Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (61 page)

A 1952 Technicolor film adaptation of
Scaramouche
(1921), whose narrative is set in pre-Revolutionary France, is famous for the longest sword fight in film history between an athletic Mel Ferrer and slightly less athletic Stewart Granger – who has the better head of hair, but less expertise with the
glissades
and
sixtes
. Sabatini’s political views were staunchly republican.
Scaramouche
has as its epigraph a quotation from Michelet: ‘sensible people who lament the ills of the Revolution really ought to shed some tears on the ills which led up to that event’. In 1921, this pro-Revolutionary sentiment (given events after 1917 in Russia) was inflammatory. The main plot element has the young Revolutionary swordsman, the harlequin Scaramuccia, turn out to be the bastard son of his duellist-rival, the wicked Marquis. This story was taken over by George Lucas, for the
Star Wars
epic (same romance, different costumes). Presumably the young genius of SF-movies saw the film as a teenager in his native Modesto.

Sabatini is buried in Switzerland, a country he had visited annually, in earlier years, to indulge his love of skiing. Over his grave his wife erected a headstone bearing the opening line from
Scaramouche
: ‘He was born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.’

The good stuff may be all right for posterity. But I’m not writing for posterity.

Edgar Wallace did for English fiction what Henry Ford did for the horseless carriage. His was the Model T of fiction. Ford jested you could have any colour you wanted – so long as it was black. So, too, the Wallace addict could have:
The Ringer, The Squeaker, The Forger, The Joker, The Mixer, The Cheater, The Gunner, The Twister
. Wallace’s were books for the day – the hour, almost. Oddly, the only work that survives is the one he was working on at his death, in Hollywood,
King Kong
. His fertile brain, apparently, came up with the scenario. Wallace’s name is buried, alas, in the credit basement. Few take note of the ‘King of the Thrillers’ while watching the King of the Gorillas.

In pedigree, Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace is the archetypal Wellsian ‘Little
Man’ – a cockney sparrer. He was born in 1875, on All Fools Day, spectacularly illegitimate. He was the child of a touring actress, a second-line performer in a third-rate troupe, Mary Jane ‘Polly’ Richards. A young widow at the time of her son’s conception, she surrendered her virtue at a drunken party to the company’s romantic lead, Richard Horatio Edgar. Edgar claimed not to remember the encounter and Polly sneaked away to bear her shameful offspring in secret in Greenwich. Barely hours after birth, he was farmed out to the family of an amenable Billingsgate fishmonger, who brought him up as ‘Richard Freeman’. Smart as paint, young Dick earned an honest penny as a printer’s devil, a newspaper vendor, and – as an early photograph indicates – a villainous-looking milk-van boy. He was dismissed from the last position for lifting a few dishonest pennies from the coin bag – cash was always his great weakness. Aged eighteen, Edgar enrolled in the army, under the name Wallace. He wanted to see the world, before becoming one of its wage slaves. The medical examination records him as being possessed of a chest, expanded, of 33ins. He was stunted, like most children of the slums. The army would, they promised, ‘make a man of him’.

Trained in the infantry, he was shipped to South Africa, in 1896, and wangled a transfer into the Medical Corps. It was a cushy berth. This was the high period of Kiplingesque barrack balladry. Wallace turned his own quick wits to profit as the ‘Tommy Poet’. In 1899, as the war with the Boers broke out, Wallace – no fool – married a local girl and bought himself out. By this point the Tommy Poet had cultivated contacts in the press. Reuters took him on; the
Daily Mail
(‘The Megaphone’, as it would be in his thrillers) bought the occasional piece. As a reporter (he despised the term ‘journalist’), he shrewdly ingratiated himself – by bribery, if necessary – with clerks, orderlies and others ‘in the know’. He knew the lay of the land better than the hacks sent out from Fleet Street with their cleft sticks, topees and Royal Ordnance maps. Young Wallace pulled off a series of scoops – endearing himself to the great mogul, Northcliffe, and infuriating the CiC, Kitchener, who would rather have shot English newspapermen than Johnny Boer.

