Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (116 page)

Mary Patricia Plangman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on 19 January 1921, sharing a birthday, as she liked to recall, with Edgar Allan Poe. She was an unwanted child: her mother had tried to abort her with a swig of turpentine (the smell of which Highsmith ‘adored’ in later life – but murder always smelled good to her). She was born some five months after her parents’ divorce and, aged three, was named Highsmith after her stepfather. Her early years were passed in New York, interspersed with boarding-house life back in Fort Worth, which she hated. Indeed, she hated her childhood; it was, she later recalled, a ‘little hell’. She would never be convinced on the subject of the joys of family life (‘No thanks,’ was her verdict) and may well have been sexually abused, her biographer suggests, between the ages of five and six. Both Highsmith parents were commercial artists. Unhappy though her early years were, she inherited a love of crafting wood and a gift for painting. Her mother’s second marriage was no happier than her first – although it lasted long enough to see Patricia through college (Barnard). On graduation in 1942, she based herself in Greenwich Village, where she turned her hand to comic-book scripts – something which critics have made much of, seeing
a crossover from the sharp-edged world of the graphic narrative to her own high-concept scenarios.

Like other intellectuals, she was drawn to communism – not dangerous at this period of military alliance with the Red Army. She gradually made a name for herself with sharply written short stories, for which there was a good market in the early post-war years. In 1948, a turning point in her career, she was invited, at Truman Capote’s instigation, to the writers’ colony Yaddo, where she roomed alongside Flannery O’Connor and Chester Himes and wrote the first draft of
Strangers on a Train
. Raymond Chandler, who did the original script for Hitchcock, thought the swapping murders McGuffin ‘ludicrous’. Hitchcock thought differently: he was probably right. At this period Highsmith tried psychoanalysis and was relieved to discover it could not make her sexually straight – or any other kind of straight. She was, she concluded, a ‘bad seed’ and resolved to go ‘the whole hog’ with her ‘perversions’. She was not always safe to know: one lover poisoned herself with nitric acid; few parted on good terms with her.

Her later career was spent largely in Europe where – thanks to Gallimard’s
Série noire
– the kind of fiction she and Himes wrote was highly regarded. Her later-life homes would be in England, France and finally the nowhere country, Switzerland. In these years she had many relationships, most transitory. In later life, alcoholism made them more so. ‘Perhaps it’s because I don’t like anyone,’ she mused, although on other occasions she would justify her instabilities with the thought ‘my personal maladies and malaises are only those of my own generation and of my time heightened’. But it was not just her. There was, she diagnosed, a hollowness, or ‘vacuum’ at the heart of American life in the 1950s – a theme she examined in one of her finest ‘human condition’ novels,
The Blunderer
(1954), whose hero, Walter Stack-house, finally resolves that being murdered is preferable to living the life of a successful, happily married lawyer in New York. Not that writing was any solution for Highsmith – it was merely a preferable use of life to all others. ‘Sometimes,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide,’ adding, ‘and I am not sorry that it is so.’

Whenever – in a spirit of experiment – she tried heterosexuality, she found it was like ‘steel wool in the face’. In later life some unpleasant harshness protruded in her always misanthropic views. She had no time for the American civil rights movements and was, in conversation, often anti-Semitic: ‘if the Jews are God’s chosen people, that’s all one needs to know about God,’ she wrote. Feminists (always complaining about something) annoyed her intensely. Her long-lived, anything but feminist, mother annoyed her even more. Her warmest feelings were reserved for Siamese cats and snails. Neither, she believed, ‘made demands’. In her later career
she hit a rich creative vein with her series hero, Tom Ripley – art forger, criminal fence, contract killer, bon viveur. Like much of her work, the Ripliad adapted smoothly to the screen. It constitutes around a quarter of her published fiction and has proved the longest lasting.

She died of leukaemia in Switzerland, a rich woman, leaving some $3 million of her wealth to the Yaddo institution which had put her on the writing path all those years ago.

Oh fuck the Beatles. I’d like to push my bum into John L’s face for forty-eight hours or so, as a protest against all the war and violence in the world.
Amis writing to Philip Larkin, 19 April 1969

Kingsley Amis’s last completed novel,
The Biographer’s Moustache
(1995), was a sardonic missive to his Boswell. Moustached or not, no novelist of his post-war (once ‘Angry’, latterly ‘hidebound’) generation has been more thoroughly ‘done’ by what are now called – a term he would vituperatively have despised – the ‘life writers’. Amis wrote his own, indiscreet, memoirs. Supporting them (and occasionally contradicting them) are three biographies and a voluminous edition of his astonishingly self-revealing correspondence. If, for his closest friend, Philip Larkin, life was ‘first boredom, then fear’, it was for him – Amis quipped – ‘first boredom then more boredom’. The boring facts are easily summarised. He was born middle-class and suburban. He attended the City of London school, an institution perched uneasily between ‘public’ and ‘grammar’, and won an Exhibition (not
quite
a scholarship) to St John’s College, Oxford, in 1941, where he formed his bond with the congenial Larkin over traditional jazz, traditional literature and Hogarthian quantities of beer. His studies were interrupted when he was called up in 1942. He was commissioned into the Royal Signals (not
exactly
the Household Cavalry) but saw no action. Boredom he got plenty of.

After the war he got a first, did a B.Litt., which he eventually failed, met his first wife, Hilary (Hilly), married her (they having decided not to abort their first child), and landed a job at Swansea University College (not
exactly
Balliol). It was
on a visit to Philip Larkin, assistant librarian at Leicester University College – lower in academic esteem than even Swansea – that he got the idea for
Lucky Jim
. The novel, when it came out in 1954, was seen as a manifesto text in the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement, which was getting up middle England’s nostrils. Amis’s poetry, into which much of his early creative energy was diverted, was disruptively associated with the ‘Movement’ movement: a return to Augustan clarities in verse. He was – though uneasy with the role– a rebel writing prose, and a traditionalist in poetry.

His career as a novelist and increasingly acerbic commentator on various aspects of Englishness is exhaustively chronicled, but one aspect of his life invites further investigation for the effect it had on his fiction. ‘Boozer’ could have been chiselled on Amis’s gravestone – not that posterity needed any reminder that he was, above all else, a laureate of the bottle. In 2010,
Everyday Drinking
(1983) was re-released to nostalgically warm reviews. It gathered pieces originally written for the
Telegraph
in 1972, a period when Larkin was writing for the same paper on jazz – subjects they had both applied themselves to at Oxford, while effortlessly scooping up their ‘firsts’. Alcohol plays a pivotal role in the opening and closing sections of
Lucky Jim
. In the first comic set-piece, a high cultural weekend at the country house of Professor Welch, Jim – in a welcome break in the carolling and recorder-playing – hies off to the pub to drink at least (‘I never count’) eight pints and returns to neck half a bottle of sideboard sherry (from which Welch had earlier poured ‘the smallest glass Jim had ever been offered’), makes a rebuffed attempt on the virtue of his girlfriend Margaret, whom he’s not actually all that keen on, and retires to bed, fag in mouth (soon to burn its way through the bedclothes). There follows the famous hangover description at the opening of
Chapter 6
:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Viewed from one angle, Jim is an oaf: he deserves to feel bad. Viewed from another, he is a rebel – a word much in vogue in the early 1950s. The genius of the Angry Young Man was to realise that you could be both simultaneously.

Jim’s malefactions in Welch’s house forecast the novel’s finale – the funniest episode in the novel and, many maintain, the funniest in all twentieth-century English fiction. The hero has been dragooned into giving a lecture on ‘Merrie England’. He is royally pissed – well beyond ‘merry’. The inner Jim takes over as he reads his text at the lectern:

Within quite a short time he was contriving to sound like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a book-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts from a pamphlet written by a pacifist, Jewish, literate Communist.

Finally Jim erupts with what he really thinks about Merrie England, ‘without consciously willing any words’. It is, to use a favourite Amisism, a load of ‘bum’. Legless, he again collapses. It is total disgrace, but liberation. Jim is unshackled; free at last. He gets the money and the girl and is last seen embarking on a good life and lots of sex. What has liberated Jim? Drink.

Over the years between
Lucky Jim
(1954) and
Jake’s Thing
(1978), Amis himself screwed and drank mightily – while writing superb comic fiction. He was the Henry Fielding of his day, just as Jim Dixon was the Tom Jones of post-war fiction. But a penalty was paid. By the time his second marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard had broken up in 1980 Amis was clinically alcoholic (as Master Jones, we may presume, would have become more Squire Western than Squire Allworthy in his later years). Howard delivered an ultimatum: me or drink. It was no contest: Howard left. As happens with third-stage alcoholics, Amis was, at the time, impotent. His ‘thing’ was useless. He described his condition in a horrifically candid letter to Larkin (29 September 1979): ‘I haven’t had a fuck for more than a year and a wank for over a month. Don’t tell anyone. Your thing about not reading anything new struck a chord. Nearly all my reading is comfort-reading now, done while I wait for whisky and sleeping-pills to get me torpid enough to go to bed – alone of course.’

This is worse than feeling ‘bad’. It’s Kurtz’s ‘The horror! The horror!’ It’s also a condition painfully familiar to career alcoholics. The cure (drink) has become the disease (drinking). By this stage in his life Amis – once among the handsomest of his novel-writing kind – was decrepit. An old friend, encountering him in a Hamp-stead pub at this period, observed, ‘It was hard to reconcile his figure with the man I remembered. At fifty-seven, he appeared twenty years older.’ Amis was acutely aware of his condition, and suffered. In later life he was prone to do a ‘Jim Dixon’ (saying what he really felt) with disastrous consequences. One notorious example was recalled by the younger novelist, Julian Barnes, in Zachary Leader’s biography: ‘In 1986 – after the successful publication of Barnes’s
Flaubert’s Parrot
… Kingsley invited Barnes and his wife Pat Kavanagh to dinner at the Garrick. Additionally
needled by the fact that Barnes had visited South Africa and his wife had grown up there, Kingsley snapped into racist mode, offering opinions such as “You should shoot as many blacks as possible” (at which point Kavanagh left in distress).’

Jake’s Thing
chronicles, with painful exactitude, the end-point alcoholic liberation lands you in. The hero Jake, like Jim, is an educationally pointless academic, a Reader in Early Mediterranean History at Oxford (Dixon was a junior lecturer in Medieval History at a redbrick university – identifiably Leicester).
Jake’s Thing
opens with a disastrous drinking scene and the following narrative revolves around the fact that ‘something that used to be a big part of his life isn’t there any more’: he is impotent. Fascinatingly, Amis goes on to ponder whether freedom from sex is a plus, or a minus. In
The Alteration
(1976) – one of the less appreciated of his novels – an alternate universe is fantasised in which the English Reformation never happened, and Grand Opera still features castrati. The hero, Hubert Anvil, is a child with a wonderful voice. He sings like an angel. Is it worth – for him, and for his art – giving up sex to keep that otherwise unachievable artistry?

Age, of course, also emasculates. The longings of age for the potency – the drunken potency – of youth is pondered in the finest of Amis’s late novels (the one for which he rightly got the Booker Prize),
The Old Devils
(1986). The theme is crystallised in one of his late, typically light but ironic, poems, ‘Senex’ (Latin for ‘old man’ but also ‘sans sex’):