Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (151 page)

In her early marriage she embarked on what she calls ‘secret writing’. An insomniac (‘like Margaret Thatcher’ – the only similarity, she is at pains to stress), Townsend wrote after midnight and stored her writing in a hidden box. She attended a writers’ group until she was in her late thirties. It was sponsored by Leicester’s
progressive Phoenix Theatre and she won a major prize for a play set in a gynaecologist’s waiting room –
Womberang
(1979). One of the judges, John Mortimer, took a particular interest in her and his Rumpolisms, proletarianised, would be an inspiration. It was a dramatic monologue, broadcast in 1982 on BBC radio (featuring ‘Nigel’ Mole) which was the forerunner of the first instalment of her great work of fiction,
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾
. The name was changed to ‘Adrian’ to avoid too obvious a lifting from the 1950s ‘skuleboy’ hero, Nigel Molesworth, the creation of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. The difference was, ‘as any fule kno’, that Nigel was minor public school (‘St Custards’).

Adrian’s secret diary went on to be the bestselling fiction title of 1982, inspiring TV and film adaptations and a cult following. It was, Townsend claimed, the whining of one of her brood which inspired her. Like Joe Orton (brought up in a neighbouring house in Leicester), she had an unerring ear for the dialect of her uneasy class and place. She also had an acute insight into the trials of early adolescence. One of the early covers of her books portrayed a bathroom cup with a Noddy-toothbrush and a disposable razor. Adrian (Albert) Mole is trapped between the two. A child of the 1960s, life never swings for Adrian. The diary begins in the high point of the Thatcher years, an administration Townsend loathes. (She has, however, a certain fondness for the Iron Lady’s successor: ‘I didn’t see Adrian’s face,’ she once mused, ‘well – not until I saw John Major on the telly.’) It is unlikely that Townsend began with the intention of writing a saga of
Coronation Street
unendingness. But the triumph of her first volume launched ‘Moleiad’: a nobody’s progress. There followed eight further instalments of Adrian’s career, chronicling his rueful misfortunes, and becoming progressively darker in tone. The darkness spilled over from Townsend’s own life. She was diagnosed with diabetes in her thirties, registered blind in 2001. In 2005 her kidneys failed, and in 2009 she had a transplant (the organ was donated by her son). In the latter volumes she was wheelchair-bound and obliged to dictate her books to her husband.

The Mole diaries are increasingly bitter at New Labour, reaching a climax in
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction
(2004). ‘God, I can’t stand them now,’ Townsend says: ‘I support the memory and the history of the party and I consider that these lot are interlopers.’ Pandora – Adrian’s Helen of Troy (she has launched a thousand masturbation fantasies) – is, in the later instalments, a Blair Babe and the focus of Townsend’s unreconstructed Old Labour satirical venom. She announced an intention to do away with Adrian in 2007, but in
Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years
(2009), he was given a stay of execution. The diarist-hero is aged thirty-nine and a quarter and it is 2007. He is living (if you can call it that) in a converted pigsty – semi-attached to his dysfunctional parents’ house, on the outskirts of Leicester. He works in a second-hand bookshop which is going bust. His illegitimate
son, Glenn, is serving in Afghanistan. Thank heavens, his parents savings are in Northern Rock and Adrian’s own meagre hoard in an Icelandic bank. He is up all night with a worrisome bladder (more worrying, it transpires, than he suspects) and has not had sex with his wife Daisy for six months.

It’s odd that the first novel in our literature with ‘Prostate’ in the title (disfigured by its inevitable malapropism) is by a woman with incurable eye disease. Sue Townsend did her research for
Adrian Mole: The Prostrate
[sic]
Years
. At 39¼ Adrian is not, technically, in that red zone of life: commonly assumed to be a man’s late sixties onwards. But it can strike young – if you’re unlucky. No one is unluckier than Mr Mole. Like others diagnosed with PCa, Adrian has treatment options (surgery, radiotherapy, hormone therapy, high-intensity focused ultrasound) thrown back in his lap – literally. Why? Because the medical profession itself isn’t sure. ‘I only got a C– in biology,’ Adrian complains, vainly. He chooses radiotherapy, on hearing another patient in the waiting room say: ‘I wouldn’t have a prostrate operation again for all the tea in China.’ Has Adrian Mole chosen right? Will he live to die, as they like to say, with PCa, rather than of it? Ominously, Townsend has said again she wants him to ‘face death’.

