Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (74 page)

The William stories are both formulaic, invariably involving some ingenious act of juvenile rebellion against the adult world, and flexible – adapting, hand in glove, to the historical period in which they were conceived and first published. A prime example is ‘William and the Nasties’, published in the
Happy Mag.,
June 1934.
William, having caught wind of what’s going on in Germany, declares himself by schoolboy putsch ‘Him Hitler’ (‘Her[r] Hitler’ is, needless to say, ‘girly’). The Outlaws, now stormtroopers, duly hound the Jewish sweetshop owner, Mr Isaacs, but after a while they find the whole business somehow ‘wrong’, and befriend their victim. The story was later suppressed, but it is noteworthy that it precedes (and foretells) by four years,
Kristallnacht
.

Crompton drew on Tom Brown,
Stalky & Co.
, P. G. Wodehouse and, above all, Tom Sawyer. The stories are saturated with English class prejudice. Hubert Lane and Violet Elizabeth Bott are rich and vulgar: the ‘evacuees’ with whom William goes to war during the war are ineffably common. But, as Crompton’s biographer argues, there is always a subtle Twainian satire against the author’s own class in her stories.

In her later years Crompton turned to table-rapping and a belief in reincarnation. Independent to the end, she died of a heart attack, having driven herself home, alone, from a dinner party, in her controls-modified car.

Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.

Aldington was born in Portsmouth and brought up in various seaside towns – which he later despised as the epitome of Englishness. The son of a solicitor’s clerk and a (not very good) novel-writing mother, he received the school education of his class, which did not much educate him but did enable him to make himself, in later life, a high-achieving autodidact. In 1910, he enrolled at University College London – the ‘Godless Place in Gower Street’. It was, he later declared, an institution designed to turn out ‘ten thousand pedants for one poet’.

Aldington resolved to be the one among ten thousand and left UCL’s ‘buttressed respectability’ after a year for Soho and ‘the freer if frowstier fields of bohemianism’. In those frowsty fields he became intimate, if never quite a leading spirit, with avant-gardistes such as Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Herbert Read, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Together they brought in the ‘Revolution of 1912’ – or imagism, as less impressed literary historians term it. Aldington married the Revolution’s star practitioner, H. D., in 1913. It would be a modishly open union: photographs of the period
display a goatee-bearded Ezra lookalike – poetic to the core. Three years later, after the outbreak of war, the image is of a smart young infantry officer, with the obligatory ‘tache’, swagger stick and middle-distance stare.

Unlike fellow poets (Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Charles Sorley), Aldington survived the trenches, gas and shellshock, although the pointlessness of it all imbued him with cosmic despair – he claimed to have attempted suicide twice. For the rest of his life he maintained, ‘There are two kinds of men: those who have been to the front and those who haven’t.’ It was his personal heart of darkness. The relationship with H. D. broke up without animosity, as both followed their wayward lusts. In the 1920s Aldington settled down with his new partner, as a tweedy man of letters, working for the
TLS
. He was increasingly intimate with T. S. Eliot, whom he had met in 1917. He bought a cottage in Berkshire and countryfied himself.

Aldington had begun writing
Death of a Hero
almost the day the war finished but it would not see print until 1929 (the same year as Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
). He called it a ‘jazz novel’. It’s not clear what he meant by the term. Transparently autobiographical, it tells the story of George Winterbourne, who, in the trenches, discovers the real enemy is not the Hun but England – ‘a country where there are so many old fools and so few young ones’. Wholly disillusioned he hurls himself into a hail of machine-gun fire: ‘The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.’ Chatto (who had just rejected
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
) agreed to publish Aldington only with some savage wielding of the blue pencil. Aldington insisted on asterisks to mark the ‘mutilation’. It is necessary, said Zola, to ‘kill the hero’. Aldington did it twice: with his first novel (and a couple of pallid successors), and his gloriously iconoclastic biography of T. E. Lawrence, published (to screams of patriotic outrage) in 1955.

The belated publication of his novel produced in Aldington what psychiatrists call ‘abreaction’. The despair he had felt in 1917 flared up again and he stalked into the Soho restaurant where Herbert Read and T. S. Eliot were dining to announce, ‘I’m on my way to Paris … I’ve done with this country.’ He clinched it with a postcard to Eliot ‘on which was written a single four-letter word’. What word is not recorded. Perhaps four asterisks. Thereafter, Aldington was, like his friend D. H. Lawrence, a passionate pilgrim living by his pen in Europe, then, during the Second World War, in America. He died in France. On his gravestone, Aldington instructed there be written Wilfred Owen’s assertion: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity.’ Not the heroism.

Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know.

Barnes was born into a bohemian, free-thinking, sexually liberated family, the daughter of an artist, ‘Wald’ Barnes, and Elizabeth Chappell, an English-born concert violinist. A convinced advocate of polygamy, Wald moved in his mistress during Djuna’s childhood. Barnes was brought up on the family farm in New York state, alongside a tribe of siblings and half siblings. The domestic environment was comfortably off, liberated, but irregular in the extreme – Djuna may, it is suspected, have suffered incestuous rape. Her early education certainly suffered. Aged seventeen, she was coerced into marriage with the fifty-two-year-old brother of her father’s mistress. The marriage lasted only a few weeks.

The family broke up when Djuna was twenty, and she left for New York where she worked as a well-paid journalist, based in the city’s Latin Quarter, Greenwich Village. She was meanwhile writing on the side in an aggressively avant-gardiste manner. Her first major literary work,
The Book of Repulsive Women
(1915), is a collection of her poems (‘rhythms’) and her drawings – decadent and frankly, for the time, lesbian. She had affairs with lovers of both sexes, but child-bearing she abominated.