With peace, Wallace and his wife Ivy (a daughter having died) returned to Britain and the
Daily Mail
. His stipend was a comfortable £750 p.a., but Wallace’s life, however much he earned, was always a rollercoaster: lunch at the Savoy, bailiffs in the kitchen. An eye for the ladies and the horses – and a legendary open-handedness – kept him forever on the brink of insolvency. In 1905, he produced his first novel,
The Four Just Men
. The idea was ingenious. Four cosmopolitan vigilantes, of impeccable breeding, set out to overset Britain’s xenophobic Aliens Act (Wallace was always a champion of the underdog). The narrative pivots on a locked room mystery. The Home Secretary no less is warned that unless he liberalises the
legislation, he will die. The minister ensconces himself in his Portland Place office, surrounded by guards. He is assassinated. But how? Read on.

Wallace, still slaving as a hack and a racing tipster (his preferred occupation), picked a winner in 1911 with his next serious foray into fiction,
Sanders of the River
(the first of eleven books of stories). Before being sacked by Northcliffe (furious at the never-ending libel suits his star reporter incited), he had been dispatched to the Belgian Congo – the heart of darkness. He spun out of this experience a series of adventure tales, chronicling Mr Commissioner Sanders’ mission to bring ‘civilisation’ to ‘half a million cannibal folk’ with his Maxim machine gun and Houssa storm-troopers. Conrad’s Kurtz would have approved.

Wallace, now divorced, remarried in 1927 (to one of his secretaries, twenty years his junior) and middle-aged, came into his own as a mass producer of fiction in 1920. His agent, A. P. Watt, negotiated a sweet deal with Hodder and Stoughton for what was, effectively, a fiction assembly line. H&S would pay him £250 advance for any and every title. Wallace rose to the challenge, with 150 novels over the next twenty-five years. All he needed was his Dictaphone (he hated the labour of actually writing), pyjamas, a freshly brewed pot of tea every half hour (heavily sugared), and his cigarette holder, nearly a foot long, to keep the smoke from his eighty-odd cigarettes a day, out of his eyes. He boasted he never walked more than four miles a year (and then only between bookies at the track). He feared draughts and went to extreme measures to protect himself against them. He travelled habitually in a closed yellow Rolls-Royce; his windows were kept shut in all but the warmest weather, and he wore two sets of underwear.

In financial difficulty, despite his vast income (he had a theatrical success with
The Ringer
(1929), starring Gerald du Maurier, and was chairman of the British Lion Film Corporation), Wallace accepted Hollywood’s lucre in 1932. RKO loved him. A new career, even more splendid, was in prospect. But the oceans of over-sweetened tea he had swallowed over the years caught up with him. As he waited, impatiently, for the Hollywood starlet who would warm his bed that night, he fell into a terminal diabetic coma. It was a teetotal tragedy, unique in a location where innumerable of his profession had drunk themselves to early death (Wallace was only fifty-eight), but all with stronger brew than Mr Lipton supplied. He left huge debts, and some grieving turf-accountants. The bells tolled and flags in Fleet Street were lowered when his body returned. As his memorial in Ludgate Circus testifies, he had given literature his brain, but his heart was in the daily newspaper – like fish and chips.

How good a writer was he? Orwell, unfairly, labelled him proto-fascist, a ‘bully worshipper’. But Orwell would have thought a Belisha beacon fascist. Politically
Wallace was proletarian-liberal – a man of the people. And he knew precisely what fiction the people wanted.

Sailor on horseback

Born into an irregular marriage, the bastard son of a vagabond astrologer and a failed boarding-house keeper, Jack London was the main support of his family at ten years old – a ‘work beast’ before he was even a man, rising at three in the morning to deliver newspapers in Oakland, California. He left school at fourteen, having derived most of his education from Oakland Public Library, its librarian Ina Coolbrith, and a mutilated copy of Ouida’s novel
Signa
. By fifteen he was the ‘Prince of the Oyster Pirates’, poaching molluscs in the shallow waters off San Mateo. ‘Dreadful trade’, as Shakespeare’s Edgar would say.

