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

by John Sutherland

  Using a bleak and economical English, Roth goes back past those adolescent years to describe a Newark childhood in which the real enemies were not Germans or Japs but ‘the Americans who opposed or resisted us – or condescended to us or rigorously excluded us – because we were Jews’. The theme is expanded in his ‘alternative universe novel’, The Plot Against America (2004), a sub-SF fantasy about 1930s anti-Semitism in a USA in which the national (but incorrigibly prejudiced) hero Charles Lindbergh comes to power, defeating Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s fantasy on one level; on another, actual fears which the Roth family and Philip (all of whom are so-named characters in the novel) entertained in the 1930s. With the rise of the Bush dynasty in the 2000s he feared it again.

  The tone of The Facts is dutiful and piously filial. Portraits are correspondingly respectful. For the record, his father – the insurance salesman – was never the constipated nudnik of Portnoy. Neither did his father disown Philip’s writing and die in rage at its masturbatory offences to patriarchal Judaism. Herman Roth was the loyalest and proudest father an author could have. Further tribute was paid in Patrimony (1991). No father – as he went to his final rest – could want better tribute from a son. Although she figures only on the edge of The Facts, Roth’s mother was, as he describes her, a quiet, intelligent woman – ‘vigilant’ perhaps, but nothing like the vampiric and castrating Sophie Portnoy: the kind of mother who would drive young Jewish boys to hang themselves in the cellar in a spirit of sheer filial dutifulness (leaving a note that the day’s shopping would be found in the fridge). Roth’s brother Sandy was and is nothing like Henry Zuckerman. And so on.

  The narrative of The Facts touches briefly on Roth’s beloved baseball – beloved because it was, in the 1940s, ‘a great nationalistic church from which nobody had ever seemed to suggest that Jews should ever be excluded’. This great nationalistic sport, with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as its heroes, inspired his one formal attempt at the great American novel (cheekily so entitled) and – paradoxically – his most innocently comic piece of writing (‘Call me Smitty,’ it begins). According to The Facts, the only true fellowship with his fellow Americans Roth has known in his life was playing ball at school. Put another way, baseball was his purest experience of being American, not Jewish-American. His ‘baseball years’, as he elsewhere calls them, extended until eighteen, when a new era opened with the reading of Conrad’s Lord Jim. The bulk of The Facts is taken up with his formative college years, 1950–58, at Rutgers, Bucknell and Chicago (where he was taught by Saul Bellow). Among other revelations is a recollection – which future biographers will seize on – of his early storytelling activities at 95 per cent gentile Bucknell College. As an undergraduate, Roth would regale his goy friends with robust imitations and salty routines from his native Jewish Newark community, delivered in stand-up comedian manner. Meanwhile he was writing fey sub-Salingerian literary exercises in which ‘the Jew was nowhere to be seen’.

  The Facts skates over the educational aspects of his ‘Joe College’ years and ignores altogether his time in the Army – from which he was invalided out in 1955 after sustaining an injury during basic training. Those few months supplied the acrid short story, ‘Defender of the Faith’ with its whiff of self-despising Judaism. It was gathered into his first collection, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), the book which, with its 1959 NBA award, propelled him into fame, still in his twenties. The facts Roth principally engages with in The Facts are his three affairs with non-Jewish girls. The first was in 1954, when Roth fell in love with ‘Polly Bates’ (a pseudonym). Following various couplings in his lodgings, made acutely uncomfortable by the prying of his landlady – an episode recalled in the early sections of When She Was Good (1967) – Polly found herself pregnant, as she thought. Roth faced the prospect of buckling down to marriage and giving up the writing nonsense. To his relief (though perhaps not – desire for children that never came runs through The Facts as a pathetic refrain), Polly turned out not to be in the club, after all.

