Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (150 page)

He did not venture on writing fiction until his mid-twenties. After encouragement
by the publisher Jonathan Cape, and delays induced by his own ‘doubt and demoralisation’, Julian Barnes finally published his first work,
Metroland
(1980), at the age of thirty-four. Few career-making novels can have been nursed in a spirit of such carefully fermented inadequacy: ‘I didn’t see that I had any right to be a novelist’, he recalls.
Metroland
, he later pronounced ‘was about defeat’ and he wrote it in a defeated spirit. It remains, none the less, the only autobiographical novel Julian Barnes can be said to have written and even if it weren’t a strikingly good piece of work, it would be readable for that reason alone. The narrative is divided into three sections: One, Metroland (1963); Two, Paris (1968); Three, Metroland II (1977). The narrative circuit is familiar from Orwell’s
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
: both novels record a young Englishman’s failure to escape the gravitational pull of bourgeois mores; his ‘past’ denies any future. Barnes’s hero vainly attempts to come up for air, but his handicaps are too great. He is suburban, English and non-Jewish – and anyway his heart isn’t in it. Finally, mellowed, he accepts his destiny:
j’habite Metroland
.

Metroland is itself a symbol of England’s failed leap into Europe. An old stager whiles away the commuter’s tedium by instructing Barnes’s hero on the Metropolitan line’s grand design:

Fifty miles from Verney Junction to Baker Street; what a line. Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. What a line.

Metroland never made it. It became a dormitory: ‘you lived there because it was an area easy to get out of.’ Neither does young Christopher make it. He goes to Paris in 1968, but he misses the events; he and they didn’t seem made for each other. Christopher also fails in his liaison with his exciting French partner, Annick, and lapses into marriage with the sensible English girl, Marion. And, in the last significant episode of the novel, a Metrolander once more, he doesn’t commit adultery. At the end, he has become what he once tried to escape: stuffy, English and indomitably decent. Defeated. It is one of the ironies of Barnes’s later career that he, the author, did make it. He is England’s most honoured novelist in France.

Metroland
and its successor,
Before She Met Me
, two years later, a study of retroactive jealousy (can one feel cuckolded by one’s partner’s former lovers?) enjoyed critical success but barely break-even hardback sales. Barnes’s subdued voice was drowned out by louder practitioners of the day: he was out-Martined, out Salmaned, out-Ianed (all of whom would become companions in fiction). His career took on
new force with his marriage to the gifted literary agent Pat Kavanagh in 1979 and it was with his third novel,
Flaubert’s Parrot
(1984) – and with Kavanagh’s assistance, one suspects – that he made his breakthrough. As the title proclaims, it is ostensibly homage to the French novelist through incidentals: a stuffed parrot (a flock of dubious contenders survive to stimulate the idle mind), a recycled public statue (the Nazis dismantled the original for war scrap), the books Flaubert never got round to writing. The narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, is a late-middle-aged Normandy landing veteran, a widowed doctor with an unhappy marriage behind him, only fragments of which surface in chinks between his obsessive, bordering on manic, cogitations on his beloved Gustave. Although the ostensible subject is the most constructive novelist of the nineteenth century, the form is that of the Montaigne essay – ‘loose sallies of the mind’. Lists, catalogues and reverse shots abound. There are expostulations against Oxford dons, critics, the bourgeois reader, life, death, everything. The one constant feature is that the author is not writing ‘the kind of book I knew I did not want to write’. It is a novel constantly in denial about itself.

Barnes had low expectations for this resolutely eccentric work (one should, however, beware the traps in his chronic self-deprecations): ‘I suspected that
Flaubert’s Parrot
might interest a few Flaubertians, and perhaps a smaller number of psittacophiles.’ The novel in fact did very well – although arguably not as supremely well as it should have done. As is often the case with Barnes’s fiction, it was, in a sense, too good for its own good. Time will confirm it as a high point in twentieth-century literature.

No novelist – whilst politely communicative in interview – maintains a more dignified silence than Julian Barnes about private things. He declines to comment on his (childless) marriage, for example, and a mid-1980s breakdown in his relationship with Kavanagh. The third party, a woman novelist as famous as Barnes, went public. The furious quarrel with Martin Amis ten years later, on his leaving Kavanagh’s firm for a sexier American agent, is known entirely from Amis’s engagingly indiscreet account in his memoir,
Experience
(2000). In Barnes’s memoir (dedicated to ‘P’), the uninformed reader would not know that Barnes is married. Success, on the scale of
Flaubert’s Parrot
, might have been expected to lay down future patterns. But if there is one thing Barnes dislikes as a novelist it is the rut, or furrow. He declined to follow up with ‘Tolstoy’s Gerbil’, or ‘Turgenev’s Tortoise.’ He did, however, write a novel called
The Porcupine
(1992), which came out in the euphoric aftermath of the fall of the Evil Empire when all the talk was of the end of history and peace dividends.
The Porcupine
surveys this supposed turning point in world history with styptic Montaignean scepticism. A thinly veiled
roman-à-clef
(his first in that genre), based on the trial of the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, it is a
subtler version of Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
(Barnes and Kavanagh were both admirers of Koestler). Neither sympathetic nor hostile, the novel expresses Barnes’s belief that fiction is elegant lies with a ‘hard core of truth at its centre’. In this case, the hard truth is that there is nothing clean-cut about the fall of empires.
The Porcupine
carries the most unusual dust-jacket recommendation in the annals of English literature from Zhivkov’s actual prosecutor (a principal character, under thin disguise, in the narrative).

Barnes did not get any similar endorsement from Rupert Murdoch for his satire on Robert Maxwell in his ‘condition of England novel’,
England, England
(1998). His country’s condition, he sternly implies, is not healthy – reduced as it is to a theme-park husk of what it once was. The most simply entertaining of Barnes’s works from this productive, and profoundly sceptical, phase of his career is
The History of the World in 10½ Chapters
(1989). It opens with a jaundiced history of Noah, the flood, the ark and the new covenant from the revisionist point of view of a stowaway woodworm. The next chapter leaps forward to a modern cruise liner, hijacked on the seas. The TV celebrity lecturer on history, recruited to entertain the passengers, finds himself – as do the passengers –
in
history as the hijackers throw passengers overboard, ‘two by two’. It is a painful experience. So the chapters go on, subverting received ideas on every page. The novel (if that is what it can be called) was reprinted eight times in hardback in its first year.

Flaubert is Barnes’s God – no question about that. But one can detect another less expected link with Kingsley Amis, the modern avatar of John Bullism. ‘One evening in 1983’, Barnes recalls, ‘I was having a drink with Kingsley Amis. He made the mistake of asking me what I was working on. I made the mistake of telling him … My account would have involved words such as ‘Flaubert and ‘parrot’ … As I was nearing the end of my preliminary outline – still with some way to go – I glanced up, and was confronted with an expression poised between belligerent outrage and apoplectic boredom.’ Barnes duly sent a complimentary copy of the book to Amis who informed him, without compliment, that he gave up at
Chapter 3
, ‘though he might have considered plodding on a bit further if only one of the two chaps there had pulled out a gun and shot the other chap’. The amusingly recounted episode suggests a gulf as wide as the English Channel between England’s arch-Tory and its most ‘Europeanised’ novelist. In fact, entirely the opposite may be argued. Kingsley Amis loved trying his hand at genre literature: whether James Bond (
Colonel Sun
), the cosy 1930s crime novel (
The Riverside Villas Murder
), the ghost story (
The Green Man
), or science fiction (
The Alteration
). Barnes is as fascinated by the possibilities of genre, if less skittish. In 1980 he began putting out a series of Soho based crime novels under the pseudonym ‘Dan Kavanagh’, featuring a series hero, ‘Duffy’, a
bisexual, sleazy, soccer-loving, private eye. Duffy came, said Barnes, ‘from a different part of my brain.’ No mystery as to where ‘Kavanagh’ came from.

Barnes’s big novel in the early twentieth century,
Arthur & George
(2005), came, indubitably, from the Francophile part of that organ, but it too was based on crime and detection. Not Duffy, but the creator of literature’s most famous sleuth, was the detective in question.
Arthur & George
re-examines Arthur Conan Doyle’s investigation of the falsely convicted victim of a bizarre horse-mutilation case, George Edalji. It is a kind of English Dreyfus, complete with racial discrimination, and one which subtly defines national differences within the overarching dimension of human prejudice.

In
Nothing to be Frightened of
, Barnes records that he thinks of death every day – his novelist’s orison. The problem is, think of it as you will, death’s awful ingenuities can never be anticipated – in Emily Dickinson’s bitter phrase, he kindly stops for us. But where and when he makes that stop is, unless we forestall him with suicide, entirely up to him. Very suddenly, in 2008, the dedicatee of every one of Barnes’s books since they married was diagnosed with a brain tumour and, within weeks, died. Barnes, following his inflexible code of privacy about personal matters, made no public comment. His 2011 novel involved Camus’ assertion that the one serious issue in life is whether to end it. Its title,
The Sense of an Ending
, echoes that of Frank Kermode’s critical meditation on teleology in literature (1967). Particularly relevant is Kermode on ‘peripety’ – the surprisingness of bad things. Kermode would have been the ideal reviewer. Alas, his own life ended in August 2010.

In
Nothing to be Frightened of
, the novelist fantasises about ‘the last reader of Julian Barnes’s fiction’ – that as yet unborn antiquarian who shakes the dust off the volumes in the vaults of the far distant Bodleian or British Library (or, happy thought, the
Bibliothèque Nationale
). The image he evokes is that of the Duracell TV adverts in which battery-powered marching dolls stop, one by one, as they run out of juice, but the advertised brand marches on. It too will, of course, stop eventually. Barnes’s fiction, particularly
Flaubert’s Parrot
, will, one expects, be the Duracell doll among his gifted fiction-writing cohort. But, as Barnes foresees, a time will come when even Flaubert will be unread. Nothing to be frightened of. Probably.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

George and Weedon Grossmith’s
Diary of a Nobody
was first published serially in
Punch
in 1891. The authors were London cockneys, sons of a
Times
court reporter and occasional music-hall entertainer. In their youth the brothers trod on the boards themselves, specialising in ‘patter songs’ and humorous recitative. They graduated in later life to comic journalism – writing their patter. The ‘nobody’ of the title is Charles Pooter, who works in a city office as a clerk under Mr Perkupp. He lives in a rented villa, The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, with his wife Carrie, and it is on taking possession of his Englishman’s Castle that he resolves to keep a diary to immortalise Pooteresque daily adventures.

The Grossmiths’ bestseller spawned a whole progeny of Pooters. H. G. Wells’s ‘little men’ (Kipps, Mr Polly) are in the line direct, as is Charlie Chaplin’s indomitable tramp. The latest, and most successful, late fruit of the Pooter tree is Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole saga. Townsend was born in 1946, one of the post-war demographic ‘bulge’, engendered by the false optimism of victory and a people’s government. The eldest of three sisters (‘Very Chekhovian,’ she drily comments), Sue was brought up in Leicester, a city enriched by the hosiery industry and forever weighed down with a huge urban inferiority complex. Her father was a postman, and she records her childhood as ‘happy’. The family lived in a succession of council-owned ‘prefabs’. Ugly, hutch-like things, they none the less had the mod cons (hot water, refrigerators) lacking in the slum artisans’ cottages they replaced. Prefabs did not, however, elevate the occupant’s spirit. I lived in one for a while.

Townsend failed the eleven-plus; clinching proof, if one needed it, of the unintelligence of that misconceived intelligence test. She attended a ‘secondary modern’ (i.e. school for the second rate), a stone’s throw away from the grammar school she did not attend. She left school at the earliest possible moment, at fifteen. After three years’ unskilled work, she married a semi-skilled sheet-metal worker and, by the age of twenty-two, had three children under school-age. She credits her impressive education to Penguin Classics, the series launched by Allen Lane in the same year that she was born.