Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (120 page)

Could Mailer have written as good a war novel as
The Naked and the Dead
(assuming he survived the bloody Pacific campaign) had he been engaged more actively in its fighting? Typically the best war novels are written not by heroes, but by observers – such as Tolstoy, for example, who witnessed the carnage of Sebastopol but was not directly involved in the fight. Or Kurt Vonnegut, for whom the fighting-war was over almost as soon as he joined it, and was taken prisoner. One can add Rifleman Norman Mailer to that distinguished group of ‘almost warriors, great war novelists’. He went on to write many more novels and pioneered the new genre of docufiction, notably in his bio-novelistic
The Executioner’s Song
(1979), but the general verdict is that his best work is his first – however close or not he was to the action.

I’ve been writing since I discovered pencils.

Avallone is a grand master of the trash detective story, arguably its grandest master – and if not the grandest, indisputably the most voluminous. His
oeuvre
is a bibliographer’s circle of hell. Under a barrage of pen names (some, mischievously, incorporating other people’s mistypings of his own tricky surname), he is reckoned to have turned out over 1,000 titles, along with a wealth of short stories, novelisations, radio scripts and screenplays. He also edited scores of magazines – many stuffed to bursting with
echt
Avallone. He is reputed to have written a
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
novelisation (one of his many profitable sidelines) in thirty-six hours and a 1,500-word short story in twenty minutes, to cover the bill for his
dinner in a New York restaurant. He could, if pushed, have done it in a fast-food joint.

Prose artistry necessarily suffered under such pressures. One obituary opened: ‘Few writers this century have committed more gross acts of grievous bodily harm upon the language of Milton, Shakespeare and the Authorised Version than Michael Angelo Avallone Jr.’ But why restrict it to the twentieth century? John Gross, distinguished editor of the
New Oxford Book of English Prose
, cites, as the opposite of the excellence he anthologised, and possibly the worst simile in the annals of literature, Avallone’s ‘The whites of his eyes came up in their sockets like moons over an oasis lined with palm trees.’ Parody wilts in the face of titles such as
Lust is No Lady
. Not that it bothered Avallone. He craved no praise from the critics – ‘pinkos and perverts’, all of them. As he often insisted, ‘I never wrote a book I didn’t like.’ He also liked to say that he would rather write than eat or sleep. He loved writing and baseball and big breasts – the third of which feature pointedly in his fiction. Bill Crider, who knew Avallone, recalls: ‘My own favorite Avo tale is that when he made a list of the Top Ten Private-Eye Novels of All Time, he put two of his own books on it. As I recall, however, he did modestly give Raymond Chandler the #1 position.’

Michael Avallone was born into a working-class Catholic home and brought up in New York. According to which version you go for, he was one of sixteen, or seven children of a stonemason. Numbers always get vague with Avallone. He was drafted into the army in the Second World War, saw action in Europe, won a medal, and made it to sergeant. On rejoining civilian life he worked for a short time in a stationery store, before turning full time to writing in the early 1950s. Thereafter he would need a store of his own to keep him in the paper and typewriter ribbons that he tore through daily. Unsurprisingly there is not much to record in his life thereafter, other than a growing mountain of pulp. But there was a hungry market for his wares. Story magazines for the masses were booming in the 1950s as were ‘drugstore’ paperback originals with lurid covers and selling for a quarter: wares which no self-respecting bookstore or library would give shelf space to. Publishers paid their hacks a routine penny-a-word, but if the hack turned out enough words (Avallone is supposed to have written twenty-seven novels in one year) he could keep ahead of the game.

Avallone’s best-known, and bestselling, creation is the ‘Private Eye’, Ed Noon, introduced in
The Splitting Image
(1953) and
The Tall Dolores
(1953). Noon continued crime-busting and skull-busting through thirty or so titles until the late 1970s. The hallmark was the exotic female character. ‘Tall Dolores’, for example, is a six-foot two-inch moll (big breasts? don’t ask). Noon was remodelled as a Bond-like secret agent in
The Living Bomb
(1963) – Ed is commissioned by the President to
recover a key nuclear scientist for his country. Avallone’s work includes novelisations ranging from the ultra-violent slasher-movie,
Friday the 13th, Part III
, to the all-American cosiness of
The Partridge Family
. He had a profitable sideline in pornography with his ‘Coxeman’ series, written under the pseudonym Troy Conway – detective thrillers with titles such as
The Cunning Linguist
(1970),
Eager Beaver
(1973),
A Stiff Proposition
(1971),
The Blow-your-Mind Job
, (1970),
The Best Laid Plans
(1969). These qualify him as the Russ Meyer of pulp. He occasionally touched the outside rim of class – as with his novelisation of Sam Fuller’s cult classic film,
Shock Corridor
(1963). He was notorious for his literary feuds – notably against Stephen King, whom he considered a downright plagiarist. He married twice and died in Los Angeles, the city in which he spent most of his later life.

I’m only black because you think you’re white.

Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York. Illegitimate (his mother would never tell him who his father was) ‘Jimmy’ was brought up as the stepson of a ‘storefront’ Pentecostalist preacher, David Baldwin, whom he hated, in impoverished circumstances, among eight half-siblings. Both his parents had come north from the Deep South, looking for better times. His biological father, he was told, had been the son of former slaves and ‘hated whites’. With nothing more than a high school education, in an area of New York ‘geographically part of the United States but sociologically an island’, as one biographer puts it, a member of a historically oppressed ‘minority’, convinced of his personal ugliness (particularly his ‘frog eyes’) and ashamed of his ‘deviant’ sexual longings, Baldwin was largely self-educated. He derived his powerful vision of the world, and his extraordinary eloquence, from the Baptist Church – the sole area of intellectual freedom, along with jazz, allowed blacks. He was, for three years in his adolescence, a ‘young minister’ and this carried over into his writing life. As Nelson Algren put it, ‘Jimmy left the pulpit in order to preach.’

One could also argue that Baldwin left Harlem in order to write about it. Aged seventeen, he moved a couple of miles downtown to the Bohemian quarter of the metropolis, Greenwich Village, and began to write. Here it was he met Richard
Wright, the leading African American novelist of the time and – unlike Ralph Ellison, Wright’s closest rival for that title – radically left-wing. Baldwin’s Harlem background is reflected in the powerful
Bildungsroman
with which he made his name,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1953). Realistic in tone, it draws on Richard Wright’s novel,
Native Son
, and was, for its time, shockingly ‘frank’ about race, sex and clashes of the two. In the light of his personal background, it is the ambivalent depiction of David Baldwin (‘Gabriel Grimes’) which is striking. His stepfather had died, mad and tubercular, in 1943. Baldwin was using fiction to understand, literally, where he came from.

Like other creative African-Americans (notably jazz musicians, such as Sidney Bechet, Don Byas and Dexter Gordon), Baldwin found a refuge from discrimination in Europe – particularly Paris, where he emigrated in 1948, with a borrowed $40 in his pocket. He may have been impelled by the growing interest in him and in Wright which was being taken by J. Edgar Hoover’s men, suspicious as they were of undeferential blacks (notably Paul Robeson). Paris, on the other hand, was tolerant of gays. In Britain, or America, Baldwin’s open affair with the first of his many lovers, seventeen-year-old painter, Lucien Happersberger, would have been an imprisonable crime – twice over, given Lucien’s young age. His second novel,
Giovanni’s Room
(1956), another work of self-exploration, dealt explicitly with homosexuality. A young, white American falls in love with a feckless Paris bartender, Giovanni. As in Baldwin’s own life, permanent relationship was impossible – only transient moments of sexual connection. Sexual adventurers such as Henry Miller came to Paris for fulfilment and to get published. Baldwin came, as much as anything, for self-knowledge – to work things out.

The white hero in
Giovanni’s Room
(much criticised during his lifetime) released Baldwin from the artistically hobbling ‘protest novel’ ghetto. He had been reading Joyce in Paris and there is a new level of art in his writing.
Giovanni’s Room
enjoyed a
succès de scandale
in Anglo-Saxon markets less for the art than its taboo subject. It paved the way for Baldwin’s apocalyptic tract about insurgent negritude in the US,
The Fire Next Time
(1963), and his more complicated treatment of the same themes (in the context of current Civil Rights agitation, urban riot, and reform) in
Another Country
(1962). Baldwin’s position on race was hopelessly conflicted: as an exile himself (happiest in another country), an intellectual (in the French sense), and a sexual rebel, he could not easily take sides, even had he wanted to. Yet everyone wanted him to be a ‘spokesman’. His biographer, James Campbell, describes him as a ‘black James Dean’. He was ‘mixed up’, as the phrase of the day was. Radicals like Eldridge Cleaver thought him toothless. According to Cleaver, all James Baldwin wanted was to be a white man’s bitch. He was a ‘Negro’ – afraid of being a ‘Nigger’
but too smart to be an Uncle Tom. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ‘color line’, the mass of middle-class whites found Baldwin too angry (did he not threaten them with ‘fire’?) and,
au fond
, anti-American. French fragrance has never helped US writers with the home crowd.

Nor did it much help in Harlem – or Watts, or any other of the urban ghettoes which were on the point of explosion in the 1960s. African-Americans, particularly the church constituency in which Baldwin originated, were uneasy about his sexual orientation. His later novels dealing with African-Americanism,
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
(1968),
If Beale Street Could Talk
(1974), and
Just Above My Head
(1979) did not have the impact of their predecessors. He could not master the trick of turning ‘the howl of the man who is being castrated’ into art. But who could? His last years were spent as an eminent professor at Amherst, Massachusetts, and as an eminent expatriate in France – by now more of a home to him than the America he wrote about. Alcoholic, racked by multiple debilitating cancers, he died at his French country home in 1987: fifty years earlier, a doctor had informed his mother that her son would not live beyond the age of five.

To contain the fuse of life, SF must be unsafe.

Aldiss’s autobiography begins with an epiphanic experience – his arrival in India as an eighteen-year-old BOR (‘British Other Rank’), in the ‘forgotten’ 14th Army, on its way to defeat the Japanese in the steaming jungles of Burma. The seething life of the Indian subcontinent as he and his fellow soldiers ‘entrained’ (the military loves such words) for their inland transit camp was a New World. ‘Those days on the train’, he recalls, ‘were ones in which my determination to be a writer developed.’ The clearest reflection of that experience is found in his finest SF novel,
Hothouse
(1962), and his most ambitious, the twin-sunned ‘Helliconia’ trilogy (1982–5).

Aldiss was brought up in the anything-but-hot Norfolk market town of East Dereham, the son of a gentleman’s outfitter (whom, in his autobiography, he resolutely declines to call ‘father’). At seven he was sent to a boarding school in Devon. In the dorm, ‘new boys had to tell stories … Soon I became champion story teller.’
But, if you were caught talking after lights out, teachers would swoop: ‘The punishment was six strokes across the bum.’ Inside every critic, thinks Aldiss, you can find ‘a nasty little housemaster longing to get loose’. He saw active service in the Second World War and, more importantly, as the British Army routinely promised in its imperial heyday, he saw ‘the world’ – and its horrors. The war left a long wound. Aldiss loathed SF practitioners like Robert Heinlein, a novelist who glorified military combat (in works like
Starship Troopers
) but ‘who had never been to war’. Back from war, Aldiss went to work in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford – an excrescence on the dreaming spires – and read voraciously. ‘Bookshops’, echoing Gorky, ‘were his university’. His first published book was a Kippsian account of his life behind the counter.