Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (52 page)

Slight, but one of the most delightful and charming essays in fiction of recent years.
Harold Williams, half praising
The Beloved Vagabond
in 1918

One of the comic highlights in
Howards End
is Leonard Bast’s recounting to the Schlegel sisters his midnight ramble. What inspired this act of depressing nocturnal vagabondage? What had Len been reading – one knows he’s a bookish sort of cove? He drops the names Meredith, Jefferies, and ‘RLS’, with the aim, patently, of impressing his new friends. But, given the date of
Howards End
’s publication (1910) and of its action (a couple of years earlier), it is likely that a direct inspiration for Bast’s taking to the road was W. J. Locke’s 1906 bestseller,
The Beloved Vagabond
. It was not, for a certainty, a volume the Schlegels would have had on their coffee table.

Locke was born in Demerara, British Guiana, and went to school in Trinidad. His parents were English, colonial, and well off. He attended St John’s College, Cambridge, as a scholar, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1884. For six years or so, in the early 1890s, he worked as a schoolmaster at, among other places, Clifton College, Bristol. Given the schools that employed him, Locke was evidently good at his job but, as evidently, did not much like it. There may have been some disgrace. Biographical details are scarce – itself sometimes a significant detail. His first novel,
At the Gate of Samaria
(1895), deals with sexual (heterosexual) improprieties.
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
(1905) has as its hero a former schoolmaster who gets into a pickle with a married woman.
Derelicts
(1897) has a hero falsely accused of fraud. Locke’s health may also have been a problem – he contracted tuberculosis in the early 1890s. Another of his novels,
A Study in Shadows
(1896) is set in Switzerland, where Locke may have gone for his lungs.

For whatever reason, he gave up the classroom. From 1897 to 1907 he served as secretary to the Royal Institute of British Architects and moved to London. The post evidently gave him time to write and his career as a bestselling author took off, meteorically, with
The Beloved Vagabond
. It inspired a ‘happy tramp’ genre, later exploited by Wells in works such
The History of Mr Polly
(1910) and, pre-eminently, by Jeffery Farnol in
The Broad Highway
(1911). Locke’s vagabond is a ‘wandering philosopher’, Paragot, a wine-loving Gascon. Paragot buys a young cockney boy, Augustus Smith, for half-a-crown, and renames him ‘Asticot’, on the whimsical grounds that ‘it expresses you better’. Asticot becomes a disciple and Paragot’s Boswell. A figure with a romantic past, Paragot is initially the manager of a Bohemian London club. Losing this position after a dispute with the owner, he takes to the highway, serenading passers-by with his violin. Thereafter, the novel complicates, peripatetically.
The
Beloved Vagabond
is laced with much high-flown philosophising about life, society and freedom and launches a barrage of cheerful insult against ‘the Great British God Respectability’. Respectable British readers duly rewarded Locke with an annual income of £15,000 in his heyday and the novel was filmed four times.

Divorce court records reveal that Locke was cited as co-respondent in the 1910 divorce suit against the woman who became his wife, in 1911. She was an actress, working with him in his capacity as a playwright (twenty-four of his bestsellers were dramatised for the West End stage). The couple had no children and lived quietly at Hemel Hempstead, in a large house – large enough, indeed, to convert into a hospital for the war-wounded, particularly Belgians (the same refugees who, elsewhere, inspired Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot) in 1914. The Belgian government decorated Locke for his philanthropy after the war. He continued writing novels until his death in Paris, clocking up a lifetime total of thirty-two, though none enjoyed the runaway success of
The Beloved Vagabond
. Leonard Bast should have been so lucky.

Civilisation has been saved!

Dixon was born during the Civil War in North Carolina, one of five children of a Baptist minister. Before the war the Dixon family was rich; after the war they found themselves plunged into abject poverty – down there with the ‘darkies’ they had always lorded it over. The disgrace had a (de)formative effect on the growing Thomas. During these hard years his father (also ‘Thomas Dixon’) rode with the Ku Klux Klan and became a senior member, or ‘Wizard’, as did other disaffected members of his family. The KKK, an underground movement, had been formed by veterans of the Confederate Army to assert white supremacy (by violence if necessary) against reforms imposed by the victorious North and the hated Republican Party. It established a surrogate aristocracy for an unfairly, as they thought, degraded master-class.

A clever boy, Thomas entered Wake Forest university aged fifteen and went on, four years later, to Johns Hopkins on a full scholarship, qualifying, after an unsuccessful stab at a career on the stage (his lifelong love), as a lawyer. One of
his contemporaries at Hopkins, and a personal friend, was the future President, Woodrow Wilson. While at law school, his father urged him towards a political career and in 1885 he was elected to the North Carolina legislature – but resigned a year later to enter the Baptist ministry. In the same year, 1886, he married. He was a wildly popular ‘lyceum lecturer’ and gave dramatic sermons to admiring congregations as far north as New York and Boston. John D. Rockefeller was one of the admirers. By 1895 he had mustered sufficient support to form his own ‘People’s Church’, based in Manhattan, whose doctrines cunningly mixed Christianity and protest politics. He undertook gruelling lecturing tours across the continent, firing up audiences wherever he spoke. His health was not strong, however. In 1903 he and his family (there were three children) retired to a quieter life in Virginia.

