Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (121 page)

In later years Aldiss reviewed his life in terms of four categories:

Bookshop = Commerce, Prison

Literature = University, Privilege

Far East = Poverty, Sun

SF = Freedom, Creativity.

He committed himself to SF and Freedom and Creativity, while serving gowned students (most, as he could not but observe, less well read than him). Aldiss made his Commerce + Prison-break when his first SF novel,
Non-Stop
(1958), was accepted by Faber, then headed by T. S. Eliot – an unlikely stroke of luck. Persuaded by the firm’s editor Charles Monteith and Bruce Montgomery, friend of fellow SF-fan, Kingsley Amis, the most distinguished house in literary London was taking an interest in the genre. There were, Russell Square discovered (some fifty years after the fans had made the discovery), jewels in the pulp. It was Faber which took on
Lord of the Flies
after a dozen or more publishers had turned Golding down. As a practitioner of SF, Aldiss always embraced cultural risk, irrespective of how many strokes on the bum it might get him from life’s boarding-house masters. He despised the ‘safe’ SF of John Wyndham, a writer he compared to a ‘tea-cosy salesman for the Home Counties’. Not for Aldiss the ‘cosy catastrophe’ to be found in Wyndham’s triffided England: Aldiss’s visions were genuinely, not reassuringly, apocalyptic – and eerily prophetic as well. In
Earthworks
(1965), the ‘Green’, chemical-driven, agricultural revolution has produced a world in which cancer, and the death of wild flora and fauna, is universal. The novel is Rachel Carson’s
Silent Sprin
g (1962) science-fictionalised. SF such as he, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner and William S. Burroughs practised was, Aldiss said, ‘prodromic’: it diagnosed the ‘now’ more accurately than realism ever could.

As the country’s leading SF practitioner (contesting the title with Arthur C.
Clarke and J. G. Ballard), Aldiss resolutely expanded the frontiers of his genre, as well as its literary seriousness, creating a genuinely British style. Surfing the ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s, he wrote a Joycean experimental narrative –
Barefoot in the Head
(1969) – which infuriated the conservative fan-base – but then, so did Joyce. Aldiss, who had reviewed books for years for the
Oxford Times
, drew up the first comprehensive account of his genre in
Billion Year Spree
(1973), mapping its sprawling borders and raising its literary dignity by endowing it with a history. As a historian, he sees the origin of the genre – its ‘big bang’ – in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. The concept is played with in his witty fantasia,
Frankenstein Unbound
(1973).

Aldiss’s ‘straight’ fiction is as edgy as his SF. Martin Amis famously joked that in
Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth took the American novel all the way from the bedroom to the bathroom. In his Portnoyish ‘Horatio Stubbs’ trilogy (1970–78), Aldiss took the English novel from the Hampstead drawing room to the wanking exploits of the dorm and the barrack room. The Stubbsiad was accepted by Hutchinson but later rejected as ‘filth’ when the old-school proprietor of the firm happened to glance at the proofs of the first volume,
A Hand-Reared Boy
(1970). The book went on, inevitably, to be a bestseller under a more trendily sixtyish imprint.

In a striking parallelism with Ballard, Aldiss traces the origin of his creativity to childhood trauma. In late life, under therapy, as his second marriage was crumbling, he ‘recovered’ a primal memory, in which, aged three, his father – enraged by the baby’s yowling – had held him out of a window. Infant Aldiss ‘died’ from shock and had to be resuscitated. ‘That brutish act had its effect on my mental development … [it]
caused
me.’ More importantly, it caused the author in him: ‘I wrote SF because I suspected the world was not as others saw it.’ Aldiss was awarded an OBE in 2005 and deposited his literary remains at the Bodleian, the library of a university he never attended and which to this day regards SF as something sub-literary – unless, of course, written by C. S. Lewis.

I’m not gonna say anymore than I have to, if that.
Chili Palmer

The greatest American novelist never to be mentioned in the same breath as ‘Nobel Prize’, Leonard was born into a Catholic household in New Orleans. His father was employed by General Motors (motto: ‘What’s good for GM is good for America’) whose work eventually brought the family to the company’s home town, Detroit, in the early 1930s. This was where Leonard stayed for most of his long life – although his speech, as interviewers noted, retained a southern lilt. When asked why, in old age, he had not moved to more clement climes – say Florida (where novels like
Stick
(1982) and
LaBrava
(1983) are set) or southern California (where
Get Shorty
(1990) and
Be Cool
(1999) are set) he says: ‘Because I know all the streets now, and I’m too old to learn the streets anywhere else.’ A more likely reason is his ‘biblical’ tribe of children (five), and (too many to count) grandchildren – and, as it happens, he just likes the grimy, run-down, once booming, city.

Leonard’s lifelong love-affair with gunplay (or, more properly, the idea of it) was triggered shortly after his arrival in Detroit in the early 1930s. A journalist interviewing him in the 1990s noticed in his study a photograph of the young Elmore, ‘dressed in a cap and suit, foot on the step of a curvy-bumpered car, brandishing a gun’. It’s a child’s re-enactment of the famous pose struck by Bonnie Parker, made famous the second time around in the 1960s movie,
Bonnie and Clyde
. Leonard confirmed the allusion, adding: ‘There is something about that time which affected me. It was said that there were probably twenty bank robbers for every doctor in America then, and I was certainly aware of the desperadoes. I was aware of what was going on with Bonnie and Clyde, and Pretty Boy Floyd. It was in the papers all the time. They were all killed, but the important ones were killed in 1934.’ In Leonard’s latest phase, with novels such as
The Hot Kid
(2005) and
Up in Honey’s Room
(2007), he returns to the Bonnie and Clyde era which so entranced him as a boy.

The Leonard household was wholly uncriminal, mildly bookish (his mother was a Book of the Month Club subscriber) and Leonard credits his sister with getting him to read avidly. At school he was nicknamed ‘Dutch’, after a now long-forgotten professional baseball pitcher. Leonard was obsessed with baseball, almost as much as with gangsters, and ‘Dutch’ stuck. He graduated from high school in 1943, and was recruited into the Navy ‘Seabees’ – construction battalions. He wanted to be a marine, but his eyes were too weak. In 1946, on the GI Bill, he studied English and Philosophy at the University of Detroit. By the time of his graduation in 1950, he was already married to his first wife, Beverly. He worked for a while as a copy writer
for an advertising firm – which he hated. He was getting up at five to write fiction – which he liked. He had composed a couple of ‘literary things’ at university, but couldn’t get them past quibbling editors. There was, he correctly anticipated, less quibble downmarket and he began writing Westerns on the Max Brand model. He had studied Hemingway’s short story, ‘The Killers’, and absorbed its laconic style, letting the white space between words do the hard work, letting the dialogue do the talking and letting the narrative hang on the page.

His work sold. ‘I’ve always been successful’, he says. Two of his early stories were optioned (at $5,000 apiece) for what became very superior movies in the new ‘psychological Western’ mode:
The Tall T
(1957) – bungled stagecoach robbery, and
3:10 to Yuma
(1957) – honest guy has to take a criminal to justice in Yuma, with the criminal’s gang likely to get to him before the train arrives. In both, Leonard builds up a complex interfusion of hero and villain. It is handled even more successfully in the finest film adapted from his Westerns,
Hombre
(1967), another bungled stagecoach robbery. The story for
Hombre
was published in 1961, when Leonard was moving away from the Western into crime-writing – his true
métier
, as admirers believe – although the motive was commercial. Boots and saddles had worn out their charm in Hollywood – smart thrillers were very much in. As a crime writer, Leonard mingled his existing style with that of George V. Higgins, the Boston-based author of
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
. Even more than Hemingway, Higgins’s narrative pivoted on terse dialogue and ultra-tight plotting, making the reader work hard to fill the gaps. There was also a new street crudity of diction. Leonard’s mother was appalled: ‘Why don’t you write those Westerns any more?’ she asked, ‘they were so
nice
.’

Leonard’s early crime novels were set in Detroit – the ‘city primeval’ as he called it. The best is
52 Pick-Up
(1974) – businessman has fling, is blackmailed by sadist crook and goes vigilante, ingeniously. Leonard’s later fiction roams far from Motown.
Glitz
(1985), the first of his novels to make the
New York Times
bestseller list, is set in Atlantic City and Puerto Rico;
Maximum Bob
(1991) in Palm Beach.
Pagan Babies
(2000) switches between Rwanda and Detroit. All, however, have Leonard’s hallmark crispness and – the later works particularly – a play of enigmatic comedy over the action, however brutal. It creates a distinctive taste.

One work of Leonard’s is different, though.
Touch
was written in 1977, but held back for ten years lest, as his publishers feared, it contaminate the tough-guy Elmore Leonard brand. He had been a heavy drinker for many years and was out of control by the early 1970s. He bobbed in and out of AA, and finally took his last drink at 9 o’clock, on 24 January 1977. His first marriage collapsed at the same time.
Touch
seems to return to the faith of the author’s childhood. A young Michigan man, it
seems, can make the blind see and perform miracles. He works with alcoholics: poor sods who need miracles, if anyone does.
Touch
can be glossed as a public vote of thanks to the ‘fellowship’ – AA. A ‘recovering’ Leonard remarried twice, the third time after his second wife died of cancer. He did not, as he says, like being single. Leave that to his heroes, like Stick.

Leonard’s genius extends beyond what is found on the pages of his books. Uniquely, he inspires film directors and stars to their best work. Directors such as Budd Boetticher, Barry Sonnenfeld, John Frankenheimer, Martin Ritt and Steven Soderbergh make up a distinguished roll call, as do the Leonard movies they have done. Paul Newman and Richard Boone, playing against each other, have never given better performances than they did in
Hombre
. Leonard sharpens things. The director with whom Leonard has collaborated most fruitfully is Quentin Tarantino, in
Jackie Brown
(1997) – the novel was called
Rum Punch
(1992). Tarantino’s masterwork,
Pulp Fiction
, can be read as an extended and subtle homage to Leonard. Among the most distinguished of his literary admirers is Martin Amis, who is on record as thinking that alongside Leonard, even Raymond Chandler looks clumsy – rather like saying Nureyev can’t dance or Glenn Gould can’t play. Leonard good-naturedly side-steps such encomiums: ‘I don’t have all the words like Martin Amis. He uses words I’ve never heard of; ones I’ve never seen on paper.’

I live mainly in my work.

O’Connor’s biographer, Brad Gooch, takes as his epigraph the author’s wry put-down: ‘There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.’ Poultry were, in fact, a very big thing in O’Connor’s life. Not least because, as she said (wry as ever) the birds did not know she was a writer. When O’Connor was just five years old, the Pathé News company dispatched a cameraman from its main offices in New York City to film a ‘buff Cochin bantam’ that she had, reportedly, taught to walk backwards. ‘From that day,’ she recalled, ‘I began to collect chickens.’ In later life her preference extended to the collection of more exotic fowl – particularly peacocks.

O’Connor was born, raised and lived her life Catholic in what she liked to call ‘the Protestant South’. Throughout her life she attended mass daily. Her fiction is as Catholic – if differently so – as that of Graham Greene or François Mauriac, her most admired fellow novelist. In O’Connor’s Deep South, Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, were only a notch or two above Jews and Negroes in the social pecking order. Legislation such as the outrageous Convent Inspection Bill (designed to check that the Church was not into the kind of white slavery popularised by Maria Monk) was still on the books – if no longer in force – at the time of O’Connor’s birth. She was born in Savannah, Georgia, a town for which she had no affection in later life – not that she did for any city. Of her state capital, she wisecracked: ‘My idea about Atlanta is to get in, get it over, and get out before dark.’ At least she never, like another Southern novelist, pictured it burned to the ground (‘I sure am sick of the Civil War,’ she once said – and sick of novels like Margaret Mitchell’s as well). None the less, memorials of the ‘war’ were unforgettably all around her as she grew up. She was christened Mary Flannery O’Connor, her middle name that of a Civil War hero. Why were Southern novelists so good? she was once asked. ‘Because we lost,’ she briskly replied.