Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (115 page)

As a civil servant, James was obliged to retire in her sixtieth year, which enabled her to turn her full attention to various good works on committees and writing. They were mainly, but not exclusively, Dalgliesh mysteries, a half a dozen of which appeared over the next fifteen years at two to three-year intervals. Their popularity was hugely boosted by TV adaptations, in which Dalgliesh was played by Roy Marsden as a moustached, taciturn, ruminative character. A radically different work was James’s dystopia,
The Children of Men
(1992). The point is, there are no children: it is 1994 (not for James a far distant catastrophe) and men’s fertility has plummeted, globally, to zero. No child is born after 1995 – sexual intercourse completes the journey it started with the pill in 1960. It is masturbation
à deux
. The world has been contracepted – society collapses. The novel was successfully filmed in 2009.

In 1991 James was made a life peer, sitting on the Conservative benches. In 1999, she published her autobiography,
Time to Be in Earnest
. It divulges relatively little of her private life (Faber wittily chose as its cover illustration half of her youthful portrait), but offers a vivid insight into her mind:

So tomorrow, on 3rd August, I shall write the first entry in a record which I propose to keep for one year, from my seventy-seventh to my seventy-eighth birthday. Will I persist with this effort? Only time will tell. And will I be here at the end of the year? At seventy-seven that is not an irrational question. But then is
it irrational at any age? In youth we go forward caparisoned in immortality; it is only, I think, in age that we fully realize the transitoriness of life.

There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell upon. I see no need to write about these things … Like dangerous and unpredictable beasts they lie curled in the pit of the subconscious…. But then I am a writer … I, a purveyor of popular genre fiction, and that great genius Jane Austen have the same expedient for taming our sleeping tigers.

The novel-writing cure, but not something available, alas, on the NHS. James suffered life-threatening heart failure in 2007. In hospital she devised what, it was said, would be her last (fourteenth) Dalgliesh novel,
The Private Patient
(2008) – murder in the operating theatre. Dalgliesh would be, by conservative estimate, some ninety years old by this date (still sprightlier than Poirot, who was applying his little grey cells to murders at the age of 130). The critic Peter Kemp identifies the essence of Dalgliesh mysteries as indeterminacy – solutions which remain cloudy: ‘Characteristically at the end of one of her novels the mystery has been solved but all sorts of other quandaries remain. In some cases the victim is more repulsive than the murderer and you can see why the murderer has done it.’ Often the murderer does it to purge the past – often the very distant past. In James’s 1997 bestseller,
A Certain Justice
, there is any number of suspects (seven, as I calculate) for Dalgliesh to ponder on when a rising young woman lawyer is killed. It turns out to be the oldest barrister in her chambers, a man in his mid-seventies, avenging a wrong of some thirty years ago.

Beneath the whodunnit plots, and the long evolution of Adam Dalgliesh’s interestingly deviant detective, P. D. James’s novels are obsessed (the word is not too strong) with the generational conflict between young and old professional classes and what one might call ‘the pathos of modernisation’. Her core readership, one suspects, is substantially composed of middle-aged, professional people, like herself, falling behind their time and none too pleased about it.

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.
Emerson

‘India’, linguists tell us, originally indicated every far-off country. ‘Raj’ is a word of Sanskrit origin, whose alternative modern form is the German ‘Reich’. Britain’s bloody conflict with the Third Reich in the early 1940s, and its scarcely less bloody struggle to preserve the 400-year-old Raj at the same period, supply the background to Paul Scott’s
Raj Quartet
. Those few years are, historically, the moment of truth when things fell apart to reveal what had always been at the centre of Empire. Many admirers of Scott will have had a threefold experience of the
Quartet
. They will have read the novels as they came out, fitfully, between 1966 and 1975, and reread them as a single, coherent, entity. And they will have viewed the twelve-part 1984 Granada Television adaptation,
The Jewel in the Crown
. The TV narrative was dominated, as is the
Quartet
, by Ronald Merrick, played by Tim Pigott-Smith. Merrick is a corrupt and brutal police superintendent as we first encounter him; a bemedalled colonel, and ostensibly happily married, as we (and India) take our leave of him in the final instalment.

It is fiendishly difficult to establish any moral line on Merrick. He is no simple villain. It’s complicated by the fact that his background is perplexingly parallel to that of his creator. Of lower-class origins (his father was a corner tobacconist) young Ronald was yanked out of school at fourteen. So too was fourteen-year-old Paul when his father’s business as a commercial artist went bust. An intelligent lad, Merrick had ‘just enough education to scrape into the Indian Police Service’. But not, of course, to hold the King’s Commission, until, that is, the Japanese victories of 1942, when the armed forces were only too happy to use men of his calibre. Merrick was later commissioned in the Indian Army Service Corps (an unsmart branch of the military). He could never have aspired to the promotion in peace-time. Merrick is said, behind his back in the ‘mess’ and the ‘club’, not to be ‘one of us’ – white, that is, but not ‘pukka’. Merrick’s CV is the mirror reflection of the author’s life. Scott was conscripted into the army as a private in 1940 and was shipped out to India three years later as an officer cadet with the scratch army mustered to repel an expected Japanese invasion (including, as it happened, Brian Aldiss). He would be an officer – but not
quite
a gentleman. ‘Scott’, as his biographer, Hilary Spurling, summarises it, ‘ended up a captain in the Indian Army Service Corps, organising supply lines for the Fourteenth Army’s unexpectedly successful reconquest of Burma’. Grocer to Britain’s frontline heroes, that is.

His uneasy social pedigree means Merrick can never give the ‘right’ answer to
that officer-class question ‘and where were you at school, Ronnie?’. But the same
déclassé
status in the mess gives him a clarity of vision denied his class-blinkered colleagues. ‘Amateurs’, as he contemptuously calls them. He sees colonial India for what it really is. So too, one assumes, did Scott. There are, of course, differences. Merrick is a repressed homosexual and lick-lipping sadist. Scott, for all his life-failings, wasn’t – at least not a sadist, as far as we know. Unlike Merrick, Scott had married in 1941. His wife Penny was a nurse and in later life a novelist herself. They had two daughters, both born after the war.

Demobbed and back in Civvy Street, Scott picked up his pre-war trade of accountant, before joining the firm of what was to become David Higham Associates as a literary agent in 1950 – in which capacity he was mightily vexing to his client, Muriel Spark (who mistakenly thought he was officer-class born and bred). Scott also had literary ambitions of his own – all deriving from his Indian experiences.
Johnny Sahib
(1952), rejected seventeen times, was the first of half-a-dozen post-colonial fictions. All, as Spurling meaningfully notes, deal with ‘complicated’ male friendship. In 1960 Scott gave up his day job (no small thing – he was now a director of the firm) to write novels. In 1964 ‘he flew back alone to India on a journey which he knew would make or break him as a writer’. It came close to breaking him. He was short of money, chronically unwell with amoebic dysentery, undergoing severe marital problems, and drinking like a fish. None the less, he was able, after a few months in the country, to embark on his great chronicle of the decline and fall of the Anglo-Indian Empire. Paul Scott knew that he had a great literary adversary when he conceived his quartet – namely the author of
A Passage to India
. ‘Forster’, Scott said, ‘loomed over literary India like a train terminus beyond which no other novelist could be permitted to travel.’ Scott ignored the ban: he was singularly immune to the ‘glamour’ of India which had so gripped Forster.

Quoted more than once in the
Quartet
is Emerson’s observation that ‘there is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time’. In awarding the Booker Prize in 1977 to the dying Scott, for his tailpiece novel to the
Quartet
, Philip Larkin paraphrased Emerson: ‘
Staying On
covers only a few months, but it carries the emotional impact of a lifetime, even a civilisation.’ Scott was not present to hear Larkin’s praise. He died, a few weeks later, in London’s Middlesex Hospital. His wife Penny had begun legal proceedings to end the marriage, but colon cancer got there first.

