (1984). Pierce-Macdonald’s second novel is a neo-Nazi hommage to Brian Garfield’s Death Wish, a pulp thriller about a citizen-vigilante in New York. In Hunter, the vigilante-hero is Oscar Yeager, a tall, blond Aryan. He’s an ex-Vietnam fighter pilot (why, one wonders, didn’t Chuck Yeager, he of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (1979), sue Pierce?). Oscar has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado – like his creator, Dr William Pierce. Viscerally disgusted by ‘race mixing’ and the ‘mud mongrels’ it spawns, Yeager assassinates interracial couples: by rifle, knife, garrotte and bomb. Why? He just don’t like ’em. Street-cleaning, you might call it – or mindless racist inhumanity.

  Fiction, too, has its chamber of horrors and in it are works such as Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic vision of Europe swamped by unrestricted immigration from the East, The Camp of the Saints (1973), much admired by Jean-Marie Le Pen; O. T. Gunnarsson’s Hear the Cradle Song (1993) Nazi putsch takes over California; and Colin Jordan’s The Uprising (2004) British heroes rise up against their ZOG – Zionist Occupation Government. Top of the (dung) heap, however, will always be The Turner Diaries: a novel to make fiction ashamed of itself.

  FN

  Andrew Macdonald (William Luther Pierce)

  MRT

  The Turner Diaries

  Biog

  R. S. Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds (2001)

  263. Reynolds Price 1933–2011

  Mr Price hasn’t exactly hidden the fact that he is gay; he is simply a private person who hasn’t tattooed this information, in curly script, on one of his biceps. Dwight Garner

  Reynolds Price was one of that golden generation of American novelists (Gore Vidal, William Styron and Truman Capote are others) who seemed to have been blessed in the cradle with genius, physical grace and – what writers need above all – good luck at the outset of their careers. Price was born, lower middle class, in Macon, North Carolina, a region devastated by the Depression. In his first volume of memoirs, Clear Pictures (1989), he recalls a family dominated by a loved, but alcoholic father and a loved, but fussily nervous mother.

  The world he was brought up in was complacently racist and sternly Methodist. Price would lose the one, and cleave to the other. In a late-life interview he recalled: ‘I think I had as miserable an adolescence as any human being can ever have had – at least outside the novels of Dickens … My problems were simply the problems of being an unpopular kid in a small town who was always being beaten up – partly through my own fault but to a large extent through just the malice of my contemporaries.’ It did not help that while at high school he realised that the ‘magnetic core’ of his personality was homosexual. It did help him escape – to more liberal places – and he won scholarships effortlessly. He took his first degree at Duke University, graduating in 1955, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. His notebooks indicate that he was determined from the first to write fiction, but he shrewdly qualified himself for an academic career as well: it would be his writer’s crutch.

  Price won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1956. He was overcome with the beauty of the university town, but astonished at the filth of the Merton College ‘bogs’ (aptly so-called). He enrolled for a B.Litt. on Samson Agonistes with the congenial Lord David Cecil (Dame Helen Gardner proved less congenial). Most valuably, his time at Oxford coincided with W. H. Auden’s as Professor of Poetry (Wystan’s sanitary arrangements, he recalled, were as astonishing as Merton’s). Auden made himself accessible to students, every morning at coffee time; he took to the exquisitely well-mannered young American. Price had come to Oxford a virgin and while there had a painfully inhibited relationship with a fellow student, Michael Jordan. He lost his virginity to a young academic called, in his second volume of memoirs, ‘Matyas’. That relationship, too, was unhappy. Less unhappily, Price sent a batch of his unpublished stories to Stephen Spender, then literary editor of Encounter, on the whimsical grounds that he thought the poet had ‘the kindest face I have ever seen’. Editorial kindness rarely extends to indulging the egos of hopeful postgraduates, but Spender realised that an unusual talent had landed in his in-tray. He rushed the stories into print and helped get Price’s novel-in-progress placed. Half the first sentence of A Long and Happy Life (1962) (Price loves long sentences) will convey the quality Spender’s editorial eye perceived –though quite how that eye pictured ‘spraddle-legged’ is uncertain:

  Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind him was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and trying to nod at every sad car in the line …

  Reynolds Price awoke and found himself famous. Within eighteen months, and at the age of twenty-eight, A Long and Happy Life was hailed as a major literary event. It won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel and has never, since 1962, been out of print. The story of Rosacoke Mustian’s dreams, disillusionment and eventual spiritual growth, the novel expanded into a trilogy and completed a quarter of a century on with Good Hearts (1988). His early career went swimmingly and he returned to take up a position teaching creative writing at Duke in 1958. By 1977, he was James B. Duke Professor of English, a chair endowed in the name of the university’s tobacco-enriched founder. He wrote a string of novels, winning prizes and every fellowship he cared to apply for. He made money, built himself a fine house in the woods and had, it seemed, a charmed life. Charm and a bubbling wit were what everyone noted about him. ‘You make any house you are in golden,’ Spender once told him.

  Around him, the Duke English Department was rising to prominence under the chairmanship of the charismatic Stanley Fish. At the same time the region was developing into the North Carolina ‘Research Triangle’ – a magnet for scholars worldwide. Among all this change, Price – North Carolinian, man and boy – embodied continuity. He knew everyone on and off the campus. Going into a Durham restaurant with Reynolds was frustrating: so many people had to be conversed with before you reached the table.

  But in 1984, Price’s world disintegrated. It began when a friend noted something odd about his gait. He was diagnosed with cancer – a one-foot-long, slimy growth ‘as thick as a pencil’ had braided itself around his upper spinal cord: he called it ‘the eel’. Duke’s medical school led the world in the surgical treatment of cancer. Its expert scalpel and radiotherapy killed the eel – that was the good news. The bad news was that the 4,000 rads bombarded into Price’s neck destroyed his nervous system. It was the cruellest of cures. At fifty-one, Price found himself cancer-free but paraplegic. Where other Americans might have enriched themselves with a vindictive malpractice suit, Reynolds confronted his condition not as an aggrieved patient, but as an author and a devout Christian. Although in constant pain, he refused painkillers, other than the even
ing martini, on the grounds that they dulled his mind. Out of the experience of losing his lower body, he wrote a book with the ironic title A Whole New Life (1994). As ‘an American with disability’ (as the 1976 federal statute defined it), Price preferred the honest Anglo-Saxon terms ‘gimp’ and ‘cripple’. For the same reason, he always favoured the term ‘queer’ over ‘gay.’ He despised minced words.

  Religion was, from the beginning, a central element in Price’s fiction. A Long and Happy Life opens with an extended description of a ‘Negro funeral service’ and ends with an even more extended description of a Christmas service. In his later years, he became increasingly drawn to theology and the suffering of Christ – writing translations of the Gospels and the religious meditation, A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined (2003). In the 1990s he also cultivated a nationwide presence as a radio-essayist on the National Public Radio broadcasting service – many of which were amiably secular sermons. As the decades after Stonewall rolled by, Price was criticised by more militantly gay writers such as David Leavitt for rarely dealing directly with queer themes in his fiction. Typically Price – as with the Rosacoke trilogy and his bestseller Kate Vaiden – employed female centres of consciousness. He shrugged off the objection with the excuse that the mass of ungay readers were not interested in gay fiction – and he liked having a lot of readers. Quietly, behind the scenes, he moved to get the traditionally conservative Duke to solemnise gay unions in its vast chapel.

  Which of Price’s forty-odd books will last? Certainly A Whole New Life and A Long and Happy Life. His own life was, as it happened, both long and – although less than whole for thirty years – not unhappy.

  FN

  Edward Reynolds Price

  MRT

  A Long and Happy Life

  Biog

  R. Price, A Whole New Life (1994)

  264. Philip Roth 1933–

  You know, even the best biographies are only two-thirds correct.

  Philip Roth in conversation with Mark Lawson

  Authors can be terrible liars and never more so than when they are in the autobiographical vein. Like salesmen, they are at their most dangerous when most sincere. Philip Roth has made a profession out of mischievous transgressions of fact and fiction. One of his titles, Deception (1990), could embellish the covers of all of his fiction as the name of the Rothian game. Roth’s tell-it-all memoir, cheekily entitled The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) – the title alludes to Dragnet hero Jack Webb’s ‘the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts’ – carries a subversive afterword, in the form of a letter from one of the platoon of Rothian alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman. ‘You are far better off writing about me than “accurately” reporting your own life,’ the figment sagely advises. But where’s the dividing line? Disentangling Roth from his fictional characters is like trying to scrape the tomato sauce off spaghetti. He specialises in ‘counterlives’ – teasing reflections of himself, with heroes perversely named ‘Philip Roth’, but not Philip Roth. The funniest thing he has written by way of explication of his fiction is that ‘the personal element is there’ – an understatement that ranks with ‘I may be gone for some time.’

