Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (123 page)

Lie Down
was published in 1951, to superb reviews. Just twenty-six years old, Styron was suddenly at the top of the tree. His life thereafter was one of comfortable international ‘wander’ (his word).
Lie Down
earned him a Prix de Rome fellowship and he moved from the Italian capital to Paris, where he was instrumental in setting up the
Paris Review
in 1953. In one of its hallmark author interviews, Styron revealed that in his study he had posted over his desk a slogan from Flaubert: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’ Drink, he found, was the catalyst for the necessary creative violence: ‘I used alcohol’, he later wrote, ‘as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria.’ It made the syrup pour. Around this period in Paris, Styron read Camus for the first time. It ‘set the tone’ for all his subsequent fiction. Put another way, it rinsed Faulkner out of his system and ‘cleansed my intellect’. ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ said it all for Styron: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’ As he later observed, in his introspective tract,
Darkness Visible
, suicide is the mainspring of all his plots – and he diced with it himself throughout his life.

Following the bourgeois injunction over his desk, in 1953 he had married Rose Burgunder, a department-store heiress from Baltimore. They returned to live in a converted farmhouse in Connecticut in the 1960s and remained happily married there for over half a century. Meanwhile, Styron’s next work
The Long March
(1956)
was inspired by his training for Korea. A reservist, Jack Culver, is called back to the service after six years in which he has grown flabby, thoughtful and wholly unbelligerent. The narrative opens with a Camusian ‘absurdity’. A couple of duff mortar shells (held-over ordnance from the Second World War) have fallen short, killing eight of Culver’s men, as they stood in a chow line. The story opens: ‘One noon, in the blaze of a cloudless Carolina summer, what was left of eight dead boys lay strewn about the landscape, among the poison ivy and the pine needles and loblolly saplings.’ Friendly fire, they call it. It is followed by another absurdity – a pointless, Sisyphean, 36-mile night march. Out of these absurdities, meaning is forged. Culver works out the peculiar compromise the civilian-warrior has to make.

Styron’s pre-marital European years were the background to his second full-length novel,
Set This House on Fire
(1960). Set principally in Italy, it unravels, in cunning flashback, a rape, a murder and, inevitably, a suicide. The novel went down well in Europe, but left the Anglo-American reader cold. Styron would, however, generate heat in plenty with his next novel. In his Connecticut retirement he had made close friends with James Baldwin. As Styron recalled, ‘Night after night Jimmy and I talked, drinking whisky through the hours until the chill dawn. He was spellbinding, and he told me more about the frustrations and anguish of being a black man in America than I had known until then.’ These drink-sodden nocturnal conversations were the germ for
The Confessions of Nat Turner
(1967). Turner was, historically, the leader of ‘the only effective revolt in the annals of American Negro Slavery’, which had taken place not far from where Styron had been born, in 1831. The rebellion was put down without too much trouble and Turner was hanged. The novel opens with him in his cell, awaiting trial (the scenario, Styron admitted, was lifted from
L’Étranger
). Why did he do it? Nat – like Camus’s Meursault – has no plausible answer.

The novel was published in 1967, just three years after the Civil Rights Act, two years after the Watts riots in Los Angeles, a year after the formation of the Black Panthers, and a few months before the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was OK for a white lady abolitionist to create ‘Uncle Tom’ in 1852 but it was not all right for a rich white Southerner (who didn’t even live there, for God’s sake) to think he could, because he was a ‘liberal,’ get inside a hero of the Black struggle a hundred years later. Nat Turner’s ‘
Confessions
’ went straight to the top of the
New York Times
bestseller list and the top of the unofficial Index Librorum Prohibitorum for every right-thinking intellectual and black radical of the time. The novel won a Pulitzer, but that did not redeem it. Nor did the defence mounted by James Baldwin. All that Baldwin wanted, declared Eldridge Cleaver (with a sneer at the other writer’s known homosexuality), was to be fucked by white men. The novel provoked hate mail and
physical threats. ‘The whole thing,’ Styron told the British journalist James Campbell, ‘soured me in being a friend of black people … and I hate to say that.’

There followed years of silence before the publication of Styron’s last major work,
Sophie’s Choice
(1979). This novel intertwines yet another portrait of Styron (‘Stingo’) as a young man in post-war New York with the story of a mysterious Polish immigrant, Sophie Zawistowska, a fellow boarder at his lodging house. She is, it emerges, a non-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. Her ‘choice’ was which child to sacrifice to the Dr Mengele figure and the SS executioners:

‘So you believe in Christ the Redeemer?’ the doctor said in a thick-tongued but oddly abstract voice, like that of a lecturer examining the delicately shaded facet of a proposition in logic. Then he said something which for an instant was totally mystifying: ‘Did he not say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me”?’ He turned back to her, moving with the twitchy methodicalness of a drunk.

Sophie, with an inanity poised on her tongue and choked with fear, was about to attempt a reply when the doctor said, ‘You may keep one of your children.’

‘
Bitte
?’ said Sophie.

‘You may keep one of your children,’ he repeated. ‘The other one will have to go. Which one will you keep?’

‘You mean, I have to choose?’

‘You’re a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege – a choice.’

Stingo’s consummating act of love with her, and Sophie’s final, Styronian, act (the self-chosen death, inevitability) are the novel’s climax. Styron received the record-breaking sum of $750,000 for the novel’s film rights and the adaptation appeared in 1982. Meryl Streep won an Oscar for her portrayal of Sophie.

Over the remaining quarter of a century of his long life, Styron’s only major publication (some short stories aside) was his confessional study of his lifelong depression,
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
(1990). He never completed his planned great work,
The Way of the Warrior
, a novel about the Korean conflict in which he had nearly been involved.

It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

Perennial thorn in the thigh of authority, John Berger has been a political presence in British fiction since the publication of his first novel,
A Painter of Our Time
, in 1958. The painter of the title, a ‘disappeared’ Hungarian exile, is reconstructed through his diary – a document reflecting the oppressions on artistic expression of totalitarianism and the scarcely less sinister oppressions of the self-proclaimed ‘free world’. The novel raised the ire of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (a body devised to roll back the tide of Marxist-intellectual orthodoxy infecting Europe) which attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress
A Painter of Our Time
in the name of cultural freedom – neatly proving the novel’s point.

Berger was born in Hackney, London, the son of a former army officer, Jewish by origin, who had converted to Christianity and had at one point aspirations to the priesthood. Berger’s Englishness is, as he points out, only one generational layer deep. He may not, he sometimes feels, belong here: ‘When I first went to Eastern Europe in the 50s, I had a very strange feeling. I had a feeling that there were little details of daily life which were incredibly familiar to me, although in fact I had never seen them before.’ He had ‘two educations’, Berger claims, though school supplied neither of them. His first education began when he ran away, aged sixteen, to study at the Chelsea School of Art ‘and see naked women’. It was the early 1940s. The war-time company he kept outside school ‘was largely European refugees from fascism – political, mostly Jewish refugees’. Rootlessness would be his big theme.

Aged eighteen, he was conscripted into the armed forces, just as the war was coming to an end. On being demobbed he returned to the Chelsea School, studying, teaching and writing on art for the papers, notably those of a congenially left-wing persuasion, such as
Tribune
(where he was a colleague of George Orwell) and the
New Statesman
. This mingling of theory and practice, together with his fervid political radicalism, fed into his influential TV series, and accompanying monograph,
Ways of Seeing
(BBC, 1972), which introduced a generation of British viewers to the excitements of materialist aesthetics. The series was conceived as a counterblast to Kenneth Clark’s high-connoisseurial series,
Civilisation
, three years earlier. Was ‘art’ something rich people hung on walls? Or the people’s weapon against those rich people? Like other British intellectuals, Berger was bitterly disillusioned with international communism after the 1956 invasion of Hungary, although he has always maintained the intellectual rigour formed in his ‘Permanent Red’ (as he
later called them) years. At the same period in the 1950s, he gave up painting for writing as his main vocation. Berger’s writing since has ranged over higher journalism, film screenplays and – increasingly – fiction and social pamphleteering (sometimes the two mix with Berger). Early novels such as
The Foot of Clive
(1962) and
Corker’s Freedom
(1964) are neo-realistic, reminiscent of David Storey, with whose work Berger’s, at this period, has clear similarities. Both writers, interestingly, are trained pictorial artists.

Berger’s great success in fiction came with the more overtly modernist
G.
(1972), a Kafkaesque study of alienated hyperconsciousness, set in the 1890s.
G
. – controversially – scooped both the Booker and James Tait Black prizes in 1972 and the author caused a huge stir when, on being presented the Booker award cheque, he disrupted the normally stultifyingly serene, black-tie ceremony by turning on the industrial combine which sponsored the event, accusing them of exploiting black labour in the West Indies. He would, he declared, give half the money to the Black Panthers. The movement, it subsequently emerged, no longer existed – but the gesture, politically empty and histrionic as it was, rocked the literary world. Perversely it was also rather good for the Booker Prize on the ‘any publicity is good publicity’ principle.

Since 1962 Berger has lived in a small village in the French Alps, a setting he has used in his fiction. He has over the years taken up the causes of both the European peasant and the European immigrant, the two great victim groups of the so-called European Union; see, for example, his polemic,
A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe
(1975). This, he says, has been ‘My second education … It began about 25 years ago [he is speaking in the late 1980s], when I moved to a village in the Alps. The people there, with whom I became quite close, were older peasants who had once been the children of subsistence farmers. From them I learned a lot about nature, the land, the seasons and a set of priorities by which they tried to live. I learned quite a lot of practical, physical tasks and a kind of ethical code.’

Detached from England, Berger’s fictional settings have correspondingly internationalised.
To the Wedding
(1995), his most accomplished novel after
G.
, has a sero-positive heroine and examines the human repercussions of Aids, a subject from which – like immigration – modern fiction has largely averted its eyes. Berger has always made himself look at what others would not, or could not put themselves in a position to see.
King: A Street Story
(1999), for example, observes urban human suffering through the eyes of a homeless dog. In the twenty-first century, Berger has been increasingly preoccupied with the struggle of the Palestinians and their persecution by ‘wall and bulldozer’. He calls for a ‘cultural boycott’ of Israel. Berger has never, it seems, seen a thigh in which he did not insert himself as a thorn.

The truth about any artist, however terrible, is better than the silence.

John Fowles was brought up in Leigh-on-Sea, a ‘bloody town’ which he grew up hating because ‘it sapped all the beauty out of things’ – specifically nature. If there was a British novelist Fowles felt an affinity to, it was Richard Jefferies, but who could imagine themselves Bevis in Leigh on bloody Sea? Fowles’s father was in the tobacco import business. The family fortunes had sunk and Robert Fowles, a First World War survivor, was crippled for the rest of his days with lingering shell shock. He was, however, a keen amateur student of philosophy, forever pondering the big ‘What does it all mean?’ The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was a main interest; parenting interested him not at all. John was an only child until he was sixteen, at which point, he claimed, he metamorphosed overnight into a writer. He was brought up in a domestic environment of psychic loneliness and Peircian pragmatism. In later life he came to despise his father as ‘a Victorian rabbit’ and his mother as a ‘Victorian vegetable’: two great lumps of inertia who, as D. H. Lawrence once said about women, ‘stopped men from reaching the stars’. He would get sweet revenge on Victorian England in
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
.