Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (114 page)

He promptly began writing novels drawing on Fante and Hemingway, using his distinctive spare, dismembered, ironic and self-centred style. Above all, his fiction was ‘real’. ‘Writing,’ he once said, ‘was never work for me … All I had to do was be there.’ New women passed through his life. He used them (cruelly in some cases) in his 1978 novel,
Women
. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Bukowski’s reputation grew – he was becoming a literary cult. The image was carefully promoted by readings in which he would drunkenly rant and turn violently on his audience. They lapped it up. His readings survive in a DVD entitled
There’s Gonna be a God Damn Riot in Here
. In point of fact, as Howard Sounes records, the ‘God Damn Riot’ was all an act. But a good one – and profitable: he could pull in as much as $1,000 a riot.

The tenor of his personal life was less riotous. In the 1970s he embarked on a relationship with the sculptress Linda King. According to his publisher, John Martin, ‘she was probably the first real sexual relationship he’d ever had in his life’. He bought a house and a smart BMW. He was still drinking heavily – but he had always been able to handle quantities which would destroy less robust writers. These were the years of what he grandly called his ‘final decadence’ – but none the less in a comfortable house he owned, with a good car and a well-stocked full refrigerator. And always a new woman. In 1976 Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle. She was twenty-four years his junior and an aspiring actress. The relationship lasted, in the usual on-and-off way, and they married in 1985. Worldwide fame, and the monumentalisation of the Bukowski image, came with the movie
Barfly
, two years later, in which Mickey Rourke played Chinaski and Faye Dunaway played ‘Wanda’ (i.e. Baker). Bukowski’s mixed feelings about the movie are inscribed in his outrageous 1989
roman-à-clef, Hollywood
. See, for example, his pen portrait of ‘Tab Jones’, a Welsh singer who has made it big in Las Vegas:

Here is this Tab Jones. He sings. His shirt is open and the black hairs on his chest show. The hairs are sweating. He wears a big silver cross in these sweating hairs. His mouth is a horrible hole cut into a pancake. He’s got on tight pants and he’s wearing a dildo. He grabs his balls and sings about all the good things he can do for women. He really sings badly, I mean, he is
terrible
. All about what he can do to women, but he’s a fake, he really wants his tongue up some man’s anus.

Poor Tom.

In his later years Bukowski became very rich but never admitted to himself that he had sold out. He died, not of the booze he had swilled all his life, but of leukaemia, leaving behind his last novel,
Pulp
. His gravestone (arguably his last poem) reads:

Henry Charles Bukowski Jr.

Hank

(‘Don’t Try’)

1920–1994

Between the dates is the image of a professional boxer.

She’s a tremendous help when I’m looking for words.

Francis was born in Pembrokeshire of semi-gentrified stock. His father was a prosperous dealer in horseflesh, and the child grew up surrounded by the beasts which would be the most important thing in his life. Infant Dick won his first race, aged eight, and left school at fifteen, intending to be a jockey. A sudden growth and weight spurt in his teens meant that his chosen line would be ‘jump’, not ‘flat’ – the sport of kings and midgets. Francis was an unusual child in wanting to grow up but not to grow.

Of military service age when war broke out, Francis volunteered for the cavalry but was recruited into the RAF – first as a non-commissioned engine-fitter, then, after much pestering on his part, as a pilot. He got his wings, and his pips, in 1944. In his autobiography, he says that he was actively involved in the dam-buster raid. Since that heroic event took place in 1943, he could not have done – unless as a civilian stowaway with the bouncing bombs in the bomb-bay. In fact his war service was disappointingly uneventful, though not, it must be said, from any lack of personal pluck. The career he chose on leaving the service in 1947 meant at least one bone-breaking fall a season and bruises all the way. On his marriage, in the same year, 1947, photographs show the bridegroom’s right arm in a sling. Francis would break his collar bone nine times in his riding career – a recurrent injury that eventually drove him out of the sport. His wife Mary was a graduate in modern languages,
a teacher and a woman of extraordinary energy (even after a bout of polio in 1949) and of volubly right-wing views. They had two sons, Merrick and Felix. The year 1947 was a good one in every way for Francis, with sixteen wins and marriage to the woman of his life.