Dixon’s career in fiction began with his seeing a stage performance of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, which inflamed his dormant KKK sentiments. He resolved to strike back, with
romans à thèse
asserting the Southern cause. There followed
The Leopard’s Spots
(1902),
The Clansman
(1905) and
The Traitor
(1907), which were bestsellers – particularly
The Clansman
, which sold 40,000 copies in its first ten days of publication.
The Clansman
is proudly dedicated to the author’s uncle, a ‘Grand Titan of the Invisible Empire’ (i.e. the KKK). It opens with victory for the Union being shouted through the streets of Washington. Young, beautiful, and ‘fair’ Elsie Stoneman has nursed back to health a young Rebel officer, Ben Cameron, who will face the firing squad when he recovers for the crime of fighting behind enemy lines as a ‘guerrilla’. Elsie goes to Lincoln and successfully pleads in person for Ben’s life. The fatherly President gladly grants a pardon. He goes on to explain that his aim for the United States has never been negro emancipation, perish the thought, but repatriation of the former slaves to Africa: ‘I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the Negro into our social and political life as our equal.’ ‘Mulatto citizenship’ is an abomination to every right-thinking American.

Elsie and Ben duly marry and return to his native South Carolina, only to discover that ‘the white man’s day is done’. The couple suffer vile humiliations and atrocities. Ben’s father, the saintly Dr Cameron, is hauled off to prison in shackles by a jeering band of the South’s new negro tyrants. A band of blacks gang-rape Ben’s former love, the ‘belle’ Marion Lenoir, and her mother. Unable to live with the shame the ladies commit suicide. The Klan avenges them – bloodily. The ‘Fiery Cross’ burns everywhere; the white-sheeted riders restore justice and (for the uppity blacks) condign retribution. The novel’s last words are: ‘Civilisation has been saved, and the South redeemed from shame.’ Hallelujah.

Dixon composed a version of
The Clansman
for touring companies in 1906. Waves of immigration through Ellis Island at the turn of the century had inflamed
national xenophobia, so these were also good years for the Klan. Having found his new vocation – and having lost much of his fortune in the financial crash of 1907 – Dixon embarked on a series of race-propaganda novels. They sold in their day, but none, other than
The Clansman
, lasted – nor deserved to. Immortality was bestowed on that garbage-novel when D. W. Griffith took it as the source for his epochal film,
Birth of a Nation
, in 1915. Dixon was the first novelist ever to receive ‘subsidiary rights’ ($2,000) for a film adaptation of his work. His old classmate, President Wilson, arranged for private showings of the movie for his cabinet, the Supreme Court, and the Houses of Congress. The KKK, unsurprisingly, seized on Griffith’s film as a recruiting sergeant.

Dixon realised the huge new ‘congregation’ that was available through film and set up his own studio in Los Angeles, adapting five of his novels for the screen between 1915 and 1923. His career as a film-maker failed as did later speculations in land: he was totally wiped out in the Great Crash of 1929. His last twenty years were passed in poverty, bereavement and political frustration (particularly with the ‘Communist’ Roosevelt). He retired to North Carolina and made ineffectual interventions in public life. In 1937 his wife died; and two years later he was crippled by a stroke, lingering on, an invalid, for seven years. He made a bedside second marriage with his personal assistant and died a forgotten man. However,
Birth of a Nation
remains one of the acknowledged founding classics of American film. If there is an afterlife, it is pleasing to think of Dixon on 4 November 2008, seething, even more boilingly, in his racist hell at the presidential (no less) triumph of ‘mulatto citizenship’.

The Dickens of the Ghetto.

Zangwill was born in Whitechapel, London. His father, a businessman in a small way, had fled persecution in Russia, arriving in England in the ‘Year of Revolution’, 1848. His mother was a Jewish refugee from pogroms in Poland. The family background was impoverished and the Zangwill household was nomadic during Israel’s early years. He first went to school in Bristol where his intellectual gifts became
apparent, but in 1872 the family returned to London where Israel attended the Jews’ Free School in Whitechapel. Aged ten, he was already writing stories of school life. At sixteen he won a short story competition in addition to every educational scholarship going. He eventually graduated from London University in 1884 (having attended night classes) with the highest honours in Languages and Philosophy.

By this point in his life Zangwill had shifted from the religious orthodoxy of his father to something more moderate. He gave up a career in school teaching in 1888 and devoted himself to writing. His first published novel was
The Premier and the Painter
(1888) co-written with Louis Cowen. A fantasy, the work owes something to Mark Twain’s
The Prince and the Pauper
. Zangwill was always alert to the popular touch in fiction. In 1890 he founded the comic paper
Ariel
, which he edited until 1892. In its pages he published various short stories, collected as
The Bachelors’ Club
(1891) and
The Old Maids’ Club
(1892). A gifted practitioner of the detective novel, it was Zangwill who invented the ‘locked room’ puzzle-plot – murder behind closed doors. But he was already marked out for something higher than popular fiction, and was commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society of Philadelphia (alarmed by American anti-Semitism, triggered by waves of immigrants fleeing Russian persecution) to write something quite different – a novel about his people. What the JPSP had in mind was a ‘
Robert Elsmere
for Jews’ and Zangwill duly produced
Children of the Ghetto
(1892).

It was hugely successful with all classes of reader. Subtitled ‘A Study of a Peculiar People’, the narrative takes the form of a bundle of interlinked tales, giving the sense of a tight-knit, if often quarrelsome, community. The first half of the narrative is set among the first-generation Jewish ghetto population (the ‘
Schnorrers
’ and shopkeeping petty bourgeois) of London’s Stepney and Whitechapel districts, swollen by the recent influx of Polish refugees. The second part, ‘The Grandchildren of the Ghetto’, deals with the lives of second-generation Jews (much less sympathetic to Zangwill) who have become rich and cultivated. The novel ends with the promise of new lives in the new ‘Promised Land’, America. ‘Assimilation’ and ‘Emigration’ – the two great Jewish themes in fiction – are pondered throughout.