Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (56 page)

‘I’m not sure [George] is wrong about automobiles,’ [Eugene] said. ‘With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization – that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the
life of men’s souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess.’

Eugene then leaves, with a smile, as the Ambersons gloomily ponder his prophetic words and their own downfall under the motorised wheels of an unstoppable future.

Take a step forward, lads. It will be easier that way.
Childers to the firing squad, about to execute him

Childers’ father was Britain’s leading authority on Pali (i.e. ancient Indian) culture; he died young – from tuberculosis, reportedly exacerbated by overwork. His son Robert inherited his father’s scholarly mind but added to it an indomitable yearning for a life of action, adventure and high personal risk. Although he was born in London, Childers inherited his passionate (and eventually fatal) affiliation to Ireland from his mother, a County Wicklow heiress. (She died, eight years later of the same TB that had killed her husband.) After leaving Cambridge with a law degree, Childers took up a post, from 1895 to 1910, as a clerk in the House of Commons. This was a period when Home Rule was constantly in dispute and under debate.

A passionate yachtsman and, at this period, a true British patriot, he volunteered to fight in the Boer War, writing a memoir of his frustrating experiences which mainly involved looking after horses. It was published in 1903. He came back opposed to the war he had earlier believed in. As a novelist, Childers’ principal, and abiding, achievement was the publication of his spy novel,
The Riddle of the Sands
, published, to great sales success, in the same year. Subtitled ‘A Record of Secret Service’ and written in pseudo-documentary style, the narrative is set against the background of a Germany secretly arming itself (‘she grows, and strengthens, and
waits’). ‘Carruthers of the FO’ and his friend, Arthur H. Davies, go yachting on the sand-bar bedevilled Baltic waters where they witness Germany’s rehearsal for the invasion of England. The Admiralty is informed. Childers’ novel can be plausibly credited with (1) blue-printing a genre – the spy/secret agent novel; (2) whipping up anti-German sentiment, in the long run-up to the First World War; (3) inspiring the establishment of the British secret services (later MI5 and MI6).

On a trip to Boston, the heartland of Irish America, Childers met and married his wife, Mary Osgood, in 1904. They had two sons and the marriage, Childers later declared, was the greatest happiness of his life. His subsequent books were on military history; and his main recreation continued to be yachting – particularly in the Baltic, off the coast of Germany. Meanwhile, over the pre-war years, he was increasingly preoccupied with Irish affairs. He resigned his Westminster clerkship in 1910 and, as early as 1914, was using his yacht,
Asgard
, to run guns to anti-British Irish ‘Volunteers’ – some of them ended up being used in the 1916 uprising. By this point Childers himself was a convinced nationalist.

On the outbreak of war, Childers was commissioned into the RNVR. His intimate knowledge of the German coastline – from years of yachting along it – was invaluable to his country. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was an admirer of
The Riddle of the Sands
. Childers received rapid promotions and decorations for gallantry flying reconnaissance aircraft. He was convinced Ireland should be a republic, and enraged by the British government’s ferocious oppressions in Ireland after the 1916 uprising, particularly its use of the militarised, and brutal, ‘Black and Tan’ force to cow the civilian Dublin populace.

Childers settled in Ireland in 1920 to engage directly in the emergent state’s confused and bloody politics. Opposed to any form of partition (as agreed in the 1921 treaty with England), he joined the rebel Republican Army and was captured, at his mother’s house, by soldiers of the Irish Free State government. After a court martial in Dublin, on trumped-up charges of possessing an illegal weapon, he was shot by a firing party with each member of whom, it is recorded, he cheerfully shook hands before his execution. He was regarded as a traitor by both Irish and English factions, and as a hero by parallel factions in both countries. He remains, as his biographer puts it, a ‘riddle’ – only his personal bravery is indisputable. Few novelists, with only one novel to their credit, can be said to have trademarked a whole genre. One of his sons became the fourth president of Ireland.

My earliest recollection of Hector, my younger brother, was in the nursery at home, where, with my elder brother Charlie, we had been left alone. Hector seized the long-handled hearth brush, plunged it into the fire, and chased Charlie and me round the table, shouting: ‘I’m God! I’m going to destroy the world!’
Saki’s sister, Ethel

No writer more trenchantly diagnosed the deposits of savagery beneath the high sheen of Edwardian society than ‘Saki’. Hector Hugh Munro (his birth name) was born in Burma. In an event which rivals the grotesquerie of his later stories, his mother died of shock, after being charged by a runaway cow on a lane in rural Wessex. His father was a serving senior officer in Burma (the family had strong Scottish military traditions), with only six weeks’ furlough every four years. In what was effectively an orphan, if not impoverished, condition, the three Munro children – of whom Hector was the youngest – were entrusted to the care of two maiden aunts near Barnstaple, Devon. ‘Care’ is not the word the Munro offspring would have used. Aunts Charlotte and Augusta hated each other and created a domestic climate that verged on ‘mental cruelty’, as Ethel Munro recalled. Graham Greene, that connoisseur of lost childhoods, saw Saki’s as one of the most creatively lost in literature. He channelled his bitterness into therapeutic dark comedy.

Saki slaughtered his aunts, particularly the more sadistic Augusta, time and again, in his later short stories: most memorably in ‘Sredni Vashtar’. In that story Conradin has a tame, but incorrigibly vicious, polecat-ferret. It is his ‘most treasured possession’. He keeps Sredni, whom he has invested with divine properties, hidden in the back garden. His guardian, the odious Mrs De Ropp (i.e. Aunt Augusta) goes into the shed to investigate – and, if necessary, undertake some vermin extermination. However, as she peers into the hutch, it is she who is exterminated. Ethel supplies the necessary background.

