Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (157 page)

Not easy to graft this into a movie. None the less Mackendrick would try, and invited Martin to play the Bas-Thornton son, John. As Amis recalls, ‘a few weeks later I was taking my mother – first-class BOAC – on a highly paid as well as complimentary two-month holiday in the West Indies.’ It may, one suspects, have been set up by the well-disposed Howard as therapy.

On location, the newly created young star ‘played chess with my co-star, the consistently avuncular Anthony Quinn’ (the film’s Long John Silver). Amis was later to describe film-making as waiting around until you do the same thing over and over again and, luxurious as the experience was, he did not like it. ‘My acting duties were light,’ he recalls, ‘because I died just over halfway through: blood-thirstily watching a cockfight in the square below, I fell from a window of [a] bordello.’ The scene is different in the novel. But in both versions, the sudden death of John Thornton jolts. One does not expect it.

Amis is dismissive of his ‘talentless’ performance. It was years before he ‘steeled’ himself to watch the film, which got mixed reviews. He thought his bum looked big. Much later even than that, Amis read
A High Wind in Jamaica
and found it ‘a thrillingly good book … more continuously sinuous and inward (and enjoyable) than Golding’. Hughes, he recalls, visited the set, ‘Otiosely tall … he was pleased, impressed, tickled … I keep meaning to read more of him
but something prevents me
.’ I fancy that what prevents him is the fact that Hughes, in a sense, ‘killed’ him. Fictional victims rarely meet their authorial murderers, and it is fascinating when they do.

The film and renewed interest in the source novel made Hughes an in-demand public speaker. He was invited to speak at the University Teachers of English conference at the University of Sussex (spit-new in those days) in 1965. It was the first such conference that I (spit-new lecturer myself) attended. Hughes gave the expected readings from his work in progress but then diverged to muse at inordinate length on the mysteries of inspiration, particularly the death of John Thornton in
High Wind
. Why, Hughes asked himself – somewhat to the bemusement of his audience – had he killed the boy? It was never in his plan for the novel. The need for this act of authorial homicide had come to him suddenly, from nowhere, and irresistibly. Although Martin Amis wasn’t (as I recall) mentioned, the boy actor, physically there in the flesh, had obviously ‘tickled’ his curiosity, and perhaps even his guilt. Why had he done it?

In Hughes’s own background, one can find speculative answers. He was born one of three children of a civil servant. By the time Richard was two, the other elder children in the family had died, and his father died three years later. He recalled the event all his life: ‘I wanted to ask Father something [and] scampered up to his bedroom, burst open the door … Under the stiff folds of the sheet lay what looked like a not very skilful wax copy of him.’ The family was a hecatomb of sudden, untimely, death. Hughes was educated at Charterhouse and Oxford. He narrowly missed being called up for the war (another hecatomb). By the time he graduated, he had gained some reputation as a poet. The fourth-class degree mattered little to him. As the
ODNB
entry, written by a close friend, records: ‘While still at Oxford (‘that intense white incandescence of young minds’, he calls it in
The Fox in the Attic
), he began travelling as a way of countering the strain of creative writing, and, within a week of graduating, he was sailing a boat down the Danube and dabbling dangerously in Balkan politics; thus began a wanderlust and taste for adventure which he was to indulge for the rest of his active life.’

The ‘strain’ of creative writing proved paralysing, despite all the travelling. After
A High Wind in Jamaica
(begun on the shores of the Adriatic, finished in Connecticut, on the blustery Atlantic), he found the fame intolerable and exiled himself to Morocco (‘his favourite country after Wales’), where ‘he bought a house in the Kasbah of old Tangier for two donkey-loads of silver’. He returned to Britain in 1932 and married a wealthy wife. They had five children. The family lived the life of country gentry in rural Wales. Although a novelist by vocation, Hughes would produce no second novel until
In Hazard
(1938), a tale of storm in the Caribbean, prophetic of war. During the stormy years of the war, Hughes worked in a civilian capacity in the Admiralty. In the post-war years he jobbed around, never desperate for money, but always glad to have it – reviewing, lecturing, and doing screenplays for Ealing Studios (hence the connection with Mackendrick).

