Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (13 page)

Too delicate for the polluted airs of ‘Auld Reekie’, his early childhood was spent with grandparents on a farm in the Borders, an experience which steeped him in regional folklore and balladry. After education at the High School and Edinburgh University (which he entered at twelve and left at fourteen), Scott was put to work in his father’s law firm. Had he not been disabled he would, he said, have entered the army. There were some exciting wars going on. Scott eventually qualified as an advocate, after a second spell at the university, then the centre of European Enlightenment. He married Charlotte Charpentier in 1797. Allegedly the daughter of a French refugee from the ‘Terror’, she was more probably the by-blow of an English aristocrat. No novelist has been better at keeping his family skeletons in the closet than Walter Scott. The couple were to have four children, including the required son and heir, ‘Walter’.

Scott began in authorship with some gentlemanly collecting of Border ballads. His first narrative poem,
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
, came out in 1805. It sold amazingly and was followed by
Marmion
(1808), for which the author received a mighty advance of £1,000 from Archibald Constable, the enterprising publisher with whom Scott’s career was to be intertwined. By now, a favourite among the Tory oligarchy who ran Scotland, he had consolidated his professional position with well-paying legal sinecures. His run of bestselling narrative poems continued with
The Lady of the Lake
(1810), a poem whose florid Highlandery – swirling kilts, heather
and claymores everywhere – is plausibly credited with founding the Scottish tourist industry. But for all his success, and the money, he was astute enough to realise his thunder was comprehensively stolen by the runaway success of
Childe Harold
in 1812: ‘Byron beat me’, he confessed candidly. Literary history agrees.

In 1814, Scott diversified into a field where there was no Byron, with
Waverley
, a prose romance centred on the 1745 uprising. Scott’s head, as he liked to say, was with the Hanoverians; his heart was with the Jacobites and the Pretender. His hero, Edward, similarly wavers, afflicted with an ideological bipolar disorder, between Scotland’s romantic past and her progressive future.
Waverley
took the British and European reading publics by storm. There had been no such success since Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela
. Scott had entered the ranks of the novelists, aged forty-three, and shot to the top. But bestselling fiction was not an entirely respectable sideline for the august Clerk to the Court of Session and the novel was published anonymously. The identity of ‘The Author of
Waverley
’ was a closely guarded secret until 1826. Under his mask, Scott went on to publish a string of historical romances with Scottish settings, of which the best is
The Heart of Midlothian
, with its heroic dairy-maid heroine, Jeanie Deans, and a 1715 Jacobite uprising setting.

Even at Constable’s price of a pound-or-more for a multi-volume set, the
Waverley
novels sold prodigiously, enabling Scott to build himself a Scottish baronial mansion, Abbotsford, in the Borders. A favourite of the Prince Regent and of the English Tories, he was created a baronet in 1820. At the same period he embarked on a series of chauvinistic historical romances with an English setting, which were immensely popular and influential.
Ivanhoe
(1819), a romantic tale of knighthood in the time of the Lionheart king, was instrumental in popularising the ‘Norman Yoke thesis’ – the notion that there was a primal Saxon heritage in Britain which could be recovered and with it national greatness. (Scott, incidentally, regarded himself racially as Saxon, not Celt.) The NYT became dogma among novelists in the Victorian period: Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ and ‘One Nation’ conservatism is founded on it.

In 1825, at the height of his fame, Scott’s business affairs deteriorated catastrophically. He was heavily involved with his printer James Ballantyne and Archibald Constable, both of whom were ruined by the epidemic bank failures of 1825–6. Scott found himself liable for debts of over £100,000. Disdaining the unheroic option of bankruptcy, he contrived to pay off the bulk of this debt through his pen over the succeeding years. It was quixotic, but magnificent. ‘We two against the world,’ he would say, raising his right hand defiantly against fate.

In his last years, that right hand continued to write ceaselessly but much less brilliantly, and at the expense of his health. ‘I shall never see three score and ten,’ he wrote in his journal. In this last phase of his career, his main income came from
a cheap reprint series of his collected works, undertaken by the publisher Robert Cadell (a former partner of Constable’s). The
magnum opus
series, whose volumes were sold at 5s apiece, had a profound influence on the publishing of ‘fiction for the people’.

