Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (50 page)

Wister himself had capitulated in 1898, marrying a cousin, Mary Channing. He wrote only one other novel of any interest after
The Virginian
–
My Lady Baltimore
(1906), which was not a Western. His later years seem to have been generally frustrated. He was rabidly patriotic in the First World War. Nothing he wrote had anything like the effect of
The Virginian
, whose narrative is still plundered, time after time, by Hollywood.

A Jewish Jane Austen.
Lisa Allardice

Levy was born at Clapham into a cultured and orthodox Jewish family, generally relaxed on matters of religion, who actively encouraged their daughter’s precocious literary talents. Her father, Lewis Levy, was a stockbroker. She was educated, from fifteen, at school in Brighton and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she
was the first Jewish woman to matriculate. This pioneer status was, apparently, stressful and she left after her first year, without a degree.

Levy had been publishing verse since her thirteenth year. At university in 1881 her first volume of poetry came out under the distinguished imprint of Grant Richards. Entitled
Xantippe and Other Verse
, after Socrates’ fabled shrew of a wife, the work proclaimed the independence of spirit which had been latently evident, even in childhood. The style is markedly Browningesque – the intellectuals’ favourite poet at the time. In the title poem, Xantippe ends her melancholy monologue with what looks like imminent defenestration – following her suicidal husband.

The details of Levy’s subsequent life are tantalisingly mysterious. She may have taught, or even have worked in a factory from idealistic motives. She was a close friend of novelists Olive Schreiner and Clementina Black; and of socialists such as Eleanor Marx. There was an informal coterie of these progressive women formed around the British Museum Reading Room, in Bloomsbury and in the newly formed University Club for Ladies. She is plausibly claimed by modern admirers, and close readers of her verse, as having been lesbian. In 1884 she published another volume of poetry with the typically self-deprecating title
A Minor Poet and Other Verse
. The minor poet of the title poem commits suicide with the final words – ‘Too heavy is the load. I fling it down.’

In 1886, she is known to have travelled to Italy, where she met the poet, feminist and novelist, Vernon Lee. Her first published novel,
Reuben Sachs
(1888) is the story of a sexually unscrupulous would-be politician, and the woman Judith he sacrifices. Its depiction of Jewish life in London as grossly materialistic caused a furore and was widely taken as a race libel, as had been Julia Frankau’s similarly anti-Semitic
Dr Phillips
(1887). In an earlier essay, in the
Jewish Chronicle
in 1886 on ‘The Jew in Literature’, Levy had made crystal clear that she wished to deromanticise the image projected by philo-Zionist works such as
Daniel Deronda
.

Her subsequent novel,
Miss Meredith
(1889) was less tendentious. It is the story in autobiographical form of an English governess, Elsie Meredith, who falls in love with the son of the Italian household, where she is employed as an ‘upper servant’. Its lightness of tone suggests it may have been written some time before its actual publication. Levy also wrote the shorter fiction
The Romance of a Shop
(1888), in which four Lorimer sisters (based on Clementina Black and her sisters) set up their photography business in Baker Street.

Prey to depression, Levy committed suicide in her parents’ London home, in an upstairs room, by suffocating herself with charcoal fumes, having just corrected her fifth and final volume of poems for press and dedicated it to Clementina Black. Oscar Wilde was an admirer and published Levy in his magazine
Woman’s World
,
and wrote a gracious obituary for her. She was, he said, ‘a girl who has a touch of genius’. Aged twenty-seven at the time of her death, ‘girl’ is not – as it might otherwise have been – offensive. And recent advocates have detected more than a ‘touch’ of genius in her work. She is recorded as the first Jewish woman to be cremated in England. Her family burned her private papers, leaving the details of her life as forever inscrutable as her corporeal ashes.

All work was ‘spiritual work’ to my mother.
Florence Barclay’s daughter

Florence Charlesworth was born and spent her early years in a country rectory at Limpsfield, Surrey, one of a number of daughters of a well-off clergyman. Florence’s family nickname – tender but double-edged – was ‘Benny’, because her parents ‘so wanted a son’, a Benjamin. It was a writing family. Her aunt, Maria Louisa Charles-worth, published pious tales for the young, notably the perennially popular
Ministering Children
(1854). A semi-invalid, Miss Charlesworth lived with her brother Samuel’s family, and was a permanent fixture in Florence’s domestic circle.

A man of a ‘reserved, undemonstrative nature’, who had married late in life, the Revd Charlesworth was excessively high-minded. When Florence was seven, he gave up his comfortable living in Surrey to take up one in Limehouse, the most deprived area in the East End of London (where, one may recall, Wilde’s Dorian Gray goes for his illicit pleasures of the night).

Precocious, even by Victorian standards, ‘Benny’ taught herself to read by the age of three. The New Testament was among the first things she read. She later underwent a number of religious crises in childhood. Governess-educated, she gave evidence of a remarkable singing voice from her earliest years and was performing publicly at the age of twelve, assured that she would go to the Royal Academy of Music. But it was not to be. ‘Florrie’ (as Benny now was) married the Revd Charles W. Barclay in 1881; a family friend, he had singled her out as his future wife, when she was just eleven. The couple married in her father’s Limehouse church, in front of a crowd of 2,500 loyal parishioners. Florence had always yearned to visit the Holy Land, and tread where ‘He’ had trod. Before returning to his ministry, her
husband indulged his young bride with a four-month wedding trip to Palestine. It was a formative experience in her adult life.