Before he was eighteen, Jack had sailed the Siberian waters as a seaman on a seal-hunter. Two years later, a befurred London plodded over the Klondike snows, as a gold-miner. In the interim he was one of the enlisted unemployed in Jacob S. Coxey’s ‘army’ as it marched bravely on Washington, demanding a new deal for the American worker. They were brutally disbanded by the DC police and charged with trespassing on the White House Lawn. He deserted from Coxey’s ranks to ride the rods, hop freight cars and generally hobo all over the North American continent. He served time for vagrancy in Erie County Penitentiary (he had been to see the Niagara Falls by moonlight – the true London touch), then returned to enrol in high school. Two years later he entered Berkeley from where, anticipating his hippy successors, he dropped out after a semester. He then worked ten-hour days at 10 cents an hour, shovelling coal, in waterfront jute mills.

But it was not all harpoon, ice-axe and shovel. Before he was thirty, London had made a reputation as an intrepid journalist, reporting to the American people from the ‘abyss’ of London’s East End slums and the trenches of the Russo-Japanese war. Lesser men would have paused their career at any one of these points. But for London it was ever onward on what he called the ‘Adventure Path’ of life,
and he seems always to have anticipated his premature death. Adventurers are not good insurance risks. Since selling his first story (‘To the Man on Trail’) in 1899, London had written as energetically as he did everything. Those writings are mirror reflections of his life experience – most comprehensively the autobiographical novel
Martin Eden
(1909).
The Road
(1907) records his Coxey experience.
The Call of the Wild
(1903) recalls his expedition to the frozen north and the volume of Darwin he took in his back-pack.
The Sea-Wolf
(1904) recalls his seal-hunting voyage across the Pacific. Everything with Jack London’s name on it sold bestsellingly. He could even sell socialism – as in the dystopian
The Iron Heel
(1908). (Jack did, however, make the radically qualifying point that his was ‘the socialism of the caveman’.)

In his last years he was earning around $75,000 annually. No author in the annals of American literature had ever made it so big. He married twice; the first marriage broke down in 1903. In 1905 he took to himself a new ‘mate woman’, Charmian Kittredge. Neither union gave him the Jack London Jr he craved, but the second lasted. In the same year, 1905, he bought a 1,000-acre property in California’s Sonoma County, which he would later cultivate as his ‘Beauty Ranch’ – it is depicted, idyllically, in
The Valley of the Moon
(1913). At its centre he began erecting a mansion to be called ‘Wolf House’: a fitting habitation for one who had shown himself so indisputably a leader of the human pack. Ominously, it burned down on the day he and Charmian were to move in.

To his millions of admiring contemporaries, Jack London, as he approached his fortieth year – with the prospect of decades ahead of him – embodied the bounding energy of his still young nation. He was Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism incarnate, an overman, a Carlylean hero, a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story, a champ. Why, then, did he commit suicide – as it seems probable that he did – in 1916? On the night of 22 November, Jack London injected into himself a lethal overdose of morphine. Apologists have claimed that it was accidental: or that it was something organic (kidneys, perhaps) that killed him. The suicide thesis is, however, supported by its omnipresence as a theme in his work. London had, as his ‘alcoholic memoir’
John Barleycorn
(1913) records, attempted to drown himself, aged sixteen. The event furnishes the climax of
Martin Eden
, and its last paragraph:

His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and feebly. But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them beat and churn. He was too deep down … There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.

There was a Jack London who was the embodiment of American manhood, a London who joyed in the glory of his body, with as much energy surging in him as a one-man Olympic team: ‘I boxed and fenced, walked on my hands, jumped high and broad, put the shot, and tossed the caber, and went swimming.’ (The ‘caber’, like Niagara by moonlight, is another true London touch.) But there was another Jack London who saw, only too clearly, the skull beneath the skin, who was fascinated by easeful death, and could write: ‘I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton, that under the rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death’s head.’ It was that Jack London, one suspects, who reached for the hypodermic syringe, not the dumb-bell, in the dark watches of 22 November 1916.