Francis was always reckoned in the top ten of his profession, and as champion jockey in 1953–7, he rode for the Queen Mother. But in 1956 Francis’s life, as he liked to say, ‘ended’. Everything else would be ‘afterlife’. It was a dramatic final act: in the Grand National that year, riding for the QM, leading the field by many lengths, Francis’s horse, Devon Loch mysteriously collapsed only yards short of the finishing line. Francis had never won the National, the peak of a jump jockey’s career, and his disappointment was bitter. Was Devon Loch nobbled? Perhaps; it’s a recurrent theme in Francis’s thrillers. But the most likely explanation seems to have been a gigantic fart which was so explosive as to prostrate the unluckily flatulent beast. Francis retired, having ridden 2,305 races and 345 winners. In his retirement he began writing insider and tipster columns for the
Sunday Express
, a line of work (pitifully paid) which he continued until 1973. His first racing world thriller,
Dead Cert
, came out in 1962. He would thereafter, until 2001, produce one a year.

According to the novelist himself, he was no Henry James: ‘I start at
Chapter 1
, page 1, and plod on to THE END.’ Starting gates and finishing lines made him comfortable. His invariable practice was to begin a new book every 1 January, and deliver the MS to Michael Joseph on 8 May for publication in September. As
Private Eye
put it, with neat sarcasm, in 1992: ‘All his novels are narrated by a male hero. Although this hero begins with a handicap, whether physical or psychological (bereavement, divorce, unrequited love, family tragedy, whatever), he always comes out a winner, proving himself brave and honest, honourable and taciturn, heterosexual but horse-loving, one of nature’s gents.’ What one detects in the above – as with many who profess to be dismissive of Francis – is that the (anonymous) critic clearly
reads
the novels. Once opened, a Francis thriller sticks to the eyes like glue.

Nobbling and criminal betting coups are recurrent plot devices. In racing circles, Francis is routinely accused of bringing his sport into disrepute. The charge is belied by his evident love of it. His series hero Sid Halley, injured former champion jockey, is self-confessedly a version of the author (see, for example,
Odds Against
(1965),
Whip Hand
(1979) – Francis has a knack in racy titles).
Forfeit
(1968) is regarded as Francis’s most self-revealing novel. His autobiography,
The Sport of Queens
(1957), is anything but self-revealing. According to Julian Symons (the critic who made crime fiction critically respectable), ‘Francis has been overpraised.’ One of his more famous overpraisers was Philip Larkin, who declared Francis ‘always 20 times more readable than the average Booker entry’ (he knew whereof he spoke – Larkin was
chair of the panel in 1978. Francis, alas, was not longlisted for
Trial Run
). Francis was also a favourite with Kingsley Amis, Queen Elizabeth II, and, of course, his employer, her ‘mum’.

Dick and Mary Francis, both broken in body, retired to Florida in their last years. Graham Lord’s flagrantly ‘unauthorised’ biography, published in 1999, alleged outright that Mary had ghosted every one of the ‘Dick Francis’ novels. According to Lord, she confirmed his thesis, telling him that her authorship was suppressed in order to preserve the ‘taut … masculine’ feel of the works. Two pieces of evidence support Lord. First is the fact that the Francises did not sue him. Second that on Mary’s death in 2000 Francis ‘retired’ from writing. He came back, eight years later, in ‘collaboration’ with his son Felix. But what does it matter? Horses don’t win races by themselves: jockeys don’t win races by themselves – they win them in partnership. Why shouldn’t it be the same with novels? He was the horse, she was the jockey.

Taming our sleeping tigers.

There is a telling moment in
Original Sin
(P. D. James’s ninth novel, published 1994) when Adam Dalgliesh, P. D. James’s well-read Scotland Yard detective and published poet, with special responsibility for ‘sensitive’ cases, surveys the study of a deceased and old-fashioned spinster detective novelist. No one likes Esmé Carling’s brand of fiction any more. Her bookshelves Dalgliesh notes (with an uneasy sense of his own superannuation), are dominated by ‘women writers of the Golden Age’:

Surveying the titles so reminiscent of the 1930s, of village policemen cycling to the scene of the murder, tugging their forelocks to the gentry, of autopsies undertaken by eccentric general practitioners after evening surgery and unlikely denouements in the library, he took them out and glanced at them at random.
Death by Dancing
, apparently set in the world of formation ballroom competitions,
Cruising to Murder, Death by Drowning, The Mistletoe Murders
. He replaced them carefully, feeling no condescension.

James, seventy-four years old when she published
Original Sin
, belongs, in terms
of years lived, to Esmé Carling’s generation. In terms of the evolution of her genre – the crime novel – she writes very much to the present. Moreover she has taken that genre to levels of literary respectability far beyond those represented by Gladys Mitchell (1901–83), clearly the target of James’s mild satire here (Mitchell, oddly, was Philip Larkin’s favourite crime novelist; for her cosiness, one suspects). Ruth Rendell, James’s coeval in the genre, hails
Original Sin
as ‘the
Middlemarch
of crime novels’ – in other words, ‘Literature’.

Phyllis Dorothy James was born in 1920 in Oxford, into a gas-lit world permeated by the ‘distinctive odour of Anglicanism’ – to which she remains faithful. Her father, just back from machine-gunning Germans, worked in the Inland Revenue. Her upbringing, as she recalls it in her autobiography, was glum but not cruel. In a
Guardian
interview she recalled that ‘My storytelling began very early, certainly well before I was 10. We lived then in Ludlow on the Welsh borders and my younger sister, brother and I slept in one large nursery, a double bed for Monica and myself, and Edward in a single one against the wall. I was expected at night to tell them stories until either I rebelled or they fell asleep. The stories were invariably improbably exciting and mysterious, and the animal hero was called, somewhat unoriginally, Percy Pig.’

She realised, almost as soon as she was capable of realising anything, that she was the child of an unhappy marriage. Her father, an intelligent man, suffered from that post-First World War trauma then called ‘neurasthenia’ – dead emotions. Her mother, a warm, ‘unintelligent’ woman, had a total nervous breakdown and was forcibly institutionalised in an asylum when Phyllis was fourteen. Her memory of the event – one of the most damaging of her life – is ‘blank’, suppressed. The running of the house, and care of Monica and Edward, devolved on her as eldest child. She was, from childhood, eminently capable of taking such things on. Why does this gifted woman choose to write detective stories? Because, she says, she loves ‘structure’ and ‘order’. And – one might impertinently presume – is simultaneously running away from the acute disorder of her childhood. ‘Even as a child,’ she recalls, ‘I had a sense that I was two people; the one who experienced the trauma, the pain, the happiness, and the other who stood aside and watched with a disinterested ironic eye.’

Aged sixteen, she was obliged by the family’s financial difficulties to leave school, where she would have done well, to work at various clerking jobs. While helping out with a festival dramatic production in Cambridge she met and fell in love (not ‘overwhelmingly’) with a medical student, Connor Bantry White. They married in 1941, ‘five days after I came of age’. Everyone was marrying – it was the war. But as with her father, the war did not end with peace. Returning from service abroad in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Connor began to show signs of mental illness and
alcoholism. James, meanwhile, had risen in her line of work (the wartime absence of male competition helped) to a professional level. She was, in her thirties, a senior administrator in the health service in London.

Like Trollope, she had long been in the habit of getting up before ‘work’ to write. ‘I think,’ she recalls, ‘I knew that I would be a novelist almost as soon as I was able to read, but for a variety of reasons – including the war, my husband’s illness, the need to find and persevere in a safe career which would provide the necessary weekly cheque – I was a late starter.’ Her debut novel – and Adam Dalgliesh’s –
Cover Her Face
(the Othello allusion hints at her own desperately unhappy marriage, as does the reversion to her maiden name) appeared in 1962. ‘P. D. James’ was forty-two years old. Her chosen pen name led many readers to assume she was a man. In what D. H. Lawrence called the ‘man’s world’ she was a ‘flier’. She had now moved to the Home Office where, following fast-track promotion, she was placed in charge of the Criminal Policy department. In 1964 her husband, after having spent years in various mental institutions, died at home of an overdose of drink and drugs, leaving two children for his wife to look after alone – he was forty-four years old. It was probably suicide. She thinks of him tenderly every day, she records in her autobiography.