Like other advanced writers, Barnes was drawn to Paris after the First World War, initially as a journalist. She remained there as a creative writer for fifteen years. The city was, in the 1920s, a cauldron of literary modernism: Hemingway, Stein, Durrell, cummings and Miller had all cultivated their talents there, and ‘prohibited’ authors, such as Joyce (whom Barnes came to know well) and Lawrence, could freely publish work banned in their home countries. Paris was also as tolerant of variant forms of human sexuality as of new forms of literature. Barnes embarked on an intense – and doomed – relationship with the expatriate American artist and sculptor, Thelma Ellen Wood.

Ford Madox Hueffer published Barnes’s work in his
Little Review
and her Joycean and semi-autobiographical novel,
Ryder
, came out in 1928. In it, she seems to come to terms, psychologically, with her wayward father. The narrative covers fifty years in the life of a family, in which Djuna Barnes’s own family is easily recognisable (notably ‘Wendell’ for Wald).
Ryder
was, inevitably, seized as obscene in America, by the US Postal Services, who – with the Society for the Suppression of Vice – acted as the country’s official censorship board. It took them a few weeks to uncover the ‘filth’ lurking under the carapace of literary experimentalism. However, the seizure did wonders for the author’s reputation.

Barnes’s second book,
Ladies Almanack
, a florid exercise in eighteenth-century pastiche, was wholly unpublishable in America on the grounds of its openness about lesbianism. In the late 1920s, and in the wake of her painful separation from the increasingly drunken Thelma Wood, Barnes was working on
Nightwood
, the novel on which her subsequent reputation mainly rests. A narrative of ambitious scope and high modernity, Spenglerian in tone and Joycean in method,
Nightwood
chronicles the decay of Western civilisation alongside the complications of personal sexuality: specifically the author’s relationship with Thelma. The book was again judged unpublishable in the US, but was accepted in Britain by Faber and Faber. T. S. Eliot, chief editor, wrote an introduction in which he asserted the novel was ‘so good … that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it’. The novel appeared, prudently toned down, in 1936 in the UK and a year later in the US.

On the outbreak of war, Barnes returned to New York, and Greenwich Village, in 1940.
Nightwood
had been much acclaimed, but sold poorly. There weren’t that many Eliotic sensibilities trained on poetry around unfortunately. She could no longer be trusted with journalistic assignments, was drinking heavily and dependent on handouts from well-wishers, notably Peggy Guggenheim, whom she had come to know in her Parisian glory years. Other friends also remained loyal to her. She managed to control her alcoholism in 1950 and produce her last significant work of literature, the scaldingly autobiographical play
The Antiphon
(1958). Apart from that, her last forty years were reclusive and unhappy – periodically embattled, creatively extinct and little honoured.

There has to be a woman, but not much of a one. A good horse is much more important.
Brand’s formula for a good Western

Max Brand (the pen name is now a registered trademark in America – literally a brand name) was variously nicknamed the ‘King of the Pulps’, ‘the Great Faust’ and ‘the Western Giant’. From 1917 until his death in 1944, Brand hosed out an estimated 30 million words of fiction, some 900 stories, and around 600 full-length novels. He wrote under as many as twenty pseudonyms in all the major popular
genres (Westerns, mysteries, hospital stories, melodramas, even science fiction). His formula for success was simple: ‘All you have to do is concentrate on a snappy beginning and a smash for the close.’ Some 350 of Brand’s titles are reckoned to be Westerns, of which the first was
The Untamed
(1919) and the most famous
Destry Rides Again
(1930), as filmed with Marlene Dietrich. In passing, Brand invented the character of Dr Kildare, and can thus claim, along with his pulp kingship, to be the grandfather of the TV soaps and ‘hospital melodrama’ – see, for instance,
Young Dr Kildare
(1941).

It is one of the unlikely features in an amazing life that he changed his name, for professional reasons, from the ultra-literary ‘Frederick Schiller Faust’ (Germans being unpopular in America in 1917, when he began to write). He was born in Seattle and spent most of his childhood in Modesto, in the San Joaquin Valley, California. His family – German Jewish on his father’s side, Irish on his mother’s – was badly off, and Brand remembered all his life the shame of unpaid bills and the hardship of working as a child farm-hand. His father was an unsuccessful lawyer – not that it mattered as Frederick was orphaned in his early teens, his mother dying in 1900, his father in 1905. He would have to make his own way in the world.

Aided by a $50 loan from a friend, Brand got to the University of California at Berkeley in 1911. He left, after four lively years, without a degree, in bad odour for having attacked the university president as pro-Kraut in the student paper. He had already developed the habit of heavy drinking which was to plague him through life. But it was not all bad: at Berkeley he met the sweetheart, Dorothy Schillig, whom he later made his wife in 1917. On leaving college, Brand set off on a trip across the world and made it as far as Hawaii. The war having broken out in Europe, and his country still neutral, he crossed to Canada and enlisted in the armed forces in 1915, hoping to fight in France. No luck.

Returning to the US, he came to the notice of the Frank A. Munsey company – America’s major producers of pulp fiction. They were, as it happened, looking for someone to replace their star author, Zane Grey. Faust wanted to be a great poet and was hopefully peddling a 10,000-line epic about Tristram and Isolde. He was given a plot outline by an unimpressed senior editor, sent down the corridor of the Munsey building, where he duly tossed off his first magazine story in six hours at the standard Munsey rate of a penny a word. Brand never stopped typing thereafter and the pennies never stopped coming. He initially covered the whole spectrum of romance: historical swashbucklers, crime stories, gangster stories, romantic melodrama. It was at this period he adopted the ‘Max Brand’ authorial name.