  It was the end of the affair and Philip caddishly, as he later thought, left her to go off to Chicago, postgraduate study and his literary destiny. In that city in 1956 he met a divorcée with two children, ‘Josie Jensen’ (another pseudonym, taken to be Margaret Martinson). She was working as a waitress. Like Polly, Josie put the frighteners on Roth with an unplanned pregnancy and the child was aborted (semi-legally). By this time, however, he had seen ‘the obvious strains’ of marriage and children among his contemporary writer friends and resolved to avoid such enemies of promise. He messily separated from, and then allowed himself to be again entrapped by, his shiksa-witch Josie. Again she played the pregnancy card – this time dishonestly. Roth, if we believe him, was taken for a sucker. He married Martinson, although he claims he didn’t have to. The marriage was short-lived. In ‘My True Story’, it is also rendered as hideously violent, with battery taking over from sex as the most gratifying form of marital intercourse. The Facts corrects the fictional version: the marriage certainly went badly wrong, but homicide was not on the cards. And there seems to have been a silver lining. Roth credits his wife’s provocations with helping him make his all-important break from Henry James, noting, enigmatically, ‘It took time and it took blood.’ Hers.

  After the inevitable divorce in 1963, Roth was skewered on ever-mounting alimony payments ($125 a week in 1967) and taunted (as recounted in The Facts) by Josie’s promise never to remarry and release him. He killed her – as Lucy – in When She Was Good. Martinson went on to kill herself in a car accident in 1968. Roth felt less liberated than guilty. This personal crack-up coincided, ironically, with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and bestsellerdom. The American public was ready for its jolly portrait of the artist as a young onanist. The last of Roth’s great loves recalled in The Facts was ‘May Aldridge’. He dwells on her money and good breeding, as if to make the point that the son of the insurance salesman from Newark has done well for himself. May was/is ‘a gentile woman at the other end of the American spectrum from Josie’, possessed of ‘the civic distinction and social prominence that once came automatically to American clans of British stock’. Their affair lasted five years. The Facts ends – prematurely – in September 1968 with Roth vowing never to tie himself down to a woman again: ‘I was determined to be an absolutely independent, self-sufficient man.’ Roth Unbound.

  But he wasn’t. The publication of The Facts, with its declaration of independence, coincided with a mental and physical (triple bypass) breakdown. Illness – specifically prostate cancer (time’s cruellest revenge on the puzzled penis) – increasingly preoccupies Roth’s late fiction. One assumes – with the necessary tentativeness – that May Aldridge is a version of Claire Bloom, with whom he had, in the late 1980s, been involved for fifteen years. Despite the proclamation about never again tying himself down, Roth married Bloom in 1990. Anglo-American, a distinguished actress and renowned beauty, she matches in central ways the depiction of May Aldridge – ‘classy’, in a word. The marriage broke up four years later. Bloom published a marital-misery memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House (she had played the part of Ibsen’s Nora, and knew what she was talking about) in 1996 – before the ink on the divorce papers was scarcely dry. It was less the cruelty (although if Bloom’s account is to be believed there was plenty of that) than the petty cruelty. His charging her $150 an hour for reading her scripts, for example. Roth responded with the savage depiction of an ageing vindictive actress, Eve Frame, in I Married a Communist (1998).

  It was a very public spat and the gossip – in print and more scurrilously in cocktail parties – buzzed on for years. The invasions into his private life infuriated Roth, particularly a piece by John Updike in the New York Review of Books, a journal which Roth felt should be above such malicious tittle-tattle. Anger has none the less always been powerful fuel for Roth. His resentment at the invaders of his privacy was distilled in the fiery prelude of his finest novel, The Human Stain (2000), which opens in the year of Mo
nica Lewinsky, 1998. Roth, in the person of Zuckerman, launches a passionate defence of Clinton – the only president whose penis (could Lewinski identify it by its markings – or ‘bent’ following a dose of Peyronie’s disease?) was solemnly discussed in the press. It was, in Roth’s view, disgusting. The fury against intrusive ‘reporters’ and equally obnoxious intrusive biographers is continued, ragingly, in Exit Ghost (2007).

  His later years have been vastly honoured with appointments at the best universities and every possible prize except – to Stockholm’s shame – the Nobel. He writes, in these last years, not as the dying animal, but an ageing animal – and very grumpy with it. His novels excoriate political correctness, particularly on the campus, and the universal American timidity about racial matters. In his latest (not one hopes his last) novel, Nemesis (2010) he even takes on God, ‘a sick fuck and an evil genius’, whom he will never forgive for inflicting polio on New Jersey in 1944. Whether God will forgive Philip Roth we shall never know.

  FN

  Philip Milton Roth

  MRT

  The Human Stain

  Biog

  R. Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (2006)

  265. Wilbur Smith 1933–

  History is a river that never ends.

  Wilbur Smith came to fiction late in life. Like other male-action novelists – from Captain Marryat (bemedalled veteran of the Napoleonic Wars) to Chris Ryan (bemedalled SAS hero) – he saw action before he wrote it. He was born in 1933, in what was then Northern Rhodesia and is now one of those African countries with Zs in its name that most Britons have difficulty pinpointing on a map. Like his manly heroes, Smith was brought up a rifle-toting rancher, and educated very British. His grandfather Courtney James Smith inspired the series hero, Sean Courtney. Wilbur was an only son. He served in the Rhodesian armed forces in their most embattled years and saw, as he recalls, terrible things. ‘When I was doing National Service in Rhodesia I saw little girls who had been held up by the legs and sliced down the middle. We had to fish them out of the pit lavatory … witnessing such brutality affects my characters, just as it has affected me.’ Just how it affected him we can only deduce from some of the more blood-chilling scenes in his fiction.

  Smith’s first published novel, When the Lion Feeds (1964), established the pattern of the thirty-odd yarns that follow. Typically the narrative opens with a big game hunt – big being the operative word. Nothing small for Wilbur Smith; he needed a continent-sized canvas for his vision of Africa and his stories clump, massively, into multi-volume sequences or ‘sagas’, in which characters and dynastic families separate and intertwine over hundreds of years. Call them mega-novels. The geo-politics are complex, but it is easy to see where Smith is coming from in literary-historical terms. He is the Rider Haggard of our time. More particularly, he writes in the tradition of the fifteen-volume-strong ‘Hunter’ Quatermain saga which began with King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and ran, bestsellingly, for forty years under the series motto: Ex Africa semper aliquid novi (always something new out of Africa). All three of Smith’s great fictional constellations are Afrocentric. The largest, comprising a dozen or so titles, is the ‘Courtney’ series, which follows the foundation, rise and, as Smith portrays it, the fall of modern South Africa from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. The national narrative is set alongside the career of a family fabulously enriched from gold, diamonds and whatever other wealth is to be ripped from the country’s soil during the colonist’s brief tenure. The somewhat less voluminous Ballantyne sequence follows a Rhodesian colonial dynasty from slave-trading, through ranching, to post-Mugabe exile.

  Smith’s third fictional sequence, the ‘Egyptian Novels’, was begun in 1993, with River God. It was inspired by trips taken with his third wife, Danielle, along the Nile – ‘a river which held us both in thrall’. Like Conrad’s Congo, it takes Smith to the heart of the continent and its mystical Egyptian pre-history. After the death of Danielle, to whom seven of his novels are dedicated, Smith remarried. As he gleefully reported in an interview with the Observer: ‘My new wife is thirty-two and I’m seventy. She’s rejuvenated me totally … My mother and sister are delighted with her. They say I seem twenty years younger, and my mates ask: “How did you get so lucky?”’ Reincarnation and reinvigoration of the ancient hero, Taita’s, ‘manroot’ is a principal theme in the Egyptian series. Smith’s fiction rarely buries its meanings deep.

