Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (132 page)

At the University of Western Ontario, where she started a degree in English, Alice paid her way with a variety of meaningless jobs (waitressing mainly). On leaving UWO, after two years when her scholarship ran out, Alice Laidlaw married a fellow student, and fellow ‘Scot’, Jim Munro, in 1951. She was a mother at the age of twenty-one and would have four daughters. The Munros moved to Vancouver, where they opened a book store. Here it was, in the intervals between household chores (she hated, she says, being regarded as ‘the little wife’), that she began
tentatively putting out the short stories that she had been writing, practically from girlhood. Munro’s first collection was published as she closed on forty, followed by the only novel she has published,
Lives of Girls and Women
(1971) – a title which describes much of her output. The novel is autobiographical and offers most of what the public knows of her early life and probably ever will until after her death when the ‘post-mortem exploiters’ do their grisly work.

On divorcing her first husband in 1972, Munro moved back to Huron, Ontario, and in 1976 she married an old friend from her early college days, Gerald Fremlin. They bought a house close to where Alice had been brought up. In this mature phase of her life, Munro pulsed out a steady stream of short stories. She was, by now, a fixture in the
New Yorker
and spent periods as writer-in-residence at various Ontario universities. The crowning honour was the UK’s Man Booker International Prize, 2009. It was not otherwise an easy time: she had required a heart bypass and was also afflicted with cancer. In the same year that she won the Booker she diverted from her established pattern with the collection
The View From Castle Rock
(2006). In it she investigates her historical Scottish heritage. Karl Miller, a leading authority on James Hogg, recounts a disciple’s visit (accompanied by the poet Seamus Heaney, and the novelist Andrew O’Hagan – Celts all) to the grave of the author, in the Ettrick Valley, in 2009. ‘On returning to London’, Miller recalls, ‘I received a proof copy of the latest collection of Munro’s stories, which begins in the Ettrick Valley with an attention to Will o’ Phaup’s tombstone and a role for Hogg’s cousin James Laidlaw, who left Ettrick for North America at the age of 60 and settled in Ontario, where a descendant begat Alice Munro. The story describes how, on the top of Edinburgh Castle, Laidlaw, in his cups, had informed his children that to look over to Fife was to behold the shores of America.’

Munro’s fiction, Miller argues, is ‘true narrative’ – true, that is, to the stern, ineradicable Presbyterianism of her Ettrick forebears. She has, in a sense, come home: back-migrated, as the demographers put it. Shrewdly Miller also discerns a Presbyterian inhibition in Munro’s writing. That stern denomination has never much liked fiction, particularly its womenfolk: ‘There was no interest in reading. It was almost considered disloyal to the idea of being a good housewife,’ Munro recalls of her girlhood. In a 2005 interview, she further recalled that when her first collection was published, she hid her six copies in the downstairs cupboard where ‘we put all the things we didn’t use very often’. It wasn’t shame, she explains, but a horror of exposure. A week later, when she was alone in the house, she forced herself to read one of the stories. ‘I read the book cover to cover and, yes, it was OK.’ The terse realism, and the brevity of her chosen form, can be connected with this ineradicable desire not to be caught writing a novel, perish the thought. But particles of fiction
can slip past the internal, Presbyterian, censor. If, that is, you’re quick and short about it.

I read Proust, but not much else written in the 20th century.

No novelist of the late twentieth century put greater barriers between himself (in life) and his fiction than ‘Trevanian’ – the pen name of Rodney Whitaker. Whitaker was brought up, in impoverished circumstances, in Albany, New York. He gives a finely written description of his childhood in his last published work,
The Crazyladies of Pearl Street
(2005), and in the ‘cybernotes’ he offered on his official fansite to the ‘novel’. (It was later reclassified by its publisher as a ‘memoir’, but in neither form did it sell beyond the diminishing circle of his fans.) Whitaker was brought up ‘a believing Catholic’, but in adolescence lapsed into ‘mildly indifferent non-theism’. God, he said, was not on the first thirty pages of the important things in his life. Priests often come to gory ends in Trevanian’s fiction –
Shibumi
(1979) ends with a particularly nasty wearer of the cloth impaled on the ice-pick of a man he betrayed. As a child Whitaker was lucky, as he saw it, to have benefited from ‘the golden age of American elementary education’. A key text in the formation of his mind was Howard Fast’s ‘splendidly biased’,
Citizen Tom Paine
. Whitaker himself was a fighter for civil rights in the 1950s, demonstrating at the docks for the right of negroes to work there. An early predisposition to alcoholism – a blood weakness on his mother’s side, as he saw it – was nipped in the bud. He smoked heavily, however, a habit which eventually killed him somewhat before his time.

Whitaker was clever enough to win the fellowships and grants-in-aid which opened the way to an academic career. He graduated with a BA and MA from the University of Washington, did a stint in the US Navy during the Korean War, returning to complete his doctorate in communications and film at Northwestern University and, by mid-career, was chairman of the Department of Radio, TV and Film at the University of Texas, Austin. In his fortieth year, he published his major academic monograph, under his own name, on the language of film and, as ‘Trevanian’, his first novel.
The Eiger Sanction
(1972) introduced an unlikely Secret Service assassin,
Dr Jonathan Hemlock, an art historian who undertakes ‘sanctions’ (i.e. contract assassinations) in order to build a private art collection. No pointy-headed academic, Hemlock is also a world-class mountaineer and his current contract requires doing his deadly stuff on a fiendishly difficult climb up one of the most challenging cliff faces in the Alps. All nonsense.

With its sardonic take-off of Robert Ludlum’s heavy-handed signature titles (e.g.
The Scarlatti Inheritance
, 1971), its preposterous hero, and his own pompous
nom de plume
, Whitaker intended satire. In a line of authors going back to Swift, he discovered that you should never underestimate the dumbness of the reading public. The novel was taken ‘straight’ and became a bestseller, boosted by excited speculation as to who the author was. (Ludlum on his day off? A consortium?) He had, Whitaker later said, created a ‘monster’. A sequel was demanded and he went further over the top with
The Loo Sanction
(1973). ‘Loo’ –not the subtlest of jokes – is an ultra-secret department of the British intelligence services. They require Hemlock’s services to track down a serial killer of the country’s top people. (Whitaker had spent a year in England, on fellowship, as a young academic; he liked the place but – Tom Paine disciple that he was – hated its toffs.) The narrative opens with an anal impaling which, Whitaker later confided, was a satire on the gratuitous violence of the Kubrick–Burgess movie adaptation of
A Clockwork Orange
. Again the novel was gulped down, delightedly, by a readership which did not detect the slightest tang of satire in what they were gulping.

His fiction – and the Clint Eastwood-starring movie of the first novel – enabled the Whitakers (his wife and four children) to retire to the
pays Basque
in France, which became the setting for his most ambitious novel,
Shibumi
(1979). The hero, Nicholai Hel, has absorbed the wisdoms of East and West. His
Weltanschauung
is principally driven by a complex analysis of the Japanese game, Go. He is an expert speleologist – expert everything, in fact, including half a dozen languages and transcendental elevation – and he abuses Volvos (the ‘Volvo-bashing’ motif is a kick at the ever more ludicrous fleet of Bondmobiles). Hel is called upon to save the world, which he does. An authorial tongue is meanwhile deep in an authorial cheek. Reading
Shibumi
one feels that Whitaker could have gone on to become a giant in the genre, but he was not interested. ‘I could have made more money if I’d stuck to one genre as most successful writers do,’ he later said, but he had enough money for his needs. He wrote a medieval romance under another pseudonym, ‘Nicholas Seare’:
1339 or So … Being an Apology for a Pedlar
(1975); a
roman policier
set in Montreal,
The Main
(1976); and a gothic romance,
The Summer of Katya
(1983), set in the Basque country in 1914. It begins idyllic and ends horrific.

Trevanian then went silent for fifteen years, cultivating his garden, and not even
identifying himself when impostors (one of whom was taken seriously by the
New York Times
) identified themselves publicly as ‘Trevanian’. ‘I decided I would stop writing until I figured out what to do with this many-minded monster (Trevanian) I had been obliged to create,’ he explained. The least predictable of novelists, he came back into print with a rollicking cowboy novel,
Incident at Twenty-Mile
(1998) and, in the year of his death, a sensitive recollection of his childhood,
The Crazyladies of Pearl Street
. Whitaker spent his last years as a family man, not an author – in the West Country of England, a semi-invalid with pulmonary problems. He made close friends in his new rural retreat, even the closest of whom did not know (and would not have cared) that he was ‘Trevanian’. He seems never to have been proud of that part of his life and died never having given a live interview.

I know Beryl. No doubt you know Beryl. Seemingly everyone in London knows Beryl.
Lynn Barber

Novelists are held in different degrees of affectionate regard by the reading public – none more affectionately than Beryl Bainbridge. Wails would go up whenever – shortlisted five times – she failed to win the Booker Prize. The ‘Booker bridesmaid’ they called her. Bainbridge was born in Liverpool. She claimed a birth date of 1934, but records indicate it was November 1932. Her persistent repetition of the false date may raise suspicions as to some gilding of the lily in her accounts of other areas of her life – particularly events connected with her sexually precocious girlhood. Her father is described as a travelling salesman and former bankrupt whom in later life she candidly admitted to wanting to kill. Her mother she adored. Given the cramped dimensions of their house, she grew up sharing a bedroom with her mother. Her brother Ian bunked with his dad. The Bainbridges were ill-assorted but, given the times and prejudices of their class, chained together like galley slaves. She wrote, she said, to drain the poison of her childhood out of her system.

Bainbridge claimed to have been traumatised at the age of eleven by seeing the post-war films of the Nazi death camps (it must, given her birth date, have been a little later). A bright girl, she attended the fee-paying Merchant Taylors’ Girls School
in Crosby only to be expelled as a ‘corrupting moral influence’. According to one version of the event she gave, her mother discovered a filthy poem in her school uniform and shopped her to the headmistress. It must have made for a difficult night in the bedroom. This (dates are slippery) is reckoned to have happened when she was fourteen. She had already fallen in love with a German prisoner of war, Harry Franz, who was awaiting repatriation. There was furtive coupling in the bushes and heartbreak when, after he was sent home, re-entry to Britain was banned. The relationship was carried on by letter for a few years until the couple gave up trying and got on with their separate lives. Had he come back, Franz might have faced prosecution for carnal relations with a minor.

Her education cut woefully short, Bainbridge got a job, with her father’s help, at the Liverpool Playhouse. Her experience there is recalled in
An Awfully Big Adventure
(1989). The stage-struck teenage heroine Stella finds herself in a sticky sexual relationship as the company rehearses the Christmas performance of
Peter Pan
. Doubtless Beryl, unlike Barrie’s hero, grew up very fast. Doubtless, like Stella too, she was a very obstinate young woman. She was making a respectable start on a career in ‘rep’ – notoriously hard and unremunerative as the profession was – when in 1954 she married Austin Davies, an artist and scene painter at the Playhouse. The path of their marriage did not run smooth. Divorce from Davies followed two children later in 1959. Subsequently she became a Catholic, she later said, ‘to get away from Aussie’ and the whole sex thing. She remained a Catholic ‘for about ten minutes’, but recalled it as a delightful spiritual experience. While the couple divorced they cannot be said to have entirely separated. Austin bought her a house in Albert Street, Camden Town (an address which became smart over the forty years she lived there), and moved into the basement with his second wife and family. Sixties’ moral cool sanctioned such things.

Later in life, Beryl would have a third child by the novelist Alan Sharp. That relationship broke down when she discovered his previous wives and a currently pregnant girlfriend. This life crisis furnishes the plot to
Sweet William
(1975). William (i.e. the love rat Sharp) ‘doesn’t believe in free fall … he won’t let go of the branch till he’s sure of the next one’. As she related in later interviews, ‘He showed up for Rudi’s birth, but then went downstairs saying he was going to get a book out of the car and never came back.’ Too cool even for the sixties. Her personal life was thereafter relatively untroubled and easy-going. She was happier with free fall. She gave up sex at sixty, she said, ‘Because I was just getting too old – you’d have to do it in pitch blackness.’