WILLIAM SANSOM (1912–76) was the son of a naval architect in Dulwich. He was christened Norman Trevor, but understandably changed his name once he was able. He worked in raffish professions, including as a night-club pianist and advertising copywriter. His writing career took off after the Second World War, and for a long period he published at least one book a year. He wrote in the former billiards room of his substantial house in Maida Vale. He married the actress daughter of an accountant, subsequently working as a literary scout. The marriage was tempestuous, driven by heavy drinking on both parts. His wife sent him a note during his last illness in hospital claiming that if he ever came out, he would find that she had destroyed all his papers. She hadn’t, in fact.
SAMUEL SELVON (1923–94) was the son of a cocoa merchant in Trinidad. He worked for the Trinidad Sunday Guardian and the Evening News until 1950, when he moved to London. He lived in Britain during the period of his best writing, producing a matchless account of the lives of the Windrush generation, until he moved to Canada in 1978. There, for a time, he had to work as a janitor at the University of Calgary, which subsequently appointed him Writer in Residence.
MURIEL SPARK (1918–2006) was the daughter of a fitter in Edinburgh, a ‘gentile Jewess’ as she described herself – her father but not her mother was Jewish. In 1937 she departed for Southern Rhodesia to marry a man called Spark she had met at a dance. In Africa, he turned out to be violent and frightening, even to the generally dauntless Mrs Spark. In 1944 she took a troop ship to Liverpool. She occupied various posts in the London literary world. In 1954 she experienced paranoid hallucinations due to reliance on slimming pills. Her first novel, The Comforters, addresses the experience. In the early 1960s, her publishers, hypnotized by Spark, offered to buy her a house. A Roman Catholic convert, she was extraordinarily chic in both appearance and intellectual capacity. The excellence of her novels continued without diminishment to the end, the later ones being written in Italian exile with the domestic support of a companion, Penelope Jardine.
ROBERT AICKMAN (1914–81) was the son of a Hampstead architect. His grandfather met his father in a public toilet, and encouraged him to marry his daughter despite thirty years difference in age. Aickman was isolated and depressive throughout his early life, and married a girl he met in an opera queue out of sympathy. After they divorced in 1957, she became a nun. Aickman, in 1946, set up the Inland Waterways Association to preserve and restore British canals. After 1951 he published a series of macabre stories and novels. He is described as a man ‘at odds with the modern world’ and one who, autocratic in his public life, ‘did not suffer fools gladly’. This may or may not be a euphemism.
V. S. NAIPAUL (1932–) was born in Trinidad, the son of a journalist. He won a scholarship to Oxford, where he was lonely and insecure. Relying on his wife, Pat, he pursued a career in writing and as an occasional presenter on the BBC. His first books, beautifully conceived and written, were published by André Deutsch. They quickly won prizes, and by the time of A House for Mr Biswas (1961) the greatness of its author was accepted. Afterwards, Naipaul began to travel, including his first trip to his ancestral India. The sequence of non-fiction that followed was unsparing and sometimes, as in the case of Among the Believers (1981), startlingly prophetic. His novels pursue the large topic of the consequences of imperialism lucidly and without undue sentiment. Although his public persona has given rise to much controversy in recent years, he is often and justly regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English since the Second World War.
J. G. BALLARD (1930–2009) was born in Shanghai, the son of the manager of a calico print works. He and his family were interned in a prison camp when the Japanese army occupied Shanghai. Afterwards, Ballard moved with his mother to England, where he went through boarding school and Cambridge in a very independent spirit. Like many writers, he trained as a doctor. From 1951 onwards he wrote visionary science fiction. In 1955 he married and in 1959 he moved to Shepperton. In 1964 his wife died suddenly while they were on holiday in Spain, leaving Ballard to bring up three children alone. He drank whisky from 9 a.m. onwards, once the children were at school. The later works bring experimental modernism into the previously safe world of British science fiction. His last years were spent in a cloud of admiration, by which time the chaotic semi-detached house in Shepperton had become a legendary destination for the ambitious writers of Sunday newspaper profiles.
CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE (1923–2012) was born in Geneva and brought up in Brussels. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College London. She worked from 1968 to 1988 at the University of Paris, Vincennes, and was married three times. She was regarded in Britain as a proponent of an English-language version of the French nouveau roman.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1912–73) was the daughter of an insurance inspector. On leaving school, she worked as a governess, marrying John Taylor, a chocolate manufacturer, in 1936. After a passionate affair with a fellow communist, she began to publish novels in 1945. Her subsequent life was spent maintaining important literary connections from a slight distance – Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, Kingsley Amis and especially Robert Liddell were friends – and in living a respectable upper-middle class life in Penn in Buckinghamshire. Although she was successful in her lifetime, and one of the English writers that the New Yorker strongly supported, she was often subject to casual dismissal. Her reputation has grown considerably since her death.
KINGSLEY AMIS (1922–95) was the son of a clerk at Colman’s, the mustard manufacturer. He was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s, Oxford, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Philip Larkin. From 1942 he served in the army. He married Hilary Bardwell in 1948 and returned to academic study. Although his B.Litt thesis was failed, he managed to get a job at the University of Swansea. Soon afterwards, Amis published Lucky Jim, an immediate and enormous success. Amis’s subsequent career has fascinated a series of generations for its leap from left-wing causes to staunch Tory, and for its energetic engagement with genre in a confrontational and frequently masterly manner. He left his first wife for the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. He was a noted philanderer and spectacular drunk, as well as the most gifted mimic of his generation. When his second marriage broke up acrimoniously, he moved in with his first wife and her third husband Lord Kilmarnock, who acted as housekeepers and carers. He took considerable pleasure in asking a peer of the realm to make him a cup of tea, or to mix up some Fybogel constipation cure.
ALAN SILLITOE (1928–2010) was born the son of a labourer. His childhood was scarred by abuse, and by poverty when his father lost his job. He left school at fourteen, but was furthered by self-education in the public libraries; he was always regarded by his peers as being exceptionally well read. He had to leave the RAF when he contracted tuberculosis. He moved with his companion Ruth Fainlight to the South of France and then Majorca. Robert Graves suggested to Sillitoe that he should write about his own world; the result, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was a huge success. In later years, his varied and immensely inventive work sometimes baffled reviewers who believed that working-class writers should not venture beyond their obvious subject matter. He was highly regarded behind the Iron Curtain, but misunderstood as much there as at home: he took the opportunity in 1969 to attack human rights abuses in the USSR during a speech to the Soviet Writers’ Union.
V. S. PRITCHETT (1900–97) is the greatest of all British writers of short stories. Born the son of a feckless migratory man with fantasies about business success, Pritchett spent a childhood moving from lodging to lodging. At fifteen he left school for a job in a tannery in Bermondsey. At nineteen, he moved to Paris with the wish to become a painter, acquiring French. He returned to London and took up a job as foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. His first collection of short stories, The Spanish Virgin, was published in 1930. His novels were not successful, but his short stories and his book-reviewing quickly put him in the first rank of English write
rs. His life from the 1940s onwards was one of recollection and contemplation, and from his writing and from visiting professorships in America he was able to buy a substantial house in Regent’s Park. He rescued and preserved his beloved wife Dorothy from a serious patch of alcoholism. Two volumes of memoirs are masterpieces.
‘JEAN RHYS’ (ELLA WILLIAMS) (1890–1979) was born in Dominica, the daughter of a Welsh doctor. In 1907 she was sent to England for her education, choosing to enter the Academy of Dramatic Art. When asked to leave because of her ineradicable Caribbean accent, she became a chorus girl. A series of affairs followed, and a dangerously late abortion. She married and moved to Paris, and started to publish novels. Her first novel, Quartet, was an account of her affair with the novelist, Ford Madox Ford. Her husband, also a novelist published his own account of the affair. She returned to England and lived with, then married, her literary agent while developing a heavy drinking habit. She and her husband lost all their money, and any contact with the literary world. After the war her husband died. Rhys lived in Beckenham with his cousin, often being prosecuted for bohemian behaviour. In 1949 and again in 1956 adverts were placed in the press asking for any news of the whereabouts of this forgotten author. In 1966, with the strong support of new friends, Wide Sargasso Sea was published and hailed as a masterpiece.
IAN MCEWAN (1948–) was the son of a Scots major in the army. He was educated at the University of Sussex and was one of the first pupils of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Programme. His work has gone from gleefully macabre short stories to high-minded statements of principles. He is a Labour supporter and an enthusiastic secularist. In his novel Saturday, about a day in the life of a Labour-supporting brain surgeon resident in the same impressive Fitzrovia house that McEwan lives in, a murderous rapist is dissuaded from his beastly intentions by a character reading Dover Beach out loud.
ANGELA CARTER (1940–92) was the daughter of a journalist, born in Eastbourne. She spent much of her childhood in Yorkshire at her grandmother’s house, which contained three copies of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the young Carter’s favourite reading. She started and soon after finished work as a reporter on a local paper in Croydon: factual reportage was not her strong point. She married very young, and took a degree in English literature, specializing in mediaeval romances. She used the money from the Somerset Maugham Award for her third novel to leave her husband and go to Japan. She was a highly original essayist and novelist, and her experiences were unusually wide for the increasing professionalized occupation of novelist – she worked as a bar hostess in Ginza in Tokyo. From the 1970s onwards, she relied upon the support of university fellowships in Sheffield, Brown in the USA and Adelaide in Australia. She married a potter and lived in South London until her early death. Shortly afterwards, it was reported that more PhD theses were being written on her work in the UK than on the entire eighteenth century.
DORIS LESSING (1919–2013) was born in Iran, the daughter of a soldier and clerk at the Imperial Bank of Persia. Most of her early life was spent in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Lessing married twice, and left her second husband to travel to London with her younger son in 1949. In London, she was an active communist and political campaigner against apartheid and nuclear arms. Her first novel was published in 1950. Over the next sixty years, she maintained an argumentative, inspiring presence in London, publishing novels of every sort, picking intellectual fights, making an example of herself and giving every sign of enjoying an energetic disagreement. ‘How pleasant to be a Dame! I would adore it,’ she wrote to a government official, turning down a DBE. She died shortly after the death of her younger son, Peter, for whom she had cared for many years.
PENELOPE FITZGERALD (1916-2000) was born in the Bishop’s Palace at Lincoln, the daughter of a famously intellectual English family. Her father was editor of Punch, one uncle was one of the cryptographers who broke the code of the Enigma machine, and another was the most famous English Catholic divine of the twentieth century. She married a catastrophic wastrel in 1942, who was expelled from the Bar for petty theft and perhaps went to prison. During this time, Fitzgerald abandoned a series of rented houses, lived in a houseboat on the Thames (which sank) and was reduced to a hostel for the homeless with her three children, while teaching at a crammer. Towards the end of her husband’s life she took to writing first biographies, and then after his death, a brilliant series of novels. Most people found her gaze a complex experience: kindly, unforgettably penetrating, disconcerting, and decidedly daunting.
ALASDAIR GRAY (1934–) was born in Glasgow, the son of a factory worker. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957, and subsequently taught there. He established a career as an artist, and his first writings were plays, broadcast on radio and television in 1968. For many years, he worked slowly on his novel Lanark, finally published in 1981 and the object of great admiration, not only among Scottish nationalists. His books are objects of unusual beauty; his motto, ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’, migrated from the pages of his books to the wall of the Scottish Parliament.
BERNARD MACLAVERTY (1942–) was born in Belfast and grew up in an extended Roman Catholic family. His father was a sign painter who often worked for cinemas. At school he was a member of a skiffle band. After school, he worked as a technician in the anatomy laboratory at Queen’s University, where he joined a writers’ group that included Philip Hobsbaum, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. He took a degree as a mature student and first published a book in 1977.
SHENA MACKAY (1944–) was born in Edinburgh but grew up in Hampstead and Shoreham in Kent. A novelistic prodigy, she published her first fiction, two brilliant novellas, the year after leaving school. She worked as an office junior and subsequently in an antique shop owned by the art critic David Sylvester’s parents. A Soho period followed with connections in the Colony Rooms, and the friendship of Francis Bacon. Her first creative period came to an end in 1971, before she resumed publishing in 1983. Her subjects are the pleasures of ordinary life, touched with metropolitan and bohemian glamour. She lives in Southampton.
BERYL BAINBRIDGE (1932–2010) was the daughter of a commercial agent and a mother who, after her father’s bankruptcy, made it clear that she had married beneath her. She was expelled from school at fourteen for illustrating a dirty limerick. On leaving school, she worked as an ASM and subsequently an actor in the theatre. Her final role was as Ken Barlow’s girlfriend in Coronation Street. Bainbridge married a Roman Catholic artist, and subsequently had an affair with a man called Sharp, who when his daughter was born said he was going to get a book out of the car, and never came back. In 1967 she began to publish fiction. Her publisher was Colin Haycraft, who despised novelists. He made an exception for Bainbridge, who he had a long affair with. After Haycraft’s death, she started to receive proper payment for her novels for the first time. Her house contained a stuffed water buffalo in the hallway and a life-sized papier-mâché figure of Neville Chamberlain in her bedroom.
DOUGLAS DUNN (1942–) was born in Clydeside, the son of a tyre company executive. He worked as a librarian, initially in Glasgow but subsequently in America, where he started reviewing poetry and was mysteriously called up for the Vietnam War, which he ignored and was labelled a deserter. Returning to the UK, he started a degree at the University of Hull, meeting Tom Paulin and the librarian Philip Larkin. His wife died, tragically young, in 1981, giving rise to the poetry collection Elegies (1985), a classic.
GEORGINA HAMMICK (1939–) is the daughter of a military attaché, whose identical twin, Amanda Vesey, is an artist and illustrator. A formative experience was travelling across the Atlantic in December 1948, away from rationing to the sight of a glittering New York in the snow. She lives in Peckham with a greedy Romanian street dog and a flock of goldfinches which choose not to migrate in winter. Her first collection, People for Lunch, a masterpiece, was greatly admired by both Bernard Levin and Adam Mars-Jones.
ADAM MARS-JONES
(1954–) was born in London. His father was a High Court Judge. Mars-Jones told his father that he was homosexual on the last day of 1977, to which his father insisted that Mars-Jones had masturbated when he had glimpsed Jacqueline Bissett in a Truffaut film. Shortly afterwards, Mars-Jones went to America, returning after having written a volume of short stories about a serial killer, his father, an upper-class eccentric and the Queen. He was included in lists of best British novelists in 1983 and 1993, despite not having published a novel. Subsequently he published one short one and two very long ones, named after abstruse items of punctuation.
GEORGE MACKAY BROWN (1921–96) was born the son of a tailor and postman in Orkney. He started to write after an attack of tuberculosis, in the form of verse and articles for the Orkney Herald. For twenty years, serious attacks of ill health delayed Brown’s educational development and writing. In 1961 he became a Roman Catholic. He spent time in Edinburgh, where he made important literary connections, but left Orkney only unwillingly.
A. S. BYATT (1936–) was born in Sheffield, one of four remarkable children: her siblings are the novelist Margaret Drabble, the art historian Helen Langdon and the QC Richard Drabble. The family moved to York. Byatt’s education was Quaker. After Cambridge and Oxford, Byatt lectured at London University, and was first published by Cecil Day-Lewis. Between a sequence of exceptional novels, Byatt edited the predecessor to this anthology, the Oxford Book of the English Short Story.
MARTIN AMIS (1949–) is the son of the novelist Kingsley Amis. A peripatetic childhood, including periods in America, led to the prospect of academic failure. On returning to school after taking a part in the movie of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica, Amis was expelled for truancy. A spell in crammers got him into Oxford, and subsequently a career in literary journalism. Among his less celebrated publications are a book about the early video game Space Invaders and the screenplay to Saturn 3. His second novel, Dead Babies, was retitled Dark Secrets in paperback in order not to offend any dead babies, or anyone who knew any. Manufactured controversies about his teeth, his divorces, his advances, his views on Islam increasingly affected the public reception of his novels, whatever their quality.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 87