  Smith’s overarching motto is ‘TIA’ – ‘This is Africa’. In point of fact, it should be ‘This was Africa’. His long career as a bestselling author began, historically, with Macmillan’s wind of change, whose decolonising gusts began to blow in the late 1950s. That ‘wind’ has done to Africa, in Smith’s view, what Katrina did to New Orleans. His novels are permeated with a gloom which gathers force as the sagas unroll their interminable length. Craig Mellow’s failure to recover the family farm in the later Ballantyne novels is symbolic. Now goats graze on its pastures, reducing what was once African Eden to desert. Twenty years ago, Smith believed Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malawi had ‘a fighting chance’. No longer. ‘Africa,’ he has concluded, ‘is going back to where it was before the white man intruded’ – or, indeed, wrote novels about the doomed continent. He is now based in London.

  FN

  Wilbur Addison Smith

  MRT

  When the Lion Feeds

  Biog

  http://www.wilbursmithbooks.com

  266. David Storey 1933–

  I’ve never been an author in the way the middle class would understand, nor working class in the way a popular audience would listen to.

  Say ‘David Storey’ and readers of my – and his – generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life (1963): Frank Machin (played by Richard Harris) mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional player is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits he used to work in, but Machin doesn’t take it lying down: he is no longer a sportsman but still a man. Storey adapted his original novel for Lindsay Anderson, who directed the film, but he curtailed the ending. On the printed page, after Machin’s legs have ‘betrayed’ him on the pitch, there is a final scene in the changing-room. The players have had their communal bath. Someone, inevitably, has pissed in it. Machin looks around him, ‘had my ankles strapped, got dressed and put my teeth in’. As in the film, the scene expresses a refusal to be ground down, but in a grittier, less self-glorifying way. Getting your teeth knocked out – something Anderson plays up – can be glamorous: wearing dentures for the next forty years less so.

  The changing-room, with its naked truths about manliness, was to feature prominently in Storey’s writing over the next three decades, notably in his play of that name. There are other elements which recur in Storey’s work, most of which can be traced back to his own life: the miner father ambitious for his son to be something more (but not necessarily better); the free-booting marquee-erectors’ world, in which for a few years Storey, a muscle-bound Defarge, earned his bread swinging a 14-pound hammer, pitching and striking tents for the champagne parties of his social superiors – it supplies the setting for his play The Contractor (1970); the Slade art school in Camden, which appears under various pseudonyms, as does his native Wakefield; the years of poverty before This Sporting Life (1960); the years of wealth after it; the prizes and glorious collaborations with Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson; the broken relationships and other breakdowns; the later years of prizeless oblivion and now the pathos of ‘whatever happened to David Storey?’

  The primal scene in Storey’s fiction is to be found in the Booker-winning Saville (1976), in which Colin, the miner’s son, takes his eleven-plus. Storey vividly evokes the huge, echoing, dusty examination rooms, the ink-stained desks, the shepherding, numbering and mysterious instructions, the nervy atmosphere of remembered threats and bribes, the sense of an inscrutable authority, the pointless Cyril Burtian ques
tions designed to measure ‘IQ’ and the elusive ‘G’ (‘How many words can you make from ‘Conversation’?’) A right or wrong answer to an enigmatic question might well determine the rest of your life.

  Born in 1933, Storey took the exam in 1944, the year in which the Butler Education Act came into force. He was one of the saved (i.e. he ‘passed’) and made it to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Wakefield. The problems of a grammar-school boy like Storey were authoritatively anatomised by Richard Hoggart in the last chapters of The Uses of Literacy. As it fed through to the creative writing of the 1960s, the grammar-school boy’s educated self-alienation gave rise to a lexicon of fashionable literary terms – ‘roots’ (invariably cut off), ‘outsiders’, ‘protest’ and ‘anger’ (often in conjunction with ‘young man’). ‘Grammar school broke him in two,’ Storey says of Leonard Radcliffe, in Radcliffe (1963) – upward mobility meant class exile. It is famous that Storey found himself in the Faustian situation of getting a scholarship to study at the Slade School just after signing a fifteen-year contract to play rugby league for Leeds. For four years in the early 1950s, artist Jekyll and athlete Hyde bounced between Camden (the Slade) and Yorkshire (the pitch). He finally bought himself out of the contract with three-quarters of the initial signing fee. Camden had won but the psychic divisions would rage on in his writing: he had unmanned himself to write.