Scott undertook a gruelling trip to Malta and Europe in 1831–2. He had already sustained three devastating strokes and he returned to Abbotsford a dying man. His death in 1832 plunged Scotland into significantly more gloom than that of the unlamented George IV. Scott, for his part, had always been loyal to his liege. It was for his fat royal friend’s visit to Edinburgh, in 1822, which he stage-managed, that Scott invented the mythic flimflammery about the ‘clan tartan’ (for Highlanders, a blanket was a blanket: weave meant nothing).

Scott demonstrated that a novelist could earn massively without losing literary caste. He dignified the historical romance as a major genre – something that took root not just in Britain, but in France and Russia with writers like Hugo, Dumas and Tolstoy. He stretched historical facts outrageously for narrative effect, but as Carlyle observed, he got across the truth that history was made by living people, not dates, wars and Acts of Parliament. He pioneered the three-volume, 31/6d novel, a mode of publication that survived until the 1890s as the standard form for the British circulating library. Innumerable genres (the regional novel, the nautical novel, the gipsy novel, the ‘Newgate’ novel, the sequence novel, the ‘kailyard’ novel – to name but a few) sprang from his root. He did not merely create fiction, he procreated it.

He was hugely popular in America. The ‘Sir Walter disease’, as Mark Twain maintained (it was not one of his jokes), bore a primary responsibility for the American Civil War, creating as it did so much false consciousness about ‘glory’. The Ku Klux Klan took over much of its ritual paraphernalia (e.g. the ominous burning cross) from Scott. Not just railroad stations but whole towns and thousands of streets were called ‘Waverley’ in his honour. When Scott died in 1832, the American
Richmond Enquirer
carried the news in a black-bordered issue, normally only used for American presidents.

The social historian Mark Girouard has convincingly traced how the pseudo-medieval cult of ‘chivalry’, embodied in the ideal of the Victorian ‘gentleman’, originates with Scott’s novels. Scott also invented a romanticised ‘Brigadoon and Braveheart’ view of ‘wild’ Celtic Scotland which persists, erroneously, to the present day. No novelist has done so much, yet – perversely – has been so reluctantly read by posterity for his pains.

3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.

One of the many books about the author in 2009 – certainly the bestselling of them – was
Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
, by Claire Harman. If Harman’s unstuffy chronicle of Jane Austen’s reputation told the reader anything it was that the ‘Lady’, as she titled herself, who wrote
Pride and Prejudice,
had come a long way since 1813, when that novel barely cleared a few hundred copies of its first edition. In the last twenty years, Harman plausibly suggested, Jane Austen has ‘conquered the world’. She was no longer a writer but a phenomenon, a ‘brand’, a celebrity author. Jane Austen is to fiction what Coca-Cola is to fizzy drinks.

Thirty years ago, when that world-domination was still a year or two in the future, an American professor, Warren Roberts, published a monograph entitled
Jane Austen and the French Revolution
. It was met with uproarious mirth. If a person knew anything about Austen it was that she never mentions the French Revolution. The
New Statesman
ran a competition inviting similarly ludicrous combinations: ‘E. M. Forster and Bodybuilding’ and, famously, ‘Martin Amis: My Struggle’. Professor Roberts was, however, making a serious point. We repress things which are so important to us that we dare not be conscious of them: the French Revolution was Jane Austen’s elephant in the room. Nowadays, we are much more interested in a different pachyderm in the Austen parlour. What, in June 2009, when Harman’s book was published, was the most looked-at item of Austeniana? With A-levels coming up, you might guess the Penguin Classics
Pride and Prejudice
, or possibly the DVD of the delightful skit,
Lost in Austen
. Wrong. It was a video,
Porn and Penetration
: a ‘knockoff’, as the porn and penetration trade calls them.

By the blood-curdling standards of contemporary pornography,
P&P
was harmless burlesque. A troupe of actors in high Regency dress did a series of scenes which, at first sight, looked exactly like those of any Andrew Davies screen adaptation. But then they go a tiny step further. Only one scene, involving Elizabeth Bennet and a billiard table, veered into the mildly distasteful. One did not expect a learned monograph entitled ‘Jane Austen and Copulation’, even from the dry highlands of American academia. But the point being made by the saucy makers of
Porn and Penetration
was the same as that made by unsaucy Prof. Roberts. Namely, that it is the missing bits which fascinate us most in Austen.

All six novels are about the rocky road to a young woman’s happy marriage. Seducers lie everywhere in ambush: Frederick Tilney, George Wickham, John Willoughby, Frank Churchill, William Elliot – predators all. But the novels are, on the
face of it, wholly uncarnal. The nearest we get to a sex scene is when Willoughby (sly devil) fingers Marianne Dashwood’s sprained ankle with rather more interest than the injured joint might be thought to require by any other than the Barton Park physician. In the background of the narratives, of course, the prurient ear can usually detect some suspicious rustling. ‘Coltish’ Lydia Bennet, we surmise, is bonking everything in a red coat in the garrison town of Meryton (apt name). But Miss Austen primly averts her eyes from such goings on and keeps the narrative attention firmly focused on the teacups at Longbourn.

It infuriates some readers. ‘Narrow gutted spinster,’ D. H. Lawrence snarled. A novelist whose thighs were so firmly clamped could never open herself to life.

But was she little Miss Prim? There was controversy in the
Times Literary Supplement
recently (those damned professors) about the passage in
Mansfield Park
in which Mary Crawford recalls: ‘Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.’ It is hard to think that a woman as smart as Jane Austen, with brothers serving in the rum-bum-and-lash eighteenth-century navy, with a father who, despite his dog collar, was broad-minded enough to let his daughters read
Tom Jones
, would perpetrate such a double entendre, unknowingly.

Indulge, too, a thought about the names which Austen gives her seducers. In an age when nights were candle-lit, ‘wick’ was male slang for the male member. Regency bucks would surely have had a quiet snigger at the name ‘Wickham’ (i.e. ‘wick ’em’). ‘Willoughby’ has an echo of ‘willie’ – although, one concedes, this is probably a pun too far. But, if one wants to go super-smut, consider that enigmatic comment at the beginning of
Northanger Abbey
in which the reader is told that Catherine’s father of ten children ‘was a very respectable man, though his name was Richard’. It’s always baffled critics. It needn’t if you consider the traditional abbreviation of Richard.

Andrew Davies, Ang Lee – and most graphically, Patricia Rozema in the film of
Mansfield Park
– insert the explicit sex they believe Austen left coyly implicit. In Lee’s
Sense and Sensibility
, it is made crystal clear that Marianne has surrendered her pearl without price to lustful Willoughby. Did Frank Churchill seduce Jane Fairfax at Wey-mouth? Is that why she is so strangely pale and withdrawn? Modern readers may well think so. The twenty-one-year-old Emma inquires of the thirty-eight-year-old Mr Knightley, her future husband, how long he has been in love with her. ‘Since you were thirteen at least,’ he replies. An American (female) student in a class I taught recently uttered the single word ‘creeeeepy!’ by way of comment. And are we to assume that Mr Knightley has kept himself pure all these years? The leading Austen scholar, Deirdre Le Faye, offers a more down to earth theory: ‘It is not excessively far-fetched (if
rather un-Austenish) to suspect that Mr Knightley has a respectable lower-class mistress tucked away somewhere. Maybe some innkeeper’s wife whom he visits when he goes to Richmond or Kingston markets.’

Austen is to fiction what Elizabeth I was to the throne of England: a virgin queen. But did she not have sexual longings? The film
Becoming Jane
pondered that question with much heaving of the bosom. Why did Jane, after a sleepless night, refuse the one offer of marriage we know her to have received? Did Jane remain single to preserve herself for fiction? Did she die
virgo intacta
? Was she, perish the thought, Sapphic by preference? Why, after her sister’s death, did Cassandra burn all their private papers? ‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’ the
London Review of Books
(those damn professors again) asked, in a 1995 headline. Jane and Cassandra shared a double bed. And what else? The facts about Austen’s life were ruthlessly sanitised,
post mortem
, by surviving relatives. Her brother Henry wrote the skeletal mini-biography on which every maxi-biography has since depended. The facts that we do have are readily summarised.