Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (119 page)

‘V. C. Andrews’ has become so much more than just a name, it has become a legacy.
V. C. Andrews official website

Cleo Virginia Andrews (she later transposed her first two names) was born in 1923 in Virginia – a region she loved and where, after an unsettled life, she chose to be buried (hence the transposition of first names; she may also have died virginal – or, at least, wanted it to be so thought). As a teenager, Virginia fell down the stairs at her school, incurring a horrific spinal injury. She would be handicapped for life – needing crutches and a wheelchair in her later years. After her father, a tool and die maker, died in 1957, she lived with her widowed mother (formerly a telephone operator), helping support the household as a commercial artist. There were three children. Virginia was a prize-winning schoolgirl but college was beyond her. None the less, she made heroic attempts to educate herself beyond twelfth grade by correspondence courses and self-improvement.

Allegedly, Andrews destroyed her first complete manuscript novel on the grounds that it was too ‘personal’. According to devotional websites, ‘in 1972, she completed her first published novel,
Gods of Green Mountain
, a science-fantasy story’. The work is currently available only as an e-text. At this point in her life, Andrews was in her fiftieth year and almost wholly disabled. But her writing hand wasn’t. Between 1972 and 1979, she completed nine novels (‘confession stories’, she piquantly called them), and twenty short stories, of which only one would ever see the light of publication – ‘I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night.’ Or was it in fact published? It has never been located and is hunted by fans as the Andrews Eldorado. The third most-asked question on
www.completevca.com/faq.shtml
is ‘Where can I find a copy of “I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night”?’ Where indeed.

Incest would be a principal theme in her subsequent fiction – or, as Andrews herself quaintly put it, ‘unspeakable things my mother didn’t want me to write about’. Unspeakable, perhaps, but not unwritable – or, finally, unpublishable. Andrews at last broke into print with a paperback original,
Flowers in the Attic
, published in 1979 by Pocket Books. She was now fifty-six years old. Originally entitled ‘The Obsessed’, the manuscript was hugely overlong and had to be hacked into shape by the publishers. The ‘uncut’ version awaits publication.
Flowers in the Attic
, which attracted a measly advance of $7,500, tells the story of the four attic-incarcerated and sexually adventurous Dollanganger children. The novel (‘a fictionalised version of a true story’, the author tantalisingly calls it) derives, clearly enough, from
Jane
Eyre
– both the Red Room (in which young Jane is incarcerated) and the madwoman in the attic hover over the narrative. Anne Frank is also there somewhere – and, for more recent readers, Josef Fritzl. A sad brew.

In her ‘pitch letter’ in January 1978 to the agent who would eventually take her on, Andrews summarised the frame of her novel:

Plot: A young wife is suddenly widowed. Left with four children. She is totally unskilled for the labor market, and deeply in debt. Her home and all she has is repossessed. However … she has one solace. She is the sole heir to a fortune if she can deceive her dying father, and never let him know she is the mother of four children whom he would despise. Four children are imprisoned in an upstairs room of a huge mansion. Their playground is the attic.

Their ‘play’ becomes intense as they are ‘tested’ by adolescent hormone storms.

Andrews is credited with founding a distinct new line of gothic fiction – the ‘children in jeopardy’ genre. The term was taken over by the social service industries in the US and Britain and evolved, after a decade or two, into ‘misery memoirs’ of the
Child Called ‘It’
and
Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed
kind. Harry Potter, as an abused waif in his cupboard under the stairs at Privet Drive, began his fictional life as a child in jeopardy – a Flower in the Closet.
Flowers in the Attic
went on to be a bestseller: the first of a whole string of sagas revolving around clusters of, typically, children in jeopardy. V. C. Andrews had begun late as a bestselling author and finished sadly early. Seven years after
Flowers in the Attic
, aged sixty-two, she died of breast cancer – a year before the release of the film of her novel in which she had a non-speaking cameo; she had always longed to be an actress. But her career as a novelist did not die with her. Works kept on pulsing out after her death under the auspices of the estate. An unceasing flow of
echt
Andrews was promised – and there could never be enough of it for her fans. Allegedly, Andrews had left some sixty scenarios at the time of her death. The family announced it was working ‘closely with a carefully selected writer’ to midwife the latent Andrews
oeuvre
into print. And they would, of course, be
her
novels – as much so as
Flowers
.

The identity of the ‘carefully selected writer’ was kept strenuously secret, so as not to contaminate the Andrews brand with another name. Many of the author’s devoted readers, of course, had not apprehended she wasn’t alive and writing the ‘Andrews’ novels which continued to pour out with her name only on the cover. By 2007, the count had reached something over seventy titles – two thirds of which have come out under the trademarked V. C. Andrews brand. The ghost in the Andrews machine was, after some years, discovered to be Andrew Neiderman: his name does not appear on the copyright pages. To this day the most asked question
on the ‘Complete V. C. Andrews website’ is ‘Where can I write to V. C. Andrews?’

Too much. Times Literary Supplement
, 20 May 1949, in a dismissively brief notice of
The Naked and the Dead

Adultery figures from time to time in the fiction of David Lodge. When asked whether he is thinking of himself, Lodge replies that he is a war reporter, not a warrior. It’s a good answer – and very believable that those on the sidelines, with ‘Press’ on their flak jackets, see things more clearly than those blasting away with their firearms. War is proverbially foggy at the frontline.

Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
(1948) was one of the last books George Orwell reviewed before dying, while writing his own, posthumous, bestseller,
Nineteen Eighty-four
. ‘You will live with these men,’ he wrote, of the fourteen-strong Intelligence & Reconnaissance platoon who supply the dramatis personae to Mailer’s novel. Orwell’s remark was splashed on the cover of the execrable, double columned, 6s, English paperback which was passed, hand to hand, among me and my school-friends in 1949. Sex, rather than the Second World War (in the 1940s we knew all about
that
) was what made it a book to devour out of sight of one’s custodians. Particularly relished were passages such as the following, in a flashback to pre-war carnalities by the redneck ‘Woodrow’ Wilson:

It is intensely hot in the cabin and he strains against her. Ah’m gonna tell ya somethin’, they was a little old whore Ah had back a while ago that Ah took twelve times in a night, and the way Ah’m fixin’ now, what with the honey in mah insides, Ah’m gonna beat that with you.

Twelve times!

Orwell’s implication, assumed by the mass of early readers, was that
The Naked and the Dead
was a first-hand account: that Mailer, described, simply, by his American publisher in advertisements as a ‘young rifleman’, had been ‘there’. The inference was both true and false and it raises some definitive issues about fiction, life and war – and about the author. Norman Mailer (Nachem Malek) was brought up
in Brooklyn – the safest place in the world for a Jew to be between the wars, it was said. His father, Barney, was an immigrant from South Africa, recalled as charming but feckless (with a ‘cockney accent’ and an Irish nickname, oddly). Norman’s life was dominated by his adoring mother (the co-dedicatee of
The Naked and the Dead
, tellingly), Fanny. Her only son was, as she liked to say, her ‘king’ and, when anglicising it, she gave him the discordant middle name, ‘Kingsley’. A tigerish woman, Fanny made enough from a one-truck oil delivery business to push her beloved son through high school, where he excelled, and into Harvard in 1939, aged a precocious sixteen. To please his mother, Mailer enrolled to study aeronautical engineering, but he soon became infatuated with literature. The influences on Mailer at this formative period were Hemingway and Dos Passos.

Physically, Mailer was not warrior build. He was short (every one of his many wives would be taller than him, some toweringly so), underweight and myopic. None the less he had great presence and an ability, noted by all whose paths crossed with his, to melt into whatever society he found himself: he could be Irish, Southern, Brahmin-WASP – everything, he himself wryly noted, except ‘a nice little Jewish boy from Brooklyn’. Mailer graduated from Harvard in June 1943 with a degree he would never use and, now twenty-one years old, impatiently awaited his draft letter. As one college friend recalled, ‘Rather than thinking about the horror of war or the fact that he might get killed, he looked at it as an experience which would feed the novel he wanted to write afterward.’ He had for some time been writing another massive novel – entitled, shamelessly,
Transit to Narcissus
– which was turned down by every publisher shown it. Too narcissistic.

