Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (83 page)

While her marriage was sexless, her life was not. In Oxford she had flings (including, apparently, some lesbian episodes) and a flagrant affair with Humphry House, a pioneer Dickens scholar. She went on to have another steaming affair with Goronwy Rees, ‘journalist, Soviet agent, and fellow of All Souls’, as Deirdre Toomey sardonically describes him. Both lovers were a decade her junior – she liked her men young (‘fatherly’ Alan, by contrast, was six years her senior). House was astonished, after they first went to bed in 1934, to discover – after twelve years of marriage and thirty-five years of life, including the roaring twenties – that Bowen was a virgin. Once she got the hang of it she was a harsh mistress. House and Rees found themselves mercilessly punished in her fiction for their defections to other women; in House’s case, the scourging continued up to her last novel in 1968 (the poor man had been dead fifteen years). Rees was so enraged by the depiction of himself as the paedophiliac Eddie in
The Death of the Heart
(1938) he had to be talked out of libel action by E. M. Forster.

Bowen’s centrepiece is
The Heat of the Day
(1949), her wartime novel, worked on for ten years until its publication in 1949. The plot – mechanically inept, as usual – revolves around a beautiful Regent’s Park hostess, in her forties, so irresistible that rather than serve his country’s interests, an MI5 agent blackmails her into sex by offering not to betray her lover, Robert, as a Nazi spy. The novel chronicles the great romance of Bowen’s life, with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat (seven years younger) whom she met in 1941. He is the dedicatee of the book in which he is depicted as Robert. Their most rapturous love-making took place at Bowen’s Court, in the marital bed presumably. In 1945 she told him that he was ‘my real life, my only life’; the relationship lasted thirty years. Alan meanwhile found solace in the whisky bottle. That Ritchie himself was married meant nothing to Bowen: her lovers’ wives were never more than tiresome distractions.

Cameron finally succeeded in drinking himself to death in 1952. She described his going as like the death of a ‘next of kin’ – not, by any means, her ‘only life’. As postwar Britain reconstructed itself, Bowen became a public woman. There were honours – doctorates, decorations, committee work. One of her friends nominated her for the Nobel Prize. She earned well but the expense of living in an age of austerity in two expensive houses was crippling. She was obliged to sell Bowen’s Court in 1959 to a farmer who, in an act of class revenge, pulled it down. She eventually took up residence in Hythe, where she had been a displaced little girl all those years ago. She died of lung cancer.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Opening line of Nabokov’s autobiography,
Speak, Memory

Nabokov was born in St Petersburg, the cosseted eldest child of a rich, prominent and aristocratic family. His father was a politician of liberal convictions and high literary cultivation. Vladimir’s early life, as lovingly recalled in
Speak, Memory
, was idyllic: nurses and nannies cared for him; tutors instructed him. St Petersburg’s best school gave him the best education available in the country and he was driven to school in a Rolls-Royce. ‘I was bilingual as a baby,’ he modestly recalled and, of those two languages, English was the first he read, while French was spoken at home. A tutor was recruited to teach him Russian. The family had large properties in town and in the country and Vladimir’s passion for butterflies – in which he would become one of the world’s experts – was formed in childhood at the family estate. They were, in a sense,
his
butterflies – just as, a few decades earlier, the Nabokovs had owned serfs.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was eighteen – a fully formed product of the
ancien régime
with a brilliant future before him – when the Bolshevik Revolution broke. He would never own a home to call his own for the rest of his life. Nor would he have a country he could call his own. The Nabokovs narrowly escaped with their lives, eventually taking up residence in Berlin among a community of similarly expatriated White Russians. Among them, Nabokov’s father again rose to prominence. But they were no longer rich and Vladimir’s higher education had to be paid for with a string of pearls that his mother, Elena, contrived to smuggle out of Russia in a pot of face powder. He spent three years (1919–22) studying modern languages at Trinity College, Cambridge.

He was a gifted student at Cambridge: the university was hospitable to émigrés, and Nabokov might, like Ludwig Wittgenstein or Paul Dirac, have found a lifetime berth there. He was already writing poetry and criticism. Events, however, forbade a donnish destiny. His father was shot – by a hopelessly incompetent assassin – in Berlin. Vladimir was there at the time, on vacation, and subsequently remained in Germany to embark on his first career in fiction. There was a large enough community of exiles to supply a reading public for Russian novels but not a large enough market to make it profitable. He made ends meet by teaching languages and tennis (at which he was an ace). Nabokov’s first effort in fiction, a love story distilling the melancholies of exile, was published in 1926. The sardonic tones of his later work would emerge later.

Handsome, cosmopolitan and debonair, Nabokov had a number of affairs before, in 1925, marrying Véra Evseyevna Slonim, a Russian Jewish émigrée. They had met at a masked ball – the symbolism pleased Nabokov. His literary mask was ‘V. Sirin’, under which
nom de plume
he wrote seven novels in Russian for Russians. Russia, now the USSR, ignored them. Nabokov also developed his sidelines in lepidoptery and chess (he specialised, unsurprisingly, in ‘problems’). By the late 1930s, Berlin was no longer a safe city for a Russian with a Jewish wife and the family (now with a six-year-old son, Dmitri) moved to Paris. It was a period of crisis for Vladimir: his marriage was troubled, he was tormented with psoriasis, and depressed by never-ending exile. He contemplated suicide. However, a number of important things emerged from these mid-life troubles, most important of which was his resolution to write in English. The result was
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941). The novel is a series of riddles. Is one’s own life one’s own? The narrator begins to suggest that, like the knight on the board, he is in the hand of an intelligence he does not understand. ‘I am very happy that you liked that little book,’ Nabokov later told Edmund Wilson, ‘I wrote it … in Paris, on the implement called
bidet
as a writing desk – because we lived in one room and I had to use our small bathroom as a study.’

With the outbreak of war the Nabokovs fled to America. Here, in 1941,
Sebastian Knight
was published. Nabokov was befriended by literary admirers, notably Edmund Wilson, who helped ease him into a succession of posts at American colleges, teaching comparative literature, Russian, and lepidoptery. His tenure case at Cornell inspired a famous wisecrack. When, in support of a permanent position, the committee was reminded that he was a distinguished novelist, one member objected: ‘should we then make a rhinoceros professor of zoology?’ His failure to secure a permanent place inspired the ironic campus novel,
Pnin
(1957). Along with
Pale Fire
(1962), it reflects Nabokov’s mordant belief that American academics are to a man ‘mediocrities’.

As he liked to jest, a twelve-year-old ‘nymphet’ freed him from this campus mediocracy. The birth of
Lolita
was as cosmopolitan as its creator’s career. He showed the novel, rewritten from a 1939 sketch, to Edmund Wilson in 1954. Wilson (who had himself written a ‘dirty book’,
The Memoirs of Hecate County
) passed
Lolita
on to his publishers. They turned it down on sight (‘Do you think we’re crazy?’ one editor asked) – the American public wasn’t ready for paedophilia and incest even if packaged in hyper-literary gloss. Eventually
Lolita
was published in 1955 by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, a Paris firm that specialised in sophisticated porn written in English. Chauvinistically, the French authorities only concerned themselves with French language products – foreigners were perfectly free to corrupt themselves.

In its green Olympia livery,
Lolita
enjoyed an underground éclat. In the 1955
Christmas round-ups, Graham Greene cited it as one of his ‘books of the year’ in the (London)
Sunday Times
. It provoked an apocalyptic diatribe against ‘filth’ from the
Sunday Express
’s John Gordon, a veteran campaigner for British purity. Greene, even more provocatively, founded a ‘John Gordon Society’, comprising some of London’s leading intellectual lights, to oppose book-banning. All this publicity encouraged the American publisher, Putnam, to buy the book’s rights and a ‘legitimate’
Lolita
duly appeared in 1958. It shot to the top of the
New York Times
bestseller list (contesting the Number 1 spot with another ‘Russian’ work,
Dr Zhivago
), holding its position for two years.

The hero-narrator of
Lolita
is Humbert Humbert (a pseudonym), born in 1910, ‘a Swiss citizen of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of Danube in his veins’, an academic and minor poet. He is sexually obsessed with what he calls nymphets, little girls ‘between the age limits of nine and fourteen’. Their nature, he believes, ‘is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac)’. They victimise poor fellows like him. Humbert is left some money by ‘mon oncle d’Amerique’ and – the Old World incarnate – travels to the New World. Following a nervous breakdown, he goes to recuperate in Ramsdale, New England. It is 1947. He lodges with a widow who has a twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores (‘Lolita’) the nymphet of his lustful dreams:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Following a series of happy accidents, including her seducing him in a motor hotel, he takes off with his little nymphet on an odyssey across the highways of America. It all ends tragically after Lolita dumps Humbert for Clare Quilty, a pornographer of genius. Everyone dies, including Lolita, ‘in childbed [sic] giving birth to a stillborn girl’.

The book and Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie (of which Nabokov approved) enriched him and from 1959 he lived in Switzerland in a four-star hotel – a comfortable nowhere. He continued
Lolita
’s explorations with language in
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
, becoming increasingly self-important and given to such haughty utterances as: ‘I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning.’

From 1974 until his death, from mysterious viