Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (126 page)

French recalled being radicalised by Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
(1970), a version of
her
Ph.D. literary thesis at Columbia. About the same period French’s eighteen-year-old daughter Jamie was sexually assaulted. French did not rest until the rapist was imprisoned, where, behind bars, he might find out what rape felt like. It was a period of expansion in American higher education (a huge number of male students enrolled, to escape the Vietnam draft) and French, who got her doctorate in 1972, obtained a job teaching English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Heterosexual, she had a number of ‘romantic relationships’ but never remarried. She had been writing fiction, unsuccessfully, for some time. But in the late 1970s – with feminism’s ‘second wave’ – the time was right.
The Women’s Room
served as a bawling recruiting sergeant for a movement on the march. The newly conscripted forgave the novel’s dire literary quality, though critics were less forgiving – even women critics. In
The Times
, Libby Purves took exception to the partisan crudity. French’s men, she said, ‘are malevolent stick figures, at best appallingly dull and at worst monsters’. (On French’s death, Purves wrote a more generous appreciation in the same paper – see the above epigraph.) The novel was compared, unfavourably, to Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
. Such discrimination was
irrelevant, however. You might as well say
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is less good a work of literature than
Middlemarch
.

It was the moment and the movement which made French a one-shot bestseller. None of her subsequent five novels had any success and, at the end of her life, no American publisher was interested in her fiction. Her scholarly works on Joyce and latterly on women’s history did, however, earn her a respectable professional reputation and she was in demand as an academic lecturer and an essayist. She smoked heavily throughout her adult life (in the 1960s a woman smoking publicly was one of the smaller badges of independence). She contracted cancer of the oesophagus in her late sixties, beat it, and wrote a cancer memoir,
A Season in Hell
(1998), which posterity may well see as the most powerful of her publications. At the end of her life she conceded that ‘most men are on our side’, but insisted that she was still ‘an angry person’.

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

Cabrera Infante was born in the seaside town of Gibara, in Cuba, in 1929. It was where Columbus landed on the island – an event commemorated, often, in his later fiction. Guillermo was the eldest son of political activists who founded the Cuban Communist Party. Their politics led, inevitably, to friction with the authorities (Cuba was effectively a US possession following its colonial liberation from Spain) and his parents were imprisoned for disseminating propaganda in 1936. An acutely ‘anxious’ child, thereafter his personality was always fragile and prone to nervous breakdown. On their release – but now unemployable – the Cabrera Infantes went to live in Havana: the location which meant most to their son for the rest of his life. Six of the family were crammed into a tiny apartment in a region of the capital ‘where the street lamps were so poor they couldn’t even afford moths’. It is vividly evoked as something squalid yet romantic in his later book,
Infante’s Inferno
(1984).

Cabrera Infante enrolled as a medical student at the University of Havana in 1949, but promptly switched to journalism. His father insisted he learn English, enrolling him in night school to do so. Films – especially Hollywood – were a passion
with him. He claimed that he saw his first movie, aged twenty-nine days, when his mother took her newborn to see Ibáñez’s
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(1921): it was a baptismal moment. He published on cinema enthusiastically and perceptively in the 1950s and loved movies all his life. He also imbibed dissidence in his mother’s milk and, like his parents, spent time in prison. In his case, it was less politics than for a story the authorities found offensive (specifically the graphic description of an American tourist in Havana ‘to have maaah balls sucked’). It was, the court decreed, ‘offensive to national dignity’. Which nation was irrelevant since, under Batista, Cuba was the US’s offshore brothel. Essentially it was an offence against tourism.

Prohibited from writing under his own name, he adopted a pseudonym ‘G. Cain’ (the biblical outcast, and CAbrera INfante) and continued annoying the Batista regime. When Fidel Castro ousted the American stooge and his corrupt regime in 1959, Cabrera Infante was, initially, a staunch supporter of the Revolution. He was installed in the newly set up state film institute and given free rein in the cultural supplement of the party’s newspaper,
Lunes de Revolución
. For a year or two, he was able to brew his ‘heady’ mixture of Trotskyist politics and surrealist art. In his official capacity he met such international grandees as Pablo Neruda, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Cabrera Infante divorced his first wife and remarried at this period. In 1960 he published his first volume of fiction,
Así en la paz como en la guerra
(‘As in Times of Peace, So in Times of War’). Written under the political influence of Sartre and the stylistic influence of Hemingway, he later ‘disowned’ it as too Castroist. He was already, at the time, chafing at the Party’s institutional distaste for ‘decadent’ postmodernism and its censorship of artistic expression (particularly ‘decadent’ Hollywood films). The Party was also becoming impatient with him and closed down his literary supplement. In 1962, he accepted a diplomatic position in Belgium where he could feel himself unfettered (but not well off – Cubans were the paupers of the diplomatic world) and it was here that he wrote
Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers
).

The novel came into his head, he said, as ‘a narrative explosion’. It did not, exactly, explode on the publishing scene as the British edition’s copyright page records:

First published in Spain in 1965 as
Tres tristes tigres

First published in English in the USA in 1971

First published in Great Britain in 1980

Over these fifteen years in fictional limbo, the novel – in Spanish and in English – won an impressive haul of prizes, but it did not sell well or make its author’s name
widely famous. ‘My writing’, Cabrera Infante once said, ‘springs up not from life but from reading.’ His library contained forty-six volumes by or on James Joyce (his other favourite text – strangely – was Raymond Chandler’s
The Long Goodbye
). He loved and imitated Joyce’s ‘eye–ear polarities’, i.e. ‘Hold that Tyrant’ – an acoustic pun in
Three Trapped Tigers
which partly explains the inscrutably enigmatic title. He also loved what Cubans call ‘choteo’ – cheek: for example his cheerful desecration of the most famous lyric of the country’s most famous poet, José Martí:

Yo soy un hombre sincero

I’m a man without a zero

De donde crece la palma

From the land of the pawn-trees

The novel was everywhere praised – typically with the windy superlatives which signal that the person praising is bamboozled. The
New York Review of Books
, for example, devoted pages of lavish praise to
Three Trapped Tigers
, the luckless reviewer unaware that he had wholly jumbled up the principal characters – which is easily done. Essentially the narrative, loosely following the fate of a quartet of street-wise Habañeros, is a panorama of city low-life and café society in the years just before the Revolution: whether nostalgic or seditious is never quite clear. Music – the bolero – runs through the book thematically. The opening gives a flavour of the whole and the demands Cabrera Infante makes of the reader:

Showtime!
Señoras y señores
. Ladies and Gentlemen. And a very good evening to you all, ladies and gentlemen.
Muy buenas noches, damas y caballeros
. Tropicana! The MOST fabulous night-club in the WORLD –
el cabaret MAS fabuloso del mundo
– presents –
presenta
– its latest show –
su nuevo espectáculo
– where performers of Continental fame will take you all to the wonderful world of supernatural beauty of the Tropics.

A little of this goes a very long way for most readers.

In 1965 his mother died and he returned from Europe for the funeral. But Havana now seemed to him ‘like the wrong side of hell’ and he finally resolved on exile from a country he loved, but could no longer live in. ‘The truth,’ he later wrote, ‘is that Fidel Castro never cared about the theatre or literature, or even mural painting, for that matter. He only cares about power and its total tool, propaganda. He is known even to have used Beckett’s plays, to have said that
Waiting for Godot
showed the kind of capitalist-induced misery you’ll never find in Cuba now. Godot forbids.’ After Franco’s Spain denied him residency, Cabrera Infante moved, somewhat uneasily, to England, becoming a citizen in 1979 – the country’s first Cuban
novelist. In London he published novels, wrote screenplays and film reviews (his English was as proficient as any native speaker), and published a surrealist celebration of the cigar,
Holy Smoke
(1985).

Cuba had, by now, long disowned him as a traitor to the country and his books were banned on the island. Others saw him as Cuba’s greatest living novelist. His last years in England were unhappy following a mental health breakdown in 1972. A long course of ECT may account for the recovery of mental stability and the decline of his creativity. He was, from childhood, morbidly sensitive to the pain of others: ‘While working at his desk one day in his London apartment,’ his biographer records, ‘he had the misfortune to witness a jay killing and devouring a sparrow, a spectacle that caused him to faint.’ But the greatest hurt was for his country. Castro, it seemed, would live for ever. Cabrera Infante himself died in the year that his fellow Cuban exile, the Hollywood star Andy García, contrived to get his screenplay for
The Lost City
(2006) – a lament for pre-Revolutionary Havana – on to the film screens of the world. The film bombed with the American critics and was banned in much of South America for what was seen as disrespect to the memory of Che Guevara (depicted as a thug).

Cabrera Infante died of an MRSA infection while being treated in a London hospital for a fractured hip. Ironically (a point Michael Moore would have made with relish), he would have done better under the Cuban Health Service than the NHS. He had requested, in the event of his death, that his ashes be kept, unburied, until – after Castro and his regime were gone – they could be interred in Cuba. They remain unburied.

It is not thy duty to complete the task; but neither art thou free to desist from it.
Epigraph to
The Beginners

Dan Jacobson pluralised his past as ‘autobiographies’ – his was a life in many disparate parts. ‘How to make sense of it all?’ he mused in one of his later memoirs. One can begin with the bare facts. He was born in Johannesburg, in the ominous year 1929, of a Latvian-born father and a Lithuanian-born mother, both of whom had fled their birthplaces. Jacobson was brought up in Kimberley, a dull town (diamonds
went down with everything else in the slump) – but one of the places on the globe where Jews were safe to enjoy a dull life like everybody else. His late-life memoir,
Heshel’s Kingdom
(1998), was inspired by a visit to one of his parental homelands, Lithuania. Heshel Melamed, a stern rabbinical paterfamilias, was his maternal grandfather. On the old man’s death in 1920, Dan’s mother, Liebe, fled to South Africa. She was escaping her father as much as the Pale of Settlement. Had Heshel lived longer, Dan Jacobson would never have happened. The Nazi extermination of Jews in Lithuania (aided enthusiastically by local Lithuanians) was virtually total.

Dan’s father, Hyman, ran Kimberley’s butter factory. A vivid, child’s eye view of the bustling place is given in
The Beginners
(1966), the assembly belts, the clanking churns and hissing pasteurising vats:

It seemed impossible that in the tumult anyone could work or think. But, calmly, white men and Africans went about their duties, all of them clad alike in white overalls and gumboots.

The Jacobson home was well off, liberal in politics (the
New Statesman
was subscribed to) and non-coercive in matters of religion. Dan, one of four children, was brought up in an enclave within enclaves. There were around 100 Jewish families in Kimberley, none related to the Jacobsons. He went to a faux-English grammar school where, like the rest, he bellowed out his daily wish that God save his King. Meanwhile, outside, squads of barefoot blacks mowed the cricket grounds and whitewashed the boundary markers. It struck him, even as a boy, as somehow crazy.