Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (139 page)

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 Monica 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.

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.

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 questions 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.

The Storey hero invariably finds himself at bay. Physically, he is a wounded animal and the more dangerous for it. He has a ‘craggy’ face, with some prominently broken feature (a bent nose, missing teeth). Wherever he finds himself, he never belongs. One of the fathers in the novels tells his son: ‘When I was younger,
your age in fact, I suddenly made what I thought was a discovery: that you have only two choices, either to live in isolation or to be absorbed.’ The fathers in Storey’s fiction tend to choose absorption into pit, family and village. For their scholarship-liberated sons, the choice is less easy. The problem is that mobility can take you in any number of directions. Which is the right direction for a grammar-school boy – up, down or sideways? Storey’s novels explore various possibilities and destinations. In
Pasmore
(1972), the art college teacher puts his family together again after it has broken up and slots back into his former middle-class professional groove:

In the winter he returned to teaching. Outwardly, despite the events of the preceding year, little had changed. He still had a regular job, a home, a wife and children … Yet something had changed. It was hard to describe. He had been on a journey. At times it seemed scarcely credible he had survived. He still survived. He still dreamed of the pit and the blackness. It existed all around him, an intensity, like a presentiment of love, or violence. He found it hard to tell.

The last phrase in
Pasmore
– ‘He found it hard to tell’ – is generally applicable to Storey’s narration. He finds it hard to tell his stories; they come out knotted, tongue-tied, clumsy – but authentic.

The end of
Saville
is more uplifting than most, concluding as it does with the memorable Storeyism, ‘The shell had cracked’. Colin Saville makes his break, turning like Paul Morel towards the light of the city on the hill. He’s done with school-mastering. ‘You haven’t any lodgings or anything,’ his lachrymose mother tells him as he prepares to catch the train to London. ‘I don’t need lodgings,’ Saville replies, ‘I can always sleep on the street.’