Meanwhile he embarked on his life’s work, a multi-volume sequence called
The Human Predicament
, a conspectus of the history and origins of the Second World War from the Nazi takeover in 1923 to VE day. Two volumes saw the light of print before his death in 1976:
The Fox in the Attic
(1961) and
The Wooden Shepherdess
(1973).
The Fox in the Attic
has a forlorn Foreword indicating that this is the first particle of a work ‘conceived as a long historical novel of my own times culminating in the Second World War’. The reader, Hughes says, may wonder why ‘a novel designed as a continuous whole rather than as trilogy or quarter should appear volume by volume’. The plain truth, he confesses, ‘is I am such a slow writer that I have been urged not to wait’.

The advice was sound. The trilogy, after its somewhat less good second part, delivered to the world twelve years later, would never reach completion. Whoever urged Hughes to publish
The Fox in the Attic
prematurely deserves the thanks of posterity. It ranks as arguably one of the finest works of the post-war period – if one of the least conventional. It can itself be considered as tripartite. The narrative opens with a passage of breathtaking beauty:

Only the steady creaking of a flight of swans disturbed the silence, labouring low overhead with outstretched necks towards the sea.

It was a warm, wet, windless afternoon with a soft feathery feeling in the air: rain, yet so fine it could scarcely fall but rather floated. It clung to everything it
touched; the rushes in the deep choked ditches of the sea-marsh were bowed down with it, the small black cattle looked cobwebbed with it, their horns were jewelled with it.

Two men appear in this damp Welsh landscape – back from shooting birds in the coastal marshes. One is carrying something over his shoulders. It is not the usual brace of duck, but a dead child.

The first section of Hughes’s novel is, despite the little corpse, country-house comedy – P. G. Wodehouse crossed with
Cold Comfort Farm
. The hero Augustine just escapes the First World War: he was about to be called to the Front when the Amnesty came. His cousin Henry was killed in the trenches. Augustine becomes heir to the family’s decaying mansion: it is 1922. His world – what is left of it – is similarly decayed. He flagrantly neglects the traditions and duties of his class and is falsely suspected at the inquest of killing the dead girl. In fact he removed the body merely to protect it from water rats. He decides to go to Germany, where he has distant relatives and where he hopes to find signs of life. The middle section of
The Fox in the Attic
is a prose essay on the death of liberal England and the scar of the war, which will never heal. It is a lump of historical discourse framed in fiction. The third section is set in Munich, in the days surrounding the failed 1923 Nazi
Putsch
. The young Adolf Hitler flares, darkly, across the narrative, ‘an ego without a penumbra’. Augustine falls in love with a cousin, Mitzi, who is going blind and has symbolic visions of imminent catastrophe. If England’s inter-war plight is symbolised in the dead child, Germany’s is in the stinking fox in the castle attic. Mitzi joins a convent while Augustine drifts on, aimlessly, as history prepares for something worse even than the First World War.

There are those who consider Hughes’s fiction as among the best that never quite got round to happening; others who think him, apart from the best two novels, negligible. There is occasional curiosity as to the origin of his monumental writing block. D. J. Taylor wonders if Hughes’s interest in ‘little girls’ merits closer attention than it has received. We shall never know. If Amis is the hare on steroids, Hughes is the tortoise with arthritis. With the difference that the tortoise, in this instance, lost the race.

It’s important for me to live in the world I want to write about.

Cornwell claims to be descended from Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852). Calculator-bustingly large sales figures would seem to be one of the things the two have in common. ‘Patsy’ Daniels was born the daughter of a Miami lawyer. Her parents divorced when she was five. ‘It killed me,’ she recalls. A couple of years later, what was left of the family moved to North Carolina. A couple of years after that, broke and broken down, her mother deposited Patsy and her two brothers with neighbours – the evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth, who passed them on to be fostered by missionary friends (whom the young Patsy loathed – she kills her foster-mother, she says, in every novel).

Aged eighteen, Patsy was treated for anorexia in the hospital where her mother had earlier been a mental patient (‘like
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
’, the novelist jauntily recalls). She made it to college, got a degree in English and capped that achievement by bagging her professor, Charles Cornwell, as her husband. In 1979, the new Mrs Cornwell got a job as a reporter on the
Charlotte Observer
and was contracted as Ruth Bell Graham’s authorised biographer. The book came out in 1983. When she got a post at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, her husband moved with her, giving up his academic career to take up a position in the church. The marriage was a ‘disaster’ from the start and collapsed soon after.

Patricia, meanwhile, had become fascinated by her paper’s ‘crime beat’ – particularly the ‘bone farm’ – and had formed a friendship with the Chief Medical Examiner for Virginia, Dr Marcella Fierro (the original of Kay Scarpetta). Fierro is the dedicatee of Cornwell’s fourth book,
Cruel and Unusual
(1993), with the coy comment ‘You taught Scarpetta well.’ What Cornwell apprehended, very early in the game, was that new forensic techniques, particularly DNA analysis, gave the detective an entirely new instrument – a magnifying glass more revealing than anything Sherlock wielded. More importantly, the forensic lab – unlike the mean streets – was an arena where women were entirely equal with male police officers.

Cornwell had the unpublished author’s traditional difficulty getting her first Scarpetta novel accepted. After being turned down by seven publishers,
Postmortem
was finally taken by Scribner’s, who gave her a tentative $6,000 advance, but only after the author had taken the advice to change the sex of the narrator-hero(ine) from ‘Joe Constable’. Largely written in the mid-1980s, it was eventually published in 1991.

Scarpetta, a tough-talking, gun-toting, chain-smoking (up to
Cruel and Unusual
), whisky-drinking, detective, is clearly cut from the same genre cloth as Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, introduced in
Indemnity Only
(1982); and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, introduced in
A is for Alibi
(1982).
Postmortem
won five major genre prizes and golden opinions from connoisseurs of crime fiction. It made the
New York Times
bestseller list. By the end of the 1990s, with a novel a year pulsing out, Cornwell could plausibly claim –and did, insistently – to be the bestselling woman novelist in the world. Only Grisham’s legal thrillers outsold her.

Ms Scarpetta is Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Her duties go well beyond the routines of autopsy, written report and expert courtroom witness. She solves crimes and invariably blows the bad guys away with her own formidable fire power. The formula is repetitive. A serial killer is on the loose and is terrorising the law-abiding citizenry of the American South. His (always his) victims are postmortemed by the heroine. Inexorably the killer’s sights turn on Scarpetta herself. In her fight against crime, she is assisted by her lesbian niece, FBI field agent Lucy, and her faithful police buddy, Pete Marino.

By the turn of the century, ‘Cornwell Enterprises’ was very big business. The author herself travelled with an entourage of twelve people, including bodyguards. Her houses are reported to be bristling with motion detectors, CCTV cameras and ‘stockpiles of guns’. In 1993, Cornwell, after an evening discussing film projects with Demi Moore, drunkenly crashed her Mercedes in Malibu – Jaws of Life were required to extract her from the wreckage. She was sentenced to the first offender’s twenty-eight days rehab, and was diagnosed bipolar. At first she thought it was a reference to her sexuality. Lithium stabilised her, allegedly. There were, however, further scandals. In June 1996 a maddened former FBI agent went on a gun-wielding, hostage-taking rampage, claiming that Cornwell had alienated the affections of his wife. In 2007, Cornwell let it be known that she had contracted a marriage a couple of years before with Dr Staci Ann Gruber.

Cornwell also attracted notoriety with her much-publicised theory that Jack the Ripper was the Camden artist, Walter Sickert. She demolished one of the artist’s canvases to discover the DNA which would clinch her case. Art historians are as unimpressed by her art history as criminologists by her criminology, but readers continue to devour Scarpettas (nineteen of them by 2011).