Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (47 page)

Frankau followed this bestseller with
A Babe in Bohemia
(1889). A Zolaesque tale of seduction, it tells the story of a venereally diseased epileptic girl who finally
goes to the bad and cuts her throat with an open razor, in a seizure. ‘The blood was bad’, concludes the narrator, ‘and drains into the soil. But who will clean the soil?’
A Babe in Bohemia
is one of the hardest hitting novels of its time. The chronically cautious
Athenaeum
disgustedly called it ‘an excursion into the drains and dustbins of humanity’ and the novel was piously banned by the metropolitan circulating libraries. Inevitably, it sold like hot cakes in consequence.

Subsequently Frankau gave up fiction to study engraving – something in which she had long been interested. In 1903 she returned to the novel with
Pigs in Clover
, another anti-Semitic novel dealing with the vulgar comedies, as she maliciously saw them, of Anglo-Jewish domestic life. Her last satire on Judaism,
The Sphinx’s Lawyer
, was published in 1906, in the immediate aftermath of the 1905 Aliens Act, which was cruelly obstructing the immigration of Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe and Russia. Modern literary history is perplexed by Frankau, who was gifted, witty and a woman who made a successful career for herself when it was not easy to do so: ‘self-hating Jew’ is the commonest conclusion. But a clever self-hater.

She moved in high literary society and was an acquaintance of Oscar Wilde, George Moore and Arnold Bennett. In her youth, she was a keen bicyclist and in later life as keen a motorist. Frankau’s eldest son, Gilbert, was also a bestselling novelist, as was Gilbert’s daughter, Pamela. Another granddaughter, Joan (Frankau) Bennett, was a distinguished Cambridge academic. She examined my MA dissertation in 1964, which contained some sharp comments about ‘Frank Danby’. Bennett asked pointed questions at what was a surprisingly tough viva. Unaware of her family connection, I was taken aback by how well she knew these obscure novels. She passed my work, without, however, the distinction I was hoping for.

Femme incomprise.

The most influential of the so-called ‘New Woman’ novelists, Egerton’s life is complicated by the official accounts she put out during her lifetime. She was born in Melbourne, Australia. Her father was Irish and an army officer (dishonourably discharged), her mother was Welsh. Mary Chavelita Dunne was brought up as Catholic as her Christian
name suggests, but lost her faith in later life. As the family moved around the antipodes she saw something as a child of the New Zealand wars against the Maoris.

The young Mary Dunne entertained hopes of being an artist, ‘but family affairs prevented the course of study’. These family affairs were her mother’s death and her father’s incorrigible gambling. She trained, instead, as a nurse. In 1884 she emigrated briefly to America and in 1888 she eloped with a married man, Henry Higginson (called in one of her official versions ‘H. H. W. Melville’). The couple went to live in Norway where Egerton became imbued with the Ibsenism which is prominent in her later work. Higginson was a drunken brute and Egerton left him after a year (the official version has him die in 1889). She moved to England – although she seems to have spent some time in Ireland – and in 1891 married what one commentator calls ‘an idle destitute Canadian’, George Egerton Clairmonte. Officially he was a respectable minor novelist. But in 1901 they divorced, flagrant adulteries being the grounds (the official version has Clairmonte dying soon after the divorce).

Meanwhile, as ‘George Egerton’ (‘George’ was her mother’s maiden name) she had huge success with
Keynotes
(1893), a volume she supposedly wrote in two, inspired, weeks. It comprises sketches, or
études
, of the modern woman as she undergoes various crises: alcoholism, sex problems, suicidal
anomie
. The tendency of Egerton’s work, epitomised in
Keynotes
(and its resonant title) is away from narrative to snapshots of the woman at a significant ‘psychological moment’ of her life in which she discovers the ‘terra incognita of herself’. Embellished with illustrations by the congenial Aubrey Beardsley, it was a bestseller and inaugurated a series of uniform ‘Keynotes’ novels by many, mainly female, hands. ‘Not since
The Story of an African Farm
’, wrote
The Queen
, ‘has any woman delivered herself of so forcible a book.’

Egerton apparently became the mistress of her (and Oscar Wilde’s) publisher, John Lane.
Keynotes
was followed by similar collections of modish short stories and sketches of the
femme incomprise: Discords
(1894),
Symphonies
(1896),
Fantasias
(1897). For all its feminist toughness, Egerton’s writing has great delicacy. More than her sister ‘New Woman’ novelists, she was influenced by the aesthetics of decadence and by the European novel – particularly Knut Hamsun, to whom
Keynotes
is dedicated. In 1901 she made a third marriage to the authors’ agent, Reginald Golding Bright, fifteen years younger than her, and became herself a leading dramatic agent for such playwrights as G. B. Shaw and Somerset Maugham. Her only child, George, was killed in the First World War. Her husband died in 1941 and her last years were financially distressed.

There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

The author of
The Wind in the Willows
– that archetypally English idyll – was, in biographical fact, a Scot. Grahame was born into the Edinburgh professional classes, but the solid family framework around him dissolved, almost immediately, as if by witch’s curse. His mother died of fever, giving birth to her fourth child, before Kenneth was six and his barrister father fell into alcoholism. For the last twenty years of his life Grahame Sr drank and died alone, in France. He never communicated with his children, who were left to the care of an extended family. There are no fathers, no mothers, no wives, no siblings in the animal world of
The Wind in the Willows
. This was Kenneth Grahame’s lot in the human world. And there were other handicaps – he was afflicted with a weak chest, and, like Richard Jefferies, the condition of his lungs called for fresh air. Kenneth spent a lot of time in the countryside – ostensibly for his health, but in the long run, in both men’s work, the outcome was healthier still for English literature.

After public school at Oxford, a city he adored, there arrived the great sorrow of Grahame’s life: he did not ‘go up’ to the University. His guardian uncle determined the boy must do something useful (and cheaper on the custodial pocket) than lounging around in college for three years. It was, according to his biographer, ‘the most crushing blow that Grahame suffered, perhaps in his whole life’. It’s a strange notion of catastrophe, but real enough for Grahame. Paradise was now forever lost. Instead, Kenneth was installed, by patronage, into the cogs and wheels of the Bank of England. In this great machine he would work, mechanically, for thirty years. A ‘flier’, Grahame rose to the top, but it was not something he had chosen for himself. He was imprisoned: Threadneedle Street was his Chateau d’If.

Although Oxford had been denied him, Grahame imbibed the university’s 1890s Paterian-Wildean decadence. Gem-like flames licked, decorously, around his ankles. He bought into Great-God-Pan-worshipping ‘neo-paganism’, a cult which, guardedly, promulgated all those Hellenic practices that Victorian England frowned on – not least after the savage Labouchere Amendment of 1885. He had, like all the golden youth, a secret portrait in his attic. By day a dutiful
fonctionnaire
in the ‘Bank’, by night Grahame walked around Soho, a bohemian. Literary introductions furnished him an entry into John Lane’s
Yellow Book
. His first volume of collected pieces,
Pagan Papers
(1893) carried a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley. A green carnation could not have been more emblematic. The papers were well received. Grahame (all the while slaving by day at the Bank) followed up two years later with
another series, delicately recapturing childhood experiences:
The Golden Age
. In the same year, 1895, disaster struck with the Wilde trials, bringing with them a traumatic cultural nervousness. The
Yellow Book
gave way to Harmsworth’s yellow press – notably the
Daily Mail
, then, as now, the scourge of everything ‘abnormal’ in British life. ‘Paganism’ and a preoccupation with childhood experience were high on the list of things abnormal.

In this period of collective recoil Grahame suffered a life-threatening illness, empyema, described as ‘a collection of pus within a naturally existing anatomical cavity’. Medicine too has its allegories. It required a risky operation on Grahame’s lungs, and the deflation of one of them. And, just as riskily, in 1899 he married. The marriage proved a disaster, although it put to rest any suspicions about his private life. He was forty; his wife, Elspeth, in her late thirties. Sex was discontinued almost as soon as it had begun. It produced one son in 1900 – who would be, eventually, the cause of sadness, but it was for young Alastair, as bedtime entertainment, that
The Wind in the Willows
was conceived and eventually published in 1908.

In the book Grahame pictures an ideal menage: women do not come into it. In their ‘digs’, like Holmes and Watson, Ratty and Moley are two chaps living together: it’s a Darby and Darby situation. No Joans need apply. The story, as the author insisted, was ‘clean of the clash of sex’. Other clashes do intrude into the narrative. The oiks – weasels and stoats – who take over Toad Hall, recall those terrifying Trafalgar Square rioters on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 1887. That event had been, in its different way, as traumatic for the middle classes as the Wilde business. Thank God for the English copper, with his truncheon.

Grahame’s later life was a tragedy in slow motion. His wife became cranky and Alastair – disabled from birth – was pushed into an Oxford University where he didn’t belong, during a war in which the world was tearing itself apart. On 13 May 1920 he stretched himself on the railway tracks, one night, in the meadows outside Oxford which his father most loved, and let an express train decapitate him. Meanwhile, the marital life of the Grahames became uncosier by the year: ‘Elspeth seldom got up before eleven, often went to bed in her clothes … Much of the time she spent on her divan, sipping hot water. She ate practically nothing and mouse-nests proliferated in the larder; she put Kenneth into special underwear which was only changed once a year. It is perhaps not surprising that he took a long solitary walk every day.’ A living bruise, the solitary walker in his soiled underwear wrote nothing of significance after
The Wind in the Willows
. He left his estate to the Bodleian Library.

May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.
J. M. Barrie’s curse

Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Forfarshire, the ninth child of a handloom weaver and a devoutly Presbyterian mother. He composed an intimate portrait of her in his bio-novel,
Margaret Ogilvy
(1896), published a year after her death – an event whose pain he never outlived. Family death had scarred him earlier, too. Aged seven, he was traumatised by the horrific drowning of his brother David in a skating accident. Seven years older than ‘Jimmy’, David was his mother’s favourite (on one occasion, Jimmy dressed up in his dead brother’s clothes, in a hopeless act of emulation) and ranks as the first of Barrie’s ‘lost boys’. James himself, for reasons which are plausibly seen as psycho-traumatic, stopped growing: as an adult, he was forever boy-sized – under five feet tall. In a literal sense he never grew up.

Yet there was no littleness in his brain. At thirteen, he went to school in Dumfries and from there he progressed to Edinburgh University, graduating in 1882. From early youth (when he was addicted to ‘penny dreadfuls’), Barrie resolved on a career in literature and in 1883, a year of deep economic depression in Scotland, he secured a post as leader writer to the
Nottingham Journal.
At around the same period he was trying his hand at semi-fictional sketches set in ‘Thrums’ (i.e. Kirriemuir). They were popular with English readers and helped found the ‘kailyard’ (cabbage patch) genre of sentimental (‘pawky’) Scottish fiction. Scots have had a more equivocal response to the kailyard cult, which, like the tartan-romanticism invented by Walter Scott and the ‘wha’s like us’ machismo of Mel Gibson’s
Braveheart
, promotes an artificial image of the country.

Barrie was sucked, by the usual metropolitan magnetism, to London in 1885 where he began writing for the magazines. After the Universal Education Act of 1870 the readership for such wares had enlarged explosively. There were opportunities aplenty for an energetic young Scot with a ready pen and good manners. Editors liked his work, and talked him up. His first efforts in fiction parallel the ‘Jack of all Trades’ nature of his early magazinery.
Better Dead
(1887), published at the author’s own expense, is a sub-Stevensonian ‘murder as a fine art’ joke. More successful was
Auld Licht Idylls
(1888), a compendium of his Thrums pieces centred around the narrator’s austere religious sect. In the same year he produced the more substantial
When a Man’s Single
, by ‘Gavin Ogilvy’ (his mother’s maiden name). The Scottish hero, Rob Angus, comes down to London to make his way in journalism. It’s so transparently the author’s own story as to qualify, like much of Barrie’s fiction, as memoir. There followed
A Window in Thrums
(1889) and
My Lady Nicotine
(1890), a set of smoking club stories (tobacco was Barrie’s principal vice – assuming one discounts, as most thoughtful observers do, paedophilia).