Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (3 page)

She is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks.
Janet Todd

The novel (or ‘new thing’) happened in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. It coincided with, and arguably depended upon, an array of preconditional factors: for example, mass literacy, urbanisation, mercantilism, the Protestant Ethic, the rise of the bourgeoisie, female emancipation, new technologies, parliamentary democracy and individual authorial genius. Scholars have tried, but a juggling octopus could not keep all those balls in the air. Enough to say – it happened.

‘Eaffrey’ Johnson was born in 1640 near Canterbury. What scant evidence there is suggests her father was a ‘barber’. Among other things, these intimate attenders to the male person were the first ports of call for those with venereal problems. Eaffrey’s mother was a wet nurse – a woman, that is, who put her breasts out to hire to mothers of higher station than herself.

In return for services rendered the Johnsons received favours from powerful local families. It was thus, one assumes, that Eaffrey’s father, the barber, was appointed in 1663/4 Lieutenant General of Surinam, a British colonial possession. It has a touch
of Caligula’s horse about it. But the Civil War had (temporarily) disturbed the usual power, patronage and privilege circuits, and Surinam was hardly a plum posting – even for a governor with a royal commission in one hand, and a shaving bowl in the other. Everything about Aphra’s early life has a question mark hanging over it.

The colony was located where Guyana now is, between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers (a stream which, as Behn charmingly notes, is ‘almost as large as the Thames’). It was not far from where Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked at exactly the same period of time that Miss Eaffrey was there – if, indeed, she were.

Three colonial powers – France, Holland and England – competed for this far-off patch of colonial dirt, but currently the English flag flew. Surinam was put to the cultivation of sugar: the appetite for the sweetener was ravenous in Europe – as ravenous as that in the US today for the other white powder which South America supplies.

Slaves from Africa worked the plantations for whomever the current overseer was – English or Dutch whips were all the same. Black cattle were notoriously ill treated. It was a black man’s hell and a white man’s grave. Thus it proved for Aphra’s father who evidently died there. Did his daughter accompany him to Surinam? The question vexes readers of Behn’s primal novel
Oroonoko
. It seems, from the ostentatious accuracy of her local description and the introduction of actual historical figures, that she indeed knew the place at first-hand. But sceptics argue that she was no more there than the adult Defoe was eyewitness to the Plague Year.

It seems (again, the details are hazy) that in her mid-twenties Aphra Johnson married a trader – possibly in slaves – called Hans Behn. He was Dutch or German and apparently died (in the plague?) or absconded, shortly after the wedding ceremony. Aphra may even have invented him to render herself a ‘respectable’ widow. Whether or not the shady European spouse existed, Mrs Behn (as she hereafter inscribed herself) knew Europe very well. In 1666 war broke out between England and Holland. Now in her late twenties, Aphra (codename ‘Aphora’) served as a spy for the newly returned Charles II, in Antwerp. The ‘she spy’ did good work. Legend, apocryphal alas, has it she warned her country of the Dutch Navy’s incursion up the Thames in 1667. But Aphra did not profit from her service to the nation: 1668 found her in debtors’ prison. From seventeenth-century 007 to Moll Flanders.

She came in from the cold, with her first play,
The Forced Marriage
, in 1670. Actresses (‘Mrs Bracegirdle’, et al.) had broken the old ‘boys only’ convention – so why not go a step higher and write the things? Particularly if you could do it as wittily – and king-pleasingly – as Mrs Behn. One of her comedies,
The Feign’d Courtezans
, is dedicated to Nell Gwyn. Behn would market more profitable fare than oranges to her monarch and his retinue. The wicked Earl of Rochester, she claimed, ‘helped’ her. He liked helping handsome young ladies.

From her earliest years, she took lovers whom, in the libertine spirit of the age, she evidently preferred to husbands. Two partners figure prominently in what has come down to us. William Scot she may have met in Surinam, and he may have been her ‘control’ during her career as a spy. A ‘regicide’, he was later executed. The other partner was a bisexual lawyer, ‘Jack’ Hoyle. As Janet Todd describes him, Jack was ‘a learned, bullying man who would, a few years on, be tried for sodomy and killed after a tavern brawl’ – an everyday career in Restoration London.

Late in what would be a short life, Aphra Behn turned to fiction of which
Oroonoko
, published in 1688, is judged her masterpiece. The London theatre, with the monarchy again in bloody dispute, was in recession. And Behn, it is known, was again hard up: in her forties, ‘friends’ may have been harder to come by.

Whatever the motive for writing it, as with her male counterpart Defoe, fiction was late-life fruit. She died months after the publication of
Oroonoko
and is buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, the first woman author, and the least cloistered, to be so honoured. On her tomb, instructs Virginia Woolf, ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall … for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’ One suspects Aphra would have tossed the flowers back.

The ‘True Story’ as the title proclaims itself (the term ‘novel’ was yet to be invented) is the manifestly untrue story of a ‘Royal Slave’. The oxymoron is piquant in the context of the 1680s. An African prince, Oroonoko, along with his wife Imoinda, has been transported to Surinam, from West Africa, to labour in the plantations. His history is ‘set down’ by this anonymous young English woman, the daughter of the newly appointed deputy governor, who has just died.

The narrator befriends the luckless African pair. He, being a Prince in Exile (as was Charles II in France), can speak both French and English elegantly. Even in remote West Africa, he has heard of the execution of Charles I and found it – as did all right thinking people – ‘deplorable’. The narrator is struck by the couple’s native dignity, though their beauty is anything but native. Oroonoko (renamed ‘Caesar’ by his captors) has straight hair and ‘Roman’, not negroid, features. He is less a noble savage, a hundred years
avant la lettre
, than a noble,
tout court
. A black blue-blood. We recall that the nickname for the notoriously swarthy Charles II was ‘the black boy’ (it survives as a common pub name in England).

But Oroonoko is no common slave. He kills two tigers and has a vividly described battle with an electric (‘benumbing’) eel. When Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko is determined that his son shall not be born into slavery. He organises an uprising, and is cheated into surrendering on the point of victory. Realising it is the end, Oroonoko cuts off Imoinda’s face, after he has cut her throat, so that no one will gaze on her beauty again. He disembowels himself, but is sewn up by surgeons to
be executed, sadistically, for the delectation of a white rabble. Behn’s Royal Slave is even more stoic, at the moment of regicide, than the Royal Captive, Charles I, calmly puffing away at his pipe as his genitals are cut off.

Oroonoko
is short (at 28,000 words it might have problems qualifying for the 1689 Man Booker Prize) and it lacks
Crusoe
’s narrative machinery and masterful suspense (whose
was
that footprint on the foreshore?). But no one can deny Behn’s inventiveness and intuitive feel for the as yet undefined elements of fiction. They are well worthy of Woolf’s bouquet.

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.
Along with Oliver’s gruel, the best-known moment in English fiction

If Daniel Defoe had died in 1718 he would be remembered, if at all, as a fertile pamphleteer and pioneering English journalist with an adhesively memorable name. Living as he did, until 1731, he ranks as a founding father of the English novel – as significant a figure in the evolution of the national fiction as Cervantes in Spain or Rabelais in France.

Tantalisingly little is known of Defoe’s life. ‘Did he in fact exist at all?’ asks one recent study. Even more tantalisingly, it is not known why a man close on sixty years of age (Methuselean in the early eighteenth century) should suddenly change his literary modus operandi so drastically and creatively. In the absence of intimate information, one is thrown back on the skeletal public records. The first fifteen years of Defoe’s life occupy barely that number of pages in Paula Backscheider’s 700-page biography. ‘Lives’ of Defoe, like hers, dissolve into lifeless catalogues raisonnés of his tracts, articles and occasional writings (whose precise authorship is much disputed) – with a running commentary on the big historical picture in whose foreground any image of ‘Daniel Defoe’, infuriatingly, refuses to materialise. The curriculum vitae, as we know it, is easily summarised. If there are interesting times in English history, Defoe lived through the most interesting. Something that fascinated him throughout his life, judging by his choice of subject matter, is that he
had
actually
contrived to survive an infancy surrounded by such an array of danger. Robinson Crusoe wonders the same thing.

‘Daniel Foe’ (the French prefix was a later affectation) was born (quite likely, the date is hopelessly insecure) a Londoner in the year of the Restoration 1660. His first conscious observations, as an embryonic historian of his country, would have begun in what Dryden called the
annus mirabilis
, 1666. It was less ‘wonderful’ than downright terrifying to Londoners. The population of the capital was visited by the worst ever outbreak of bubonic plague; some 100,000 citizens died, it is estimated. Given the population of the metropolis, it was a holocaust – triggered by the black rat’s fleas, exploding population and pre-Victorian sanitation. The city burned to the ground in this same ‘wonderful’ year – a disaster, but one which at least cleansed the city of the plague bacillus. The Great Fire of London supplies vivid entries in Samuel Pepys’s Diary: not even the 1941 Blitz did more damage – Old London ceased, almost overnight, to exist. The Foes’ house survived, however, something for which they would have offered heartfelt thanks to their stern Presbyterian deity. God had not always been good to them. The adults around young Daniel as he grew up could remember the Civil War – actually a Revolution – of the 1640s in which the monarch was beheaded. In the year of Daniel’s birth, monarchy was restored and Oliver Cromwell’s corpse (he, alas, being beyond live decapitation) was shredded by jubilant Royalists.

All this happens, oddly, while Robinson Crusoe is on his island. He is unaware of it and doesn’t advert to the epochal events of the 1660s on his return, some decades after the wonderful year. Defoe may – part of him – have yearned for a refuge from the dangerous historical excitements of his youth and created that refuge in his most famous fiction about an Englishman outside England. During those years he was, in fact, brought up in the St Giles quarter of central London – an area notorious for its criminality. The Foes were, however, eminently uncriminal. Daniel’s father was a tallow chandler, a trade which would have conduced to the boy’s precocious literacy. The Foe house would, unlike most in St Giles, have been decently lighted (but smelly – tallow was made of mutton fat, the upper classes had more expensive wax).

The Foe family became Dissenters in 1662 with the passing of the Act of Uniformity. As a sect, it believed in education but, being banned from the seats of higher education and higher professions, they were thrown back on their own resources – which meant books and a premium on reading (Bunyan’s Christian, it will be remembered, hies off to the Celestial City, book in hand). A ‘persecuted minority’, the Dissenters refused sacraments and allegiance to, among other things, newly restored kings. They suffered discrimination, physical abuse and, quite often, jail – with the consoling sense that such mistreatment was proof of Christian worth. Had not the Saviour himself been reviled?

Daniel Foe grew up something of an outsider in his own country – a righteous rebel. What little is known of his school education suggests that he might have been destined for the Presbyterian ministry – ‘sacred employ’, as he calls it. Instead, he followed his father (now widowed and an increasingly eminent figure in the City) into trade. He was apprenticed in the retail business, with a line in hosiery. Men, as well as women, wore stockings at this period and there was good business to be done (close attention, one recalls, is given to Robinson’s goatskin leggings). From his earliest years in business, Defoe was an eager speculator. He had married, prudently enough, in 1684, and his wife, a carpenter’s daughter, brought a tidy fortune. We know little else about the marriage.

There were apparently six surviving children – who were lucky to grow up with a father. Restless and rebellious by nature, Defoe rashly threw in his lot with the Monmouth rebellion in 1685, whose aim was to forestall a Catholic takeover. He was taken prisoner at Sedgemoor, a battle in which the rebels were routed, but was fortunate to be spared hanging in the punitive carnage of the Bloody Assizes and Judge Jeffreys. Hereafter Defoe would mount his resistance by the pen, not the sword. He returned to his London trade, prospered and became within a few years a well-regarded man in the City. Details of what he was doing in this period are, as everywhere, scarce. But from his writings it is clear he was fascinated by ‘projects’ – the subject of one of his early substantial publications in 1697. Man was, as Defoe saw the species, a mechanic animal,
homo faber
. His survey began with Noah’s Ark (‘the first project I read of’) and came down to the latest French fire-fighting equipment; it covered other such instances of human resourcefulness as diving bells.