Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (102 page)

Like Don Birnam, and his novel ‘The Bottle’, Jackson resolved to write the first novel to describe alcoholism as it really is, rather than as it is demonised in temperance tract fiction such as
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room
, or romanticised as a ladder to the stars in novels such as
Tender is the Night.
Fitzgerald was, none the less, a writer Jackson idolised – there’s a comic moment in the novel when Don, smashed, phones up the wearily sober great author.
The Lost Weekend
was a bestseller and its sales, along with the $50,000 he got for the film rights, enriched its author. He bought a large house in New Jersey, and retired there with his wife and two daughters. He wrote three more novels over the next ten years. Only
The Fall of Valor
(1946) enjoyed anything like the éclat of its predecessor. It takes on another ‘daring’ subject: a married man, with two daughters, falls in love with a young marine officer. By the early 1950s Jackson had fallen off the wagon and was in financial difficulties. His last ten years were painful, and his life fell apart, beyond any hope of being put together again. In addition, his pulmonary problems returned. His final novel, the grim
A Second-Hand Life
(the story of a sexually loose girl, Winifred Grainger) was published in 1967. He committed suicide the following year at the Chelsea Hotel, the favourite resort of bohemian writers in New York.

Billy Wilder’s film of
The Lost Weekend
, which is viewed on TV reruns more often than Jackson’s novel is read nowadays, makes two substantial alterations to its source text. One change is to the fatalism of the novel as regards alcoholism. Jackson’s Don Birnam, a ‘periodic’ drunk, is not ‘cured’ as is Ray Milland’s Birnam in the last scene of the film. He will, we apprehend, have other lost weekends and bouts,
until either the closed ward or the morgue brings him to the Last Weekend. As the homosexual attendant Bim tells him in Bellevue (where his public drunkenness has brought him):

There isn’t any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? … If they do stop, out of fear or whatever, they go at once into such a state of euphoria and well-being that they become over-confident. They’re rid of drink, and feel sure enough of themselves to be able to start again, promising they’ll take one, or at the most two, and – well, then it becomes the same old story all over again.

The other change is to Birnam’s homosexuality, which is glossed over entirely in the film. In the novel it is clear that Birnam’s drinking is at least partly driven by sexual confusion and the explosive pressures that build up in the closet. And the drink closet.

Who remembers the old fights? Who wants to?

No novelist of his time conveyed more articulately than Nicholas Monsarrat the tepid rage of Britain in the post-war period when the country won a war, mislaid a great Empire, lost its national nerve, but preserved a saving decency. There is an illustrative moment in
The Cruel Sea
, when the captain hero (as sterling a type as ever appeared on a Players’ cigarette packet) returns to port from the deadly Western Approaches, leaving in his wake corpses still bobbing on the waves, to find civilian dock-workers on strike for more wages: ‘These were … the people whom sailors fought and died for; at close quarters, they hardly seemed to deserve it.’ None the less, Captain Ericson returns to battle.

Monsarrat was the son of an eminent surgeon in Liverpool, the second of three boys, two of whom came to tragically early deaths. At the family’s country home in Anglesey, he developed an early love of yachting. He was educated at Winchester, where he was bullied and progressed to Trinity College, Cambridge, to complete his gentleman’s education with a third in Law. It would not have disqualified him from a
good career. But Monsarrat never bought into the values of his class – nor, however, did he ever quite discard them. For most of the 1930s he chose to be like the black-sheep down-and-outer Orwell describes in the doss-house – his ragged trousers held up with an Etonian tie. In London, with only a typewriter in his luggage, he slept rough and ‘saw life’. He wrote novels which were promisingly smart, but never earned back the standard £30 advance. He sold the
Daily Worker
in Piccadilly, marched with the unemployed and proclaimed an ‘ardent’ pacifism.

By the end of the decade, he was actually getting somewhere with his fiction. His fourth novel,
This is the Schoolroom
, a
Bildungsroman
, was well received by the critics. But, published a week before the outbreak of war, it was swallowed up by history. It was a hectic period. Monsarrat married in the same week (to Eileen Rowland; they had one son). An avowed pacifist, he donned the black uniform of the St John Ambulance Brigade, based (as befitted his background) in Harley Street. The bombs didn’t come. Ambulanceman Monsarrat patrolled the streets ‘armed with iodine and sal volatile in case any ladies fainted’. Things changed when his father sent him an advertisement from
The Times
(‘a paper I would not be seen dead with’), asking whether ‘
gentlemen
with yachting experience’ would be interested in commissions ‘as Temporary Probationary Sub-Lieutenants in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve’. Was ever an invitation colder? Monsarrat joined up, telling himself that ‘pacifism was useless in wartime.’ He would spend three years on escort corvettes – unglamorous bathtubs armed with popguns, so unstable on high seas that sailors unlucky enough to sail them jested they ‘would roll on wet grass’. Sub-Lt. Monsarrat (former ambulanceman) was given the task of tending to the survivors from sunk ships. It was horrific: ‘What did one do for the tortured lascar with the mortal oil seeping down into his gut? … Often I willed such men to die, even as I tended them; and sometimes they agreed.’

Monsarrat, himself a ‘temporary’, admired the permanent officer class, while inwardly mocking their incorrigible bone-headedness. He was good at the job and ended up commanding a frigate. After 1945 he could have continued at the Admiralty, commanding a desk. Instead he joined the Colonial Service. What finally induced him to abandon, for the rest of his life, the country he had fought for was an official recipe from the Ministry of Food to senior civil servants, recommending ‘a squirrel pie recipe’. For those who qualified, ‘free cartridges would be supplied by the local pest officer to shoot the squirrel with’. If gentlemen were reduced to eating rodents it was time to leave. He was appointed to Johannesburg, to open the UK information office. In the boredom of that job, between heavy drinking and reckless adulteries (about which he is engagingly frank) he wrote
The Cruel Sea
(1951).

By now he expected little from publishers, but the British book trade was
desperate for the British
The Naked and the Dead
– Norman Mailer’s authentically eye-witness, war-is-hell novel. This, Cassells decided, was it. The
Cruel Sea
went on to become an international bestseller and an Eric Ambler-scripted film in 1953. The emblematic scene in both page and screen versions is the depth-charging of shipwrecked British sailors, hooraying as they mistakenly assume that the corvette is steaming forward to pluck them out of the water, when the Captain, as mistakenly, thinks there is a submarine beneath them and has decided that they are expendable and must be blown up. Captain Ericson, played throatily by Jack Hawkins, gets drunk and in the film (not the novel) later comes out with his agonised groan: ‘it’s the war, it’s the
bloody
war’.

Monsarrat was now rich, and could indulge himself with the first Jaguar XK120 in South Africa and a second wife, Philippa Crosby (he would, in fact, marry three times and own many fine cars). He stayed on in the service and took a posting to Ottawa, Canada, which was relatively unbloody. Disdaining the war novel sequel his publishers craved, he produced
The Story of Esther Costello
(1953), a satire on American hucksterism which, as a novel and a Hollywood adaptation, was a thought-provoking flop. He resigned the Colonial Service in 1956. He could not have stayed on, what with the novel he published that year:
The Tribe That Lost its Head
is far and away Monsarrat’s best thing in fiction. Set in an imaginary island, Pharamaul, off the West Coast of Africa, it allegorises the tensions of old, complacent British colonial rule (more benign than that in the nearby Republic of South Africa) in the aftermath of Kenya’s Mau Mau insurgency – on which Monsarrat had views which would have made Sanders of the River look namby-pamby.

The black hero, Dinamaula, is the Oxford-educated chief-in-waiting of the U-Maula tribe who returns to take up his position as tribal chief. Like the occidentalised Seretse Khama (with whom Monsarrat had dealings, and whom he personally despised), he has chosen to marry a white woman, which complicates things. The Maulas – a child-like people who have lived quite happily under a regime which has not changed since the rule of their ‘Mother across the Sea’ (Victoria) – are inflamed by ideas of self-determination fed them by mischievous British newspapermen and doltishly doctrinaire Socialist politicians. Rebellion ensues. The tribesmen, whose pagan Christianity demands blood sacrifice, ritually crucify and rape some luckless missionaries and white women. Summary executions follow and a press conference, given by a wholly disillusioned young administrator, David Bracken:

‘You mean that they actually crucified him [Father Schwemmer]?’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘A deed of madness!’ exclaimed Father Hawthorne. ‘Those poor, misguided children.’

David looked at him. ‘Yes, indeed. Misguided,
greedy
children.’

‘What do you mean by “greedy”, Mr Bracken?’

‘I should have told you that they ate him as well.’

That had been the end of the Press conference.

It echoes the black-comic ending of Waugh’s
Black Mischief
(1932), when Basil asks the chief what was the delicious stew they had last night and is told ‘Your girl friend’. But Monsarrat’s view was not – like Waugh’s – that of the satirical tourist, and the novel emanates radical uncertainty about whether Empire (like the war) was worthwhile. Monsarrat is no Blimp. Nor does he believe, like the senior colonial official Macmillan (mischievously named after the PM who loosed the winds of change over Africa) that, in a couple of centuries or so, the Africans may conceivably be ready for emancipation. It was, he believed, all a mess – but the Englishman’s mess.

This novel was, in the context of 1956 (and with the Belgian Congo debacle imminent), explosive. Monsarrat remarried and retired, prosperously, to Malta where, in his last years, he wrote his lively volumes of memoir and worked on an epic-length version of the Flying Dutchman myth. At his wish, his ashes were scattered in the sea he believed cruel, by the Royal Navy.

Golding is a little too ‘nice’ for my taste.
Artur Lundkvist, the Nobel judge who stood out against Golding getting literature’s most eminent prize in 1983

In 1972 William Golding – well on the way to his Nobel Prize – was a guest of the Cecils (Lord Cecil, that is) at Cranbourne Manor. The ‘Bloomsbury groupie Frances Partridge’ (John Carey’s scathing description) was also there. She recorded meeting Golding in her diary: ‘a short, squarish, bearded man, smelling rather like an old labourer’. Ah yes, that proletarian
stink
. George Orwell is eloquent on the subject in
The Road to Wigan Pier
: stale urine, old cabbage,
sweat.
It is no coincidence that when Gordon Comstock sells out, in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, he goes on to earn his
daily bread advertising sock-deodorants. Doubtless when Vita Sackville-West came in from tending the garden at Sissinghurst, she smelled of nothing but attar of rose. Amazing that some of the labouring classes can actually write, but, ‘little Latin and less Greek’, you know.

Golding, although he never lived to read what Partridge thought of him, glowed, lifelong, with the underdog’s radioactive anger. He lived, he once said,
under
, not
in
the British class system – and that system was indestructible. Blast Britain to smithereens with nuclear bombs, dump a bunch of innocent kids on an Edenic desert island, and class reasserts itself like funny putty – Jack Merridew the toff, Piggy the oik – thus it was, and thus it will always be. The obstructions in Golding’s way were the familiar ones. He was two generations up from the artisan’s cottage. His father, an awesomely polymathic autodidact, made it to the schoolteacher class. The fact that he was never able to rise above the rank of deputy head embittered his later years. William went to Marlborough grammar school. Not far away in distance – but a universe away socially – was Marlborough College. Golding liked to say he would happily blow up every public school in England. But he was no simple anarchist; in later life he lusted after a knighthood and bullied friends in high places to get him one. Inferiority complexes are complex things.