Already pregnant (she would have five children in as many years, eight in all), Florence returned to Hertfordshire to assume the duties of an Anglican clergyman’s wife. Her husband was rich – there was a second home in the Isle of Wight and family holidays in Switzerland – but the Revd Barclay was also clerically dutiful to a self-martyrising degree, and imposed the same stern discipline on his wife. Florence (named after the heroine of the Crimea) was willing, and in the intervals that child-bearing allowed, conducted Bible classes, undertook district visiting and trained the choir. But it was too much and in 1891 she suffered a breakdown, brought on by peritonitis, and was an invalid for a year. In this unwonted (and wholly unwanted) leisure she began writing fiction under the male pseudonym ‘Brandon Roy’. In 1905 she was again stricken by illness – her heart being strained by an energetic bicycle ride to Cromer (she was a staunch believer in physical exercise for women and the ‘Bloomerism’ rational dress associated with it). She was confined to bed for nine months and it was during this weary time that she wrote
The Rosary
, although the work was held back for three years, until 1909.

Florence was fascinated, insofar as an orthodox country parson’s wife decently could be, by telepathy and believed, like Christ, that she could perform miracles. She was discreet about her powers, but it seeps, thematically, into
The Rosary
– which manifestly contains other elements of Barclay’s own life. The narrative opens in the full glory of a summer afternoon at an English country house, seat of the Duchess of Meldrum. She has a niece, Jane Champion, who is twenty-nine, and who has, all her life ‘filled second place very contentedly’. Jane is first encountered by the reader playing a bracing round of golf. At the same weekend party is a young aristocrat, Garth Dalmain (‘Dal’), an atheist. At
his
country seat (there is a lot of country sitting), Castle Gleneesh, he overhears Jane singing a song, ‘The Rosary’, whose theme is that life should be a string of devotional beads, ‘each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer’. On the spot Dal falls in love with Jane and is converted to Christianity. When Jane refuses his offer of marriage he rushes off. She regrets her harshness (‘Oh my God, send him back!’) and the scene shifts to Egypt. What should she do? Jane asks the Sphinx. She returns to Castle Gleneesh, only to find that Dal has been blinded in a shooting accident. All ends well, with (tuneful) marriage in a little Episcopal chapel in the hills.

The novel was preposterously successful. By 1921, sales of over a million were claimed.
The Rosary
popularised Ethelbert Nevin’s song of the same name, which is central in the novel’s plot. So profitable was the book that its American publisher, Harpers, named one of its new buildings ‘The Rosary’. Barclay donated the proceeds
of
The Rosary
and her other dozen or so novels to worthy causes, principally homes for motherless children. She did treat herself to a limousine and a chauffeur – but only in order the better to lecture (i.e. preach) on pious themes to the large audiences she could command. In 1912, an accident in her vehicle caused a cerebral haemorrhage, though this did not prevent her throwing her formidable energies into the fight for women’s suffrage. She died of complications incurred by operations to relieve the ailments which had earlier allowed her to become a novelist, exacerbated, her doctors solemnly reported, ‘by her long hours of writing’.

Bar-room Maupassant

William Sydney Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, the second son of a doctor. His early years were spent in a ‘somnolent’ community in the south, in the optimistically named Reconstruction Period following the Civil War. After the death of his mother, when he was three, he was brought up by an aunt and his maternal grandmother. He began his working life in an uncle’s drugstore, as an apprentice pharmacist. Once qualified in this useful trade he moved, aged eighteen, to Texas, where he began to cultivate his skills as a quick-draw cartoonist and illustrator and – in his own grandiloquent phrase – ‘ran wild on the prairies’. He married in 1887, to his Greensboro sweetheart, and cut back, somewhat, on the running wild. In 1891, rising in the world, he went to work in Austin’s First National Bank.

Porter’s literary career took off in the mid-1890s when he began turning out short stories for local newspapers. His career as a banker meanwhile crashed when he was charged with embezzling the sizeable sum of $5,000 – filched, apparently, to help launch his own comic paper,
The Rolling Stone
. He was drinking heavily and this has always been an obscure episode. Porter went on the run to central America where he freebooted for two years beyond the long arm of the Texas marshal. He returned to Austin, and arrest, on being informed that his wife, Athol, was dying. After her death in 1897, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment from 1898. While a prisoner in Ohio, Porter began seriously to write and publish short stories
for national magazines and papers, principally to support his now motherless daughter, and took care to have the material dispatched by a middleman, so as to conceal its origin in the penitentiary system. In 1901 he was released, with remission for good conduct, and moved to New York. Under the pseudonym ‘O. Henry’ (the origin of the pen-name is obscure), he began to turn out a torrent of short fiction which brought him immense celebrity and wealth. New York settings and urban
Weltschmerz
predominate in his narratives.

He specialised in what Vachel Lindsay called ‘the triple hinged surprise’, and Aristotle called ‘peripety’. ‘The Cop and the Anthem’ is a prime example of what became famous as the ‘O. Henry ending’, shown at its sharpest in his best-known collection,
Cabbages and Kings
. Soapy, a New York street bum, does everything he can to get arrested – ordering meals in expensive restaurants he can’t pay for, committing flagrant acts of petty larceny and minor affray. He wants to be put away in prison for a while – winter is coming on and he needs warm quarters until spring when he can return to the streets. But fate perversely smiles on him. He cannot get anyone to press charges for his deliberate misdemeanours. Disconsolate, he goes into a church, where organ music is playing. It moves him profoundly, and, as he stands outside the church, he finds himself a changed Soapy:

He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. To-morrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him to-morrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would –