Townsend declares herself ‘a passionate socialist’, with broad streaks of fondness for
ancien régime
England: notably the royal family. One of her more charming productions is
The Queen and I
(1992), which fantasises Red Revolution. The House of Windsor is rehoused in a Leicester Council House, in Hellebore Close. The royals, except for the incorrigible Philip, adapt splendidly. The queen (and her ‘dorgis’) ingeniously makes do on her OAP pension; Charles talks all day to his garden plants; Diana misconducts herself with fellows up the street. When the Queen Mum dies, the street comes together to give her a mini-state funeral.

Townsend is as secretive as Adrian about her private life. Her first marriage broke up after seven years. She later married Colin Broadway (‘a canoe maker and expedition leader’) and had a fourth child. It was at this point, in early middle age, her career took off. She still lives in Leicester and is dedicated to the city – although she has risen well past the prefab level and now lives in a converted vicarage. The local university gave her an honorary doctorate and she has given the city two pubs, admirably run by her husband. They keep her, she claims, ‘working class’. Her papers (but not her private papers) are stored, alongside Joe Orton’s unbuttoned confessions, in the University archives. Only her own journals, one suspects, could enlighten us as to why it was not the ‘Secret Diary of Adriana Albertina Mole’. But, she declares, ‘I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave … and beyond!’

When we’re in dark circumstances we survive them by cracking jokes.

Auster was conceived on his Jewish parents’ honeymoon at Niagara Falls, and born in Newark, New Jersey. ‘I think of it sometimes’, he later wrote, ‘how I was conceived in that Niagara Falls resort for honeymooners. Not that it matters where it happened. But the thought of what must have been a passionless embrace, a blind, dutiful groping between chilly hotel sheets, has never failed to humble me into an awareness of my own contingency. Niagara Falls. Or the hazard of two bodies joining. And then me, a random homunculus, like some dare-devil in a barrel, shooting over the falls.’ God protect parents from their children’s ‘imagination’.

Auster Sr was a well-off property owner – on the respectable side of slumlordism, Paul insists. His mother, at twenty-one, was thirteen years younger and, even on the honeymoon, was unhappy in the marriage. His father, Auster later deduced, was not a bad man – nor, technically, a bad family man, but he needed nothing the world had to offer a man like him. Like other New York kids, Auster spent the roasting summer months in up-state camps. In 1961 he was standing next to a fellow camper who was struck by lightning. The event, he claimed, worked radioactively in his imagination. ‘I think that was one of the most important experiences I ever had. I think it really shaped my thinking about the world in ways that I was never even consciously aware of. But as I look back I understand how important it was to me. How fragile and fluky the world is. One minute you’re standing next to someone, the next he’s dead.’ ‘Chance’, he came to believe, ‘is the only certain thing in life.’ In his senior year at high school, Auster’s parents divorced. He lived, thereafter, with his mother, who remarried a labour lawyer. Neither of Auster’s parents were college-educated.

He enrolled at Columbia where, in 1966, he fell in love with Lydia Davis, the daughter of one of his professors and it was through the Davises that Auster was introduced to modern French literature – which he consolidated with a year abroad in Paris in 1967 (an exciting year in the French capital, with student rebellion threatening a second revolution). On his return to Columbia, Auster graduated well and stayed on to do research; he was already publishing in campus journals. He escaped the draft (which could have meant Vietnam) and embarked on a doctorate in French Renaissance literature, which he never completed. In a later interview he recalled: ‘I didn’t want to be an academic, which is probably what I was best suited for, but I just didn’t want to be in school anymore, and the idea of spending my life in a university was just awesomely terrible.’ What, then, did he want to be?