Before being conscripted, he married his first of his many wives, Bea Silverman (the future co-dedicatee of
The Naked and the Dead
with the other Mrs Mailer). The marriage was kept secret from his mother, who, when she found out, vainly attempted to annul it. She was not disposed to share her ‘king’. A few weeks later Mailer had been drafted and was on his way to Fort Bragg. He elected not to use his Harvard background to get into officer school. According to Bea, it was ‘because he wanted to see combat’. After basic training he was posted to the 112th Armoured Cavalry Regiment, heading for the invasion of the Philippines. Combat didn’t happen. Mailer was initially shuffled, to his chagrin, among various desk jobs – important to the war effort but not to him. He had brought with him a multi-volume set of Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West
for cheerless reading in his bunk. It was mildewing in the tropical climate. After incessant pestering, he was finally transferred to frontline duty as a rifleman (lowest rank) in an I&R platoon.

Unlike the men in
The Naked and the Dead
, Mailer’s platoon saw virtually no action. Probably a good thing. As one of his comrades recalled, ‘He was a brave
soldier but not a good one. He couldn’t see worth a damn. Near sighted … he couldn’t hit anything with a rifle. It’s a miracle Mailer lived through the war.’ His wife Bea put it even more laconically: ‘He took a few potshots, but I don’t remember worrying every day that Norman would get killed. It wasn’t that kind of fighting anymore.’ What did happen – virtually every day – were long letters home from which would come the kernel of
The Naked and the Dead
. And Rifleman Mailer certainly picked up – at second-hand – what it was like to hear Jap bullets humming past your ears ‘like a bee’ as you strained to ‘keep a tight ass-hole’.

For Mailer, as for Dos Passos before him, war was Sisyphean pointlessness. The central episode in
The Naked and the Dead
is the platoon’s gruelling ascent of Mount Anaka. There is no military purpose: it merely expresses the fact that Sergeant Croft, the incarnation of Nietszchean will to power, wants the peak under his heel. The real foe is not Nippon, but the US Army, and the licence it gives to men like Croft, and the even more ruthless General Cummings, who relishes the prospect of the total militarisation of America. As in Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, war is too useful to the men it empowers ever to have an end. As a soldier says in Dos Passos’s
Three Soldiers
, ‘I guess I wouldn’t mind the war if it wasn’t for the army.’

In mid-August 1945, the Japanese capitulated. Mailer stayed on for a while, as a sergeant-cook in Japan. Evidence is mixed as to how good he was in the kitchen. According to one jaundiced commentator he couldn’t tell white from yellow in a hen’s egg. On his return to civilian life in May 1946, Mailer had leisure, thanks to the GI Bill, to work full-time on
The Naked and the Dead
. He borrowed Dos Passos’s ‘objective’ style for its word-sparing narration. The novel opens with the men preparing for their landing next morning on the beach of a (fictional) Philippine island, knowing that in twenty-four hours many of their number will die. But who? Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead. A bunch of the I&R men are killing the night hours playing poker, wondering about the vagaries of luck (the winner of the poker pot will, as it happens, die horribly).

Mailer finished the 721-page manuscript in August 1947. It was accepted, eagerly, by the publisher Rinehart, who pushed it as a modern
War and Peace
. But Tolstoy’s soldiers did not speak like soldiers. Mailer’s did. The commissioning editor, Stanley Rinehart, was nervous about what his mother would think of the lavish F-wordage in the novel’s dialogue. (Come to that, Mailer’s mother wasn’t that happy either with the ‘language’.) It led to a compromise: the three-letter four-letter word ‘fug’. When Dorothy Parker (some versions say Tallulah Bankhead) met Mailer a
year or so later, she came out with the immortal wisecrack: ‘So
you’re
the young man who can’t spell “fuck”.’ On publication in June 1948,
The Naked and the Dead
sold like hot cakes in high-priced hardback. At twenty-five, Norman Mailer was a king indeed. The novel’s sales in the UK were boosted beyond a publicist’s wildest dreams by a front-page editorial in the
Sunday Times
demanding the novel be withdrawn, on the grounds of its ‘incredibly foul and beastly language … no decent man could leave it lying about the house, or know without shame that his womenfolk were reading it’.