I never think about my ‘place’ in literature, and perhaps I have none.

Patricia Highsmith’s achievement was to produce fiction that contrives to be simultaneously repulsive and irresistibly readable. To paraphrase Thoreau, her characters live lives of quiet psychopathy.
A Suspension of Mercy
(1965) – sometimes the most mysterious things in Highsmith’s mysteries are the titles – is a typical invention. A couple, Sydney and Alicia, are living in rural Suffolk in a condition which, to the outside world, looks idyllic. He is a writer, she is an artist. But the picture-postcard appearance is illusion. The ‘inner’ Sydney and Alicia are ravening beasts:

Sometimes he plotted the murders, the robbery, the blackmail of people he and Alicia knew, though the people themselves knew nothing about it. Alex [his literary collaborator] had died five times at least in Sydney’s imagination. Alicia twenty times. She had died in a burning car, in a wrecked car, in the woods throttled by person or persons unknown, died falling down the stairs at home, drowned in her bath, died falling out the upstairs window while trying to rescue a bird in the eaves drain, died from poisoning that would leave no trace.

Alicia does indeed come to a sticky end.

Homicide is the rational response to the human condition in Highsmith’s moral universe. ‘Murder,’ she believed, ‘is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing.’ On the face of it, such apophthegms look like the bourgeois-offending small-talk of the existentialists, with whose left-bank doctrines Highsmith was infatuated in the late 1940s. There is, however, a difference. Unlike Meursault (she read
The Outsider
in 1947), Highsmith’s killers positively relish their killing. It’s as natural as, well, making love. The big difference between the classic Hitchcock movie
Strangers on a Train
(1951) and its source novel is that in Highsmith’s version Guy (literally a nice guy) does actually kill Bruno’s father, honouring the exchange of murder forged, over highballs, in the private compartment thundering across the Texas plains. Hitchcock’s targeted audience was not up for that. At least, not in 1951.

Crime and Punishment
was one of Highsmith’s favourite novels (she actually read it a couple of months before beginning
Strangers on a Train
), but her Raskolnikovs routinely escape the afflictions of law and conscience – and sometimes even punishment. In
The Glass Cell
(1964) the hero, Philip Carter, is wrongfully convicted and, in prison, strung up by the thumbs by sadistic guards. Mutilated and forcibly addicted to morphine by a homosexual prison doctor, he contrives to kill his torturer and, on his release, kill his faithful/faithless wife’s lover, before settling down happily to
carry on where he was before he went to prison. The novel ends with an exchange with a detective who knows, but cannot prove, Philip’s guilt:

‘We won’t stop watching you, Carter.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ Carter said. ‘I know.’

He’s in a glass cell – but so are we all.

Highsmith’s novel-writing career began with
Strangers on a Train
. Even more out of step with her moralising, Eisenhowerian time is her second published novel,
The Price of Salt
(1952), brought out under the pseudonym ‘Claire Morgan’. A lesbian romance, the story originated in Highsmith’s own life. Working to keep body and soul together in Bloomingdale’s (it was not until late in her career that she made real money writing) she was struck by a rich, sophisticated and, as it emerged, married customer. It was love at first sight – the accidental encounter is always central in her world – and Highsmith, as does her heroine, stalked ‘Carol’ and won her from a furious, litigious husband. The couple go on a wild drive across America (an inspiration, it is plausibly surmised, for the hit film,
Thelma and Louise
). What makes the novel remarkable for its time is not merely the full-blooded lesbianism, but the fact that the affair ended happily. ‘Prior to this book,’ Highsmith wrote in a 1989 afterword, ‘homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing – alone and miserable and shunned – into a depression equal to hell.’