There was a most intelligent Houdan cock, who was Hector’s shadow; he fed out of his hand and loved being petted. Unhappily he got something wrong with one leg, and had to be destroyed. I believe a ‘vet’ would have cured him … No one but myself knew what Hector felt at the loss of the bird. We had early learnt to hide our feelings – to show enthusiasm or warmth was sure to bring an amused smile to Aunt Augusta’s face. It was a hateful smile.

Conradin is sickly, but revives amazingly after he realizes his aunt is lying dead with a blood-guzzling ferret at her throat. The story ends: ‘“Whoever will break it to the poor child? I couldn’t for the life of me!” exclaimed a shrill voice. And while
they debated the matter among themselves, Conradin made himself another piece of toast.’

Doctors assured the aunts that Hector would not make old bones. On leaving ‘home’, he, like Conradin, perked up amazingly. At first he resolved to join his father in the Burmese police service, but a bout of malaria ended that career after a year. He returned in 1894 to London, where, rather than waste time at university, he resolved to write. Evidently he was supported by family money. He buried himself in the British Museum stacks and six years later emerged with the wholly unlikely volume,
The Rise of the Russian Empire
(1900). As those who have read it testify, the narrative has a symptomatic interest in the sadistic practices of the Tsarist torture regimes – cooked up in a narrative tone of Gibbonian irony.

These were oppressed years, following the disgrace of Oscar Wilde. It seems certain, as his biographers suggest, that Munro was homosexual and, possibly, pederastic. Support for this is given by the prominence of the naked boy figure in stories such as ‘Gabriel-Ernest’
o
r the typically surreal, but disturbing, comic episode in another of his stories in which the mischievous ‘Reginald’ (Saki’s recurrent anti-hero, and alter ego) takes a church boys’ choir (‘shy, bullet-headed charges’) bathing in a woodland stream, hides their clothes, and obliges them to parade ‘in Bacchanalian procession through the village’. Singing naked, that is, and, presumably, priapically aroused. ‘Reginald’s family never forgave him,’ the story ends, ‘they had no sense of humour.’

Whatever the reason, it is clear that the shadowy life of the
Privatgelehrte
in London (North Soho, preferably) suited Munro. The breakthrough in his literary career came when the editor of the
Westminster Gazette
, J. A. Spender, commissioned a regular series of short squibs for ‘the seagreen incorruptible’, as the loftily liberal paper was called. Munro did parodies of Lewis Carroll and Kipling, and invented the Oscar-like, witticising ‘Reginald’ to leaven Spender’s heavy pages. It was at this point that he devised ‘Saki’ – a name derived (although it’s hard to make it fit) from FitzGerald’s
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
– though ‘sarcastic’ seems the more obvious origin. The Reginald stories were gathered into book form in 1904, and enjoyed a second success between hard covers.

In 1902 Munro – whose whole career is marked by the oddest turns – was dispatched as a foreign correspondent to the war-torn Balkans, by the
Morning Post
. Like Byron, he probably found more outlets for his private pleasures abroad than even in London’s Fitzrovia. He got to know the region as an ‘old hand’, particularly Macedonia. In 1908 he returned to London, took up residence in Mortimer Street, close to his beloved BM (closer still to the WC1 fleshpots), and embarked on the most productive phase of his fiction-writing career. In addition to his most famous stories,
he produced two full-length novels:
The Unbearable Bassington
(1912), a retrospect of his embittering childhood; and
When William Came
(1913), a German invasion fantasy. The novels work less well than the stories. Acid is most effective in droplet form.

On the outbreak of war, Munro, true to his ancient clan blood, joined up. He refused a commission, although one was offered him by a good Highland regiment. He insisted on serving at the Front, although he was over-age and incapacitated by malaria. We know more about his death than most of his life. It was a ‘dark winter morning’ in November 1916, in the lines alongside the blood-soaked village of Beaumont-Hamel. The troops were standing to. A friend engaged him in conversation: ‘A number of fellows sank down on the ground to rest, and Hector sought a shallow crater, with the lip as a back-rest. [His friend] heard him shout “Put that bloody cigarette out!” and heard the snip of a rifle-shot.’ A sharp-eyed sniper had got him. To have reached thirty, Saki once wrote, ‘is to have failed in life’. He reached forty-five. As Dominic Hibberd notes, ‘He is listed on the Thiepval memorial as one of the many soldiers whose bodies were never found.’ His sister Ethel methodically destroyed all his personal papers, thus preserving for ever the secrets of his life.

She never liked the deception.

Bertha Muzzy (known in her family as ‘Bert’) was born the ninth of ten children in rural Minnesota. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a sometime ‘dry’ farmer, as they were called, of progressive political views. When Bert was sixteen her family moved to Big Sandy, Montana, where she encountered the range life that was to be her later stock-in-trade. Bower was married three times, first to Clayton J. Bower (1890) from whom she took her strategically initialised and androgynous pen name. She began writing for publication (and money) in 1903. The following year she introduced ‘Chip, of the Flying U’ in Street and Smith’s
The Popular Magazine
. Chip Bennett went on to become one of the cowboy genre’s most popular and profitable series heroes. His name was inspired by the author’s youngest brother, who loved Saratoga-style potato chips.