There followed many unsettled years before he found out. In the grand tradition of American literature, he ‘hoboed’. His stepfather landed him a berth on an oil tanker and, for a few months, he was a merchant seaman. For another few months he worked with the US Census Bureau. The episode (and his mischievous habit of inventing non-existent Americans) crops up in
The Locked Room
(1986). America was increasingly uncongenial and in 1971 he returned to Paris for four years. It was, ‘a fundamental time’ for him. He supported himself by a series of menial jobs; by now he was steeped in the
roman nouveau
and the New Wave film movement (notably Jean-Luc Godard, whose
Alphaville
was clearly inspirational). On his return to New York in 1974, Auster and Davis married. They had one child, Daniel, in 1977. But Paul did not settle down – he was still at a loose end. Fluent, clever and well read he picked up journalistic, translating and ghost-writing assignments, while creatively he believed himself to be a playwright or poet. ‘The only thing I actually did during that period [i.e. the mid-1970s]’, he recalled, ‘was write a detective novel under another name [
Squeeze Play
, by ‘Paul Benjamin’], in about six weeks, just to make money, I was so desperately poor, so that was actually the first novel I wrote. This period went on for about a year and a half and I produced absolutely nothing.’

Then his vocation came suddenly and unexpectedly: ‘By 1978 I felt I had been running into a brick wall with my work and a moment came when I just stopped altogether. I thought I wouldn’t write anymore. At the beginning of 1979 I had a kind of breakthrough and started writing again. The first piece I wrote was prose and not poetry. Strangely enough, the night I finished that prose piece, about 10 or 15 pages, my father died. I found that out the next morning. I began in a few weeks writing a book about him and that led to all the work I’ve been doing since.’ He inherited money from his father, which eased his circumstances. He was, however, breaking up with Davis, which complicated his life, as did the chronic ill-health of Daniel. What mattered most in his father’s death was its bringing home to him the realisation of the ‘
modern nothingness
’, which was to become his theme.

By now he had completed ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man’, an extended meditation on his father’s death that makes up the first half of
The Invention of Solitude
(1982). The second half deals with his own solitude and failed fatherhood. These were starting points for him, although it took three years to work through them. In 1981, at a poetry reading, he met the woman (another professor’s daughter), Siri Hustvedt, who would become his second wife. They married on Bloomsday. Now closing in on forty, Auster was still not a novelist. He embarked on that career with
City of Glass
(1985), the first of the ‘New York Trilogy’. However, the book world was not ready for Auster and the manuscript received seventeen rejections, until being accepted
by the small, extravagantly hippyish, Sun & Moon Press in Los Angeles.
City of Glass
is a ‘metaphysical detective story’. Its famous narrative ‘hook’ is a midnight phone call: ‘It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.’ The not-someone is ‘Paul Auster, of the Paul Auster Detective Agency’. The recipient of the call is Daniel Quinn who writes detective fiction (under the pseudonym William Wilson) who, none the less, pretends, for reasons he himself cannot explain, to be Paul Auster and takes on the case for ‘Peter Stillman’. In following it up, Quinn-Auster draws on the expertise of ‘Max Work’ (Quinn’s series hero PI). Genres bend.

Stillman, he discovers, was kept in solitary confinement for nine years by his father, when growing up, so that he might develop the primeval language of Adam. His father has been released from prison, and will now, it is feared, kill his son.
City of Glass
was, bizarrely, nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Poe himself might have approved. For Auster, the mystery was not the crime, but hermeneutics – the act of interpretation. The ‘trilogy’ completed with
Ghosts
(1986) and
The Locked Room
(1986).

Fiction was now streaming fast from Auster’s pen – something he attributed to the inspirational assistance of Hustvedt. And with the publication of the trilogy, he became commercially marketable and intellectually respectable. In 1986, he was appointed to a writing position at Princeton, which he held four years.

In his fiction he moved through genres and styles like a hermit crab: the dystopian
In the Country of Last Things
(1987) the bulky family saga,
Moon Palace
(1989), the story of ‘Marco Stanley Fogg’ – the name is an amalgam of three explorers and
The Music of Chance
(1990), a fable about men building a wall as the most notorious wall in history was coming down in Berlin. Auster was currently developing a secondary career in film and would collaborate with director Wayne Wang, most successfully with
Smoke
(1995), which enjoyed general release and good reviews. Auster’s other film projects have failed to break out of the art-house, festival circuit. His fiction of the early 1990s had become markedly more fanciful.
Leviathan
(1992) opens: ‘Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.’ There are evocations of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber – except that Ben Sachs’s mission is blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty.
Mr. Vertigo
(1994) opens more cheerfully: