Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (103 page)

Following the upward trajectory of the clever grammar school boy, and at huge financial sacrifice to his parents, Golding went to Brasenose College, Oxford: it was a ‘disaster’. Why? As John Carey records, the public school boys outnumbered the grammar bugs twenty to one. ‘Not
quite
a gentleman’ was the verdict passed on him by the university authorities in their confidential dossier. But despite his pathological timidity, which he bravely disguised, Golding served gallantly in the Royal Navy in the Second World War when even ‘not quites’ could join the officer class and get killed for king and country and the preservation of the English class system. He was even given a command. Not a first-rate vessel, of course – those were reserved for those with a public school or Dartmouth pedigree – but a LCT(R) (Landing Craft Tank, Rocket Armed), a kind of floating tea-tray, with what the Russians called a ‘Molotov Organ’ (multiple rocket barrels) mounted on it. It was not a craft to be proud of. But it had a formidable punch.

Golding’s experience in the navy convinced him that ‘man produces evil as a bee produces honey’. After the war he followed his father into the classroom where his observations of boys confirmed his beliefs about universal evil. He was not, one of his colleagues cattily recalled, a ‘gifted’ teacher. His nickname among the boys was ‘Scruff’. Over the post-war years he forged an idiosyncratic personal philosophy. Extraordinarily, as John Carey discloses, he never read with any attention ‘the three most crashing bores of the Western world’ – Marx, Freud and Darwin. According
to Carey, he went to his grave not even having read Thomas Hardy. When the two of them were visiting Salisbury Cathedral, the critic, and one of his principal supporters, Frank Kermode, asked Golding how he boned up the medieval construction techniques which are so meticulously described in
The Spire
(1964). ‘Oh’, Golding replied, ‘I just came here and said to myself, “if I were to build a spire how would I go about it?”’ He created his novels the same way. In the private journal to which Carey had privileged access, Golding recalls a fumbled juvenile attempted rape. More amusingly, he recalls discovering the joys of masturbation while shinning up a flagpole. He jilted a girl he was engaged to for the woman he married (Ann Brookfield). Guilt, and bad dreams, pursued him through life. Married for over fifty years, it seems there was never a moral lapse – other than, perhaps, too warm a friendship with the American scholar Virginia Tiger (wonderful name), which vexed Ann Golding mightily.

There was, undeniably, an ugly side to Golding, particularly in later life. He was frequently drunken, rude on occasion, arrogant and preoccupied with money. But Carey is at pains to stress how savagely hard Golding was on himself. He could never persuade himself that he was a good man. Those who knew him best thought he was. But regularly through life Golding would announce that had ‘Wilhelm Geltinger’ been born in Germany, not England, he would have been as happy an SS man as he was an RNVR officer.

The foundation stone of his career was the working partnership Golding forged with his Faber editor, Charles Monteith. It was Monteith who rescued the everywhere rejected
Lord of the Flies
from the slush pile, and crafted it into publishable shape with the author. Monteith would in fact be midwife to all the major works. They were all difficult deliveries. And, over the years, the novels themselves got more difficult. You can keep a dinner party conversation going for hours with
Lord of the Flies
(1954). Mention
Darkness Visible
(1979) and all you will hear is the clatter of cutlery on plates. As the silence grows oppressive, someone will venture how wonderful is the opening scene, where Matty – the burning child – emerges from a Blitz inferno. But thereafter, who can say what the novel is doing, for all the aura of power it exudes.

The social and artistic tensions which tormented Golding were evident at what should have been the most affirming moment of his professional life. Aged seventy-two, he received the first intimation that he was to be 1983 Nobel Laureate by phone, at 10 a.m., on the morning of 6 October. He was so informed by a Swedish journalist who said, tantalisingly, that he had a ’50–50 chance’. The award was confirmed by lunchtime. The 50 per cent adverse possibility was, despite the notorious secretiveness of the Stockholm literary committee, made public in the days
thereafter. One of the committee, the seventy-seven-year-old poet, Artur Lundkvist, had single-handedly tried to blackball Golding’s nomination, in favour of a Senegalese poet, Léopold Senghor. Lundkvist explained, ‘I simply didn’t consider Golding to possess the international weight needed to win the prize … I admire Anthony Burgess very much. He is of far greater worth than Golding and is much more controversial.’ The author of
Lord of the Flies
was, he concluded, ‘too nice’. Lundkvist’s spiteful criticisms soured what should have been the crowning moment of Golding’s literary career.

Vodka for breakfast.

John Cheever was born in New England, the son of a shoe salesman, an early casualty of the Great Depression. Slump meant a rackety childhood for young John. He grew up around Boston, disliking his mother, who was capable, and despising his father, who was incapably drunken. It was his mother, after her husband’s surrender to the bottle, who kept the family together. Contradictory feelings about his parents fed through into the torment of Cheever’s later life: why was he so wedded to suburban respectability when he so hated it? He poses the question himself, with rueful wit in the 1978 preface to his collected stories:

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like ‘the Cleveland Chicken.’

Fondly nostalgic, or clinically contemptuous? Even Cheever, one suspects, could not have said.

Like Scott Fitzgerald, Cheever is a connoisseur of the crack-up – but he survived. He is, similarly, a scrupulous topographer of Richard Yates’s ‘Revolutionary Road’, but he survived even that bourgeois hell. The author of ‘The Season of Divorce’ (if
one saw that title running wild in Arabia, one would scream ‘Cheever!’) – bisexual, anti-social (he never joined the Country Clubs he chronicled) and incorrigibly adulterous – Cheever died with a Mrs John Cheever of forty years by his bedside.

As a boy, he received a bad education at a good school – Thayer Academy. He was expelled in the twelfth grade on grounds (as he variously fictionalised the event in later life) of either sexual delinquency, smoking, or poor classroom performance. Interestingly, he barely scraped a ‘C-minus’ in English: his ‘best’ subject. He serenely turned his disgrace into a short story, and submitted it to Malcolm Cowley at the
New Republic
. The magazine published ‘Expelled’ in October 1930. Cheever had declared his precocious resolve to be a writer when he was eleven years old: he was now in print, in a top-rated national magazine, at eighteen. College was out of the question: times were too hard and his academic achievement too feeble. So young Cheever bummed for a couple of years around Boston. But it was, a friend told him, ‘a city without springboards for people who can’t dive’ (swimming was always Cheever’s sport). New York was the only place for writers. Cheever followed the advice. He was lucky, soon after arrival, to land a visiting berth at Yaddo. The writers’ colony was located ‘in the woods’, on 400 acres, at Saratoga Springs and hosted, in its four-star accommodation, the best young writers in the country. Cheever would return, like a migrating bird, throughout life. Yaddo confirmed where his real community was.

It was Cowley, Scott Fitzgerald’s literary adviser, who instructed Cheever to cultivate the short story as his
métier
and the
New Yorker
as his principal outlet. Harold Ross’s magazine, into which Cheever’s fiction slipped as easily as Cinderella’s foot, would be what he called his ‘lifeboat’. But a price was paid: throughout life, there would be the recurrent criticism, to which the author, in his gloomier moments, subscribed, that beneath the smart surface of his writing there was no more ‘substance’ than in a Charles Addams cartoon. After a brief spell with the Federal Writers’ Project, whose proletarian zeal appalled him (too much ‘substance’ by far) he married in 1941. Mary Winternitz was of Yale patrician stock. A talented woman, she deserves commemoration as probably the most tolerant spouse in literary history. Like other healthy males of his age Cheever was drafted. Like Richard Yates, he was judged not quite officer material (writers, alas, seldom are) but in his case sufficiently clerical not to be sent, along with his infantryman comrades, into the meat grinder of the Pacific theatre. Private Cheever was transferred into the signal corps and a cushy home posting which allowed him time to write voluminously. His first collection,
The Way Some People Live
, was published in 1943.

Demobilised, the Cheevers could live well on Mary’s income as a teacher and his $5,000 stipend from the
New Yorker
. In 1947 he published his everywhere anthologised story, ‘The Enormous Radio’. It bears all the author’s trademarks. The Westcotts
live on the twelfth floor of a Manhattan apartment house, in swish Sutton Place. Their principal leisure activity is classical music on the radio. But a new set which they acquire has the alarming habit of transmitting conversations going on in the other apartments. The Westcott marriage breaks up under the pressure of knowing what’s going on around them. The Cheevers (now parents) joined the middle-class, white-flight, migration to the suburbs in the early 1950s. At Scarborough, Westchester County (the ‘Shady Hill’ of his stories), Cheever would find his richest material. His first novel,
The Wapshot Chronicle
(effectively interknit short stories) was published in 1957. In the high Eisenhower era he was earning $50,000 a year or more: real money. In 1961 the family moved to Ossining, in Westchester. Cheever taught some creative writing classes at the nearby penitentiary, Sing Sing, the hardest of America’s hard-time ‘joints’. The homosexuality of the jail fascinated him.

In 1964, Cheever published his most famous story, ‘The Swimmer’ in the
New
Yorker, which opens: ‘It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I
drank
too much last night”.’ Neddy Merrill, hung over, middle-aged – but still possessed of the slenderness of youth – feels so good that he resolves not to sit around boozing but to swim from the Westerhazys’ pool to his own, in Bullet Park, eight miles away. He will dip in the string of neighbourly pools that connect them. Subtly, the story modulates into a version of Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’. Pool by pool, the wreckage of Neddy’s life gradually reveals itself: he is alcoholic, bankrupt, deserted by his wife, friendless. The story ends with him, naked and exhausted, pounding on the door of a house, which is no longer his, by an empty pool.

‘I want a life of impossible simplicity,’ Cheever wrote in his journal for 1966. Alcohol, uncertain sexuality and infidelity did not simplify things. He underwent therapy from the mid 1960s, but was too clever for his analysts to pin down. In 1975 he touched bottom and sobered up, with the help of AA, whose members, inevitably, he despised as freaks and losers. In recovery, he at last allowed himself to become guiltlessly homosexual. He could never, however, quite eradicate the uneasiness that his writing was less important ‘than ironing shirts in a Chinese laundry’. But the money and awards which showered on him reconciled him somewhat. In 1977, he even made the front cover of
Newsweek
magazine. It was in recovery, and at the top of the world, that he produced the novel
Falconer
(1977). Its ‘germ’ (as Henry James would call it) is outlined in a journal entry for 1977: ‘A story about a man of forty-six who enters prison. He falls in love with Jody, who escapes; he is visited by his wife; he suffers the agony of drug withdrawal; and he escapes.’
Falconer
’s thinly disguised Sing Sing is a world away from Shady Hill. But both are Cheever’s world.

After his death from kidney cancer, Cheever left his journal – an extraordinarily
self-searing document – to be published. The last entry reads: ‘I have climbed from a bed on the second floor to reach this typewriter. This was an achievement.’ He was, his son Benjamin records, ‘a writer almost before he was a man’. And it was as a writer he chose to die.

English life is really like an autopsy.
Durrell’s verdict on his homeland

Nobody who did not personally suffer post-war austerity will appreciate the intoxication with which my generation devoured Lawrence Durrell’s
The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive
and
Clea
), when its first volume appeared in 1957. Even now, my saliva glands moisten at the first marvellous words of
Balthazar
(1958):