Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (35 page)

Fred’s mother, mine, the girls, Fred and I went into the park gardens, one day after luncheon. A very hot day, for we kept on the shady walks, one of which led to the place where women hid themselves to piss. My aunt said, ‘Why don’t you boys go and play, you don’t mind the sun,’ so off we went, but when about to leave the walk, turned round and saw the women had turned back. Said Fred; ‘I’m sure they are going to piss, that’s why they want to get rid of us.’ We evaded the gardeners, scrambled through shrubs, on our knees, and at last on our bellies, up a little bank, on the other side of which was the vacant place on which dead leaves and sweepings were shot down. As we got there, pushing aside the leaves, we saw the big backside of a woman, who was half standing, half squatting, a stream of piss falling in front of her, and a big hairy gash, as it seemed, under her arse; but only for a second, she had just finished as we got the peep, let her clothes fall, tucked them between her legs, and half turning round. We saw it was Fred’s mother, my aunt. Off aunt went. ‘Isn’t it a wopper,’ said Fred, ‘lay still, more of them will come.’

It’s distasteful in the extreme – but telling. And it tells what is not told elsewhere. Where, for example, does Tess the dairymaid go when she needs to ‘go’? Or, perish the thought, Miss Dorothea Brooke?

Dead Love has Chains.

Mary Braddon was born in Soho, London, the youngest daughter of a solicitor. Her mother left her husband, who was reportedly feckless and faithless, when Mary was only four. Among all this domestic strife she contrived to get a good education, began to write fiction at the precocious age of eight, and was publishing in the magazines, as the family breadwinner, before she was twenty. With the same worthy aim she took to the stage (only one notch above taking to the streets) in 1857 as ‘Mary Seyton’, and specialised in playing older women.

She was, however, young and comely when off-stage. In 1860, a Yorkshire ‘admirer’ gave her money to quit the boards and write an epic on Garibaldi. Safe enough occupation for a respectable mistress, he must have thought – even if the fellow was an Italian revolutionary. Instead, she sensibly wrote a sensation novel,
Three Times Dead
, published in 1861. Through it she became acquainted with the Irish publisher John Maxwell, proprietor of the
Welcome Guest
magazine. Exit Yorkshire admirer: enter London patron.

Braddon’s great triumph came with
Lady Audley’s Secret
(1862), the serial rights for which were bought by Maxwell. The two became lovers and Braddon’s first child by her new ‘admirer’ was born in 1862.
Lady Audley’s Secret
was published in volume form by another publisher, William Tinsley, and set Braddon up for life. It likewise set up Tinsley, who built a villa at Barnes shamelessly called ‘Audley Lodge’ on the profits. The plot is succinctly summarised by Elaine Showalter: ‘Braddon’s bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband number-one down a well, thinks about poisoning husband number-two and sets fire to a hotel in which her other male acquaintances happen to be residing.’

Braddon’s own marital problems were not as easily managed. Maxwell had five children, and a wife currently residing in an Irish lunatic asylum; he was also deeply in debt. A bestselling author in his bed and in his columns was a godsend. In 1874, when the first Mrs Maxwell died, Braddon was free to marry her publisher, and went on to bear him another six children, while continuing to be his principal commercial asset. Revenue from Braddon’s fiction installed their growing family in a fine country house. The couple rode out the inevitable scandal when it was revealed to the world that they had been living, and breeding, in sin for ten years – although their servants resigned en masse.

In the mid-1860s, Braddon’s price peaked at a massive £2,000 per novel, with a rapid string of bestsellers such as
Aurora Floyd
(1863),
John Marchmont’s Legacy
(1863),
Henry Dunbar
(1864) and
Birds of Prey
(1867). Her output was prodigious, and in addition to her other labours she edited, or ‘conducted’ several magazines. Many of her novels were dramatised, and she wrote plays herself. She was a top favourite with the circulating library subscriber; with the railway reader (by 1899, fifty-seven of her novels had appeared in yellowbacks for the traveller); and with the lower-class market for whom she wrote in penny journals. Braddon drove herself too hard, and suffered a stroke in 1907, but none the less kept on writing. Her final life tally is some eighty titles, of which
Lady Audley’s Secret
was never out of print during her lifetime and became a bestseller again, with the vogue for Victorian sensation fiction in the 1990s.

Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.

The author of two of the most un-Victorian novels of the Victorian period, Butler was born the son and grandson of Anglican grandees. His childhood, and its patriarchal tyrannies, are recalled in that of Ernest Pontifex, in the
The Way of All Flesh
(1903). Butler went to Shrewsbury School and formed there the two great loves of his life: Handel and Italy. He left Cambridge in 1858 with a first-class degree in Classics and a lifelong distrust of academic institutions. He declined the destiny intended for him – holy orders. To save the family’s blushes, Samuel was sent as far away as earth permitted, to raise sheep in New Zealand. In the five years (1859–64) that he was there Butler proved a resourceful emigrant, doubling his capital.

Pastoral leisure allowed Butler to read widely – he was an early convert to Darwin. He returned to London in 1864, rich enough to be free of his family (why, he once wondered, were there not orphanages for those luckless children who actually
had
parents). He took up bachelor rooms near Fleet Street and remained there the rest of his long life. In his mature years Butler dedicated himself to painting, music and writing. It was an enjoyable course of life – and a good vantage point from which to snipe at the hated Victorian establishment. In 1865 he published
a typically provocative pamphlet, arguing that Christ had not died on the cross, merely fainted (the idea was later picked up by D. H. Lawrence in
The Man Who Died
, 1929). He and a close friend, Henry Festing Jones, allegedly shared the sexual favours of the same woman by weekly calendar arrangement.

Butler’s Swiftian reflections on the hypocrisies and moral contradictions of Victorian England were published, at his own expense, as
Erewhon
(1872). Set in New Zealand, the hero Higgs, accompanied by a native, Chowbok (George Lucas evidently read the novel, in creating Chewbacca), journeys over a mountain range to a country called Erewhon – where everything, like the name, is back to front. Crime is regarded as an ailment, and is humanely treated, while illness is regarded as a crime, and punished. The young are instructed in colleges of Unreason and the presiding deity is the goddess Ydgrun (i.e. Mrs Grundy). Higgs escapes by balloon. The satire also plays with Butler’s prescient idea that in the future machine intelligence will outstrip human.

Butler went on to produce a torrent of works of a hyper-rationalist tendency, and one supremely eccentric
Bildungsroman, The Way of All Flesh
. Begun in 1873, this work, which flays the age in which Butler found himself, was not published until the year after his death. In the novel, Ernest Pontifex, born in the same year as Butler, is mercilessly tyrannised by his clergyman father and bullied at Roughborough School. He studies at Cambridge with a view of taking orders in a Church in whose religion he does not believe. By a series of misadventures, and total innocence about sex, he is convicted, while serving as a curate in London, of indecent assault. Disastrously, his lusts inflamed by the easy conquests retailed to him by his best friend, he mistakes a girl who won’t for a girl who will:

Then it flashed upon him that if he could not see Miss Snow he could at any rate see Miss Maitland. He knew well enough what he wanted now, and as for the Bible, he pushed it from him to the other end of his table …

About ten minutes after we last saw Ernest, a scared, insulted girl, flushed and trembling, was seen hurrying from Mrs Jupp’s house as fast as her agitated state would let her, and in another ten minutes two policemen were seen also coming out of Mrs Jupp’s, between whom there shambled rather than walked our unhappy friend Ernest, with staring eyes, ghastly pale, and with despair branded upon every line of his face.

Six months later after release from prison – and no longer a member of decent society – Ernest is free, at last, to grow up and become a rational, and joyously un-Victorian, human being. He has realised the importance of being un-earnest.

Butler’s last years were passed in furious quarrels on evolution and freethinking,
in which he attacked the orthodoxies of his time and rode his various hobbyhorses, such as his belief that a woman had written
The Odyssey
.

I am not an American. I am
the
American.

Among all the nation’s writers, Mark Twain has the firmest hold on the national epithet. From Theodore Roosevelt onwards, American presidents have routinely salted their oratory with down-home Twainisms. Harry Truman had a framed Twain quotation on his desk – ‘Always do Right. It will Please some People and Astonish the Rest’ – alongside ‘The Buck Stops Here’. On the 2008 election trail, Barack Obama routinely reached out to ‘our greatest American satirist’ (and, it may be noted, the creator of the only classic American novel with a mixed-race hero,
Pudd’nhead Wilson
). There is, in fact, something presidential about Twain himself. ‘The Lincoln of our Literature,’ William Dean Howells called him.

Great American writers elbow each other aside to aver Twain’s supreme greatness. ‘Mark Twain’, declared Eugene O’Neill, ‘is the true father of all American literature.’ ‘Mark Twain is all of our grandfather [sic],’ concurred William Faulkner. ‘All modern American literature’, said Ernest Hemingway, ‘comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn
.’ Norman Mailer turned it around neatly by noting that much of what Mark Twain wrote had clearly been lifted from Norman Mailer.

The universal panegyric highlights a strange paradox. How can a writer have achieved such eminence with such a small number of incontrovertibly great works? One of his biographers, Jerome Loving, in an otherwise laudatory account, is surely correct in pointing out that ‘
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
is possibly the most overrated work in American literature.’ Even Hemingway’s ‘one book’ was dropped, mid-composition, for five years and picked up to be hurried, hugger-mugger into the feeblest of concluding chapters.
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
(1894), the first American novel to deal unsentimentally or unbigotedly with race, was written during the turmoil of one of Twain’s insolvencies and is marred by unliterary distractions. As for the rest?
The Prince and the Pauper
(1882) and
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(1889) are charming
amusettes
(to borrow Henry James’s term) but no
one suggests they are in the
Moby Dick
or
Scarlet Letter
class. Dickens published twelve novels any one of which can be argued to vindicate his status as Britain’s greatest. Where are Twain’s dozen? What makes him the ‘father’ of American fiction? What makes him what H. L. Mencken called ‘the archetype of
Homo Americanus
’?

The second question is the easier to answer. Twain’s life is a parable of the American belief that anyone can make it in that country – any pauper can end up a prince. Born in Florida, Missouri, the son of an unlucky storekeeper, young Sam L. Clemens was lucky to make it through infancy – most of his siblings didn’t. His father’s insolvency (they were, at their lowest point, reduced to just one slave) and premature death kicked Sam out of school at eleven, to earn a pittance as a printer’s devil. Fortunately for American literature, he was not good enough at that line of work to prosper. In his early teens, he struck out from Hannibal, Missouri (immortalised as ‘St Petersburg’ in
Huck Finn
), to make his fortune importing coca leaf from South America. He might have become the Pablo Escobar of his day, had he not met the legendary Mississippi pilot, Horace Bixby. The romance of the great river, its raffish steamboat life and its eerie call – ‘mark twain!,’ i.e. two fathoms of water beneath us – occupied him for four years.