  When it was published, Roth’s publishers trumpeted The Facts as just what its title said – ‘Roth and his battles, defictionalised and unadorned’. It was suspicious since Roth’s previous writings had played ducks and drakes with factuality and fictionality, and disentanglement is complicated by the fact that he manifestly does drop great authentic chunks of personal history into his fiction. He has used his childhood in Weequahic so often that even though I have never been to Newark, New Jersey, I feel I know its pre-war streets as well as I know the Bull at Ambridge. His 2010 novel, the last of the ‘Nemesis’ trilogy, opens:

  The first case of polio that summer [1944] came early in June, right after Memorial Day, in a poor Italian neighborhood crosstown from where we lived. Over in the city’s southwestern corner, in the Jewish Weequahic section, we heard nothing about it, nor did we hear anything about the next dozen cases scattered singly throughout Newark in nearly every neighborhood but ours.

  The seventy-five-year-old novelist – the ‘dying animal’, in his own phrase – writing this lives in a fine eighteenth-century farmhouse in isolated Connecticut (visitors are extremely unwelcome, but a pen-picture is given in Exit Ghost). The ten-year-old Philip Roth is somewhere on the sidewalk in New Jersey, 1944 – and will always be trapped there, unable to escape, like some sad ghost in an M. R. James tale.

  Roth’s titles routinely tease the reader with proffers of frank confession: e.g. Reading Myself and Others (1976), The Ghost Writer (1979), or the 1994 TV special, entitled, outrageously, My True Story. But ‘confession’ is false coinage with this writer. He doesn’t hold with it. He has stated that a writer cannot know his past, he can only recount it. What then does it mean to ‘come clean’, or ‘let go’? – Letting Go (1962), one recalls, is another of Roth’s teasing titles. Probably Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) offers his most persuasive answer. You come closest to telling the truth when you kvetch – when you whine – and when you are privately closeted with your analyst (hopefully the listener behind the sofa will not be as absurd as Dr Spielvogel, author of the treatise ‘The Puzzled Penis’).

  The Facts is no kvetch, however. If anything, it’s a surprisingly mellow evocation of the author’s upbringing. Especially in the early sections, it recalls Woody Allen’s over-tenderised Radio Days. Philip’s was, we are to understand, a happy childhood. Nor is The Facts a transcript of what goes on between Roth and his therapist: it is the least offensively outspoken of any book he has written. No organisation of rabbis, league of Jewish mothers, or Southern Baptist preacher could have protested this publication. Anyone wanting to know if Roth himself actually did that awful thing described in the ‘Salad Days’ section of My Life as a Man (1974) to a young lady under the ping-pong table, yelping ‘good shot’ and ‘nice return’ to allay her parents next door, will be disappointed. The Facts contains not a single lavatorial or sex scene; no family liver is profaned; no anal sub-tabular tennis is played.

  Roth, being Roth, will never keep the facts he does tell entirely straight. Framing the autobiography is an exchange with Nathan Zuckerman – the hero and sometimes the narrator of the 1980s tetralogy. Roth’s letter requesting his alter ego’s imprimatur forms a preface to The Facts and there he explains how he came to write it. Its quest for ‘original pre-fictionalised factuality’ grew out of certain ‘necessities’ and these were in turn the consequence of a ‘crack-up’ which the author suffered in the spring of 1987. Tantalisingly, Roth won’t elaborate (‘there’s no need to delve into particulars here’ – why not?). As part of a general nausea, he emerged sick of ‘fictionalising’ Roth. If this manuscript ‘conveys anything, it’s my exhaustion with masks, disguises, distortions and lies’. One knows what he is referring to. His immediately preceding novel, The Counterlife (1986), finished in a riot of fictional artifice with characters arbitrarily dying and coming to different (‘counter’) life and finally defecting from the novel in disgust at what their awful author was doing to them. ‘I’m leaving you and I’m leaving the book,’ the heroine tells the narrator in a farewell note. After The Counterlife’s excess of artifice, the author was evidently surfeited. ‘Did literature do this to me?’ David Kepesh asks when he wakes to find himself a gigantic breast. It did – and it has done awesome things to Roth.

  As a postscript to his preface in The Facts, Roth touches on another ‘necessity’ – a settling of accounts with his mother’s death in 1981 and his father’s great age (eighty-six) and cancer-ridden fragility. The autobiography opens not with the hero’s birth but with a vivid recollection of Herman Roth’s near-fatal attack of peritonitis in late October 1944 when Philip was ten. He was saved by sulfa powder, newly developed during the early years of the war to treat battle-front wounds. But it was a very close thing and the revealed mortality of his father during the height of his
Oedipal conflict affected Roth deeply. The narrative skips forty years to Herman at death’s door – but this time there is no wonder drug to come to his rescue:

  now, when he is no longer the biggest man I have to contend with – and when I am not all that far from being an old man myself – I am able to laugh at his jokes and hold his hand and concern myself with his well-being, I’m able to love him the way I wanted to when I was sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen but when, what with dealing with him and feeling at odds with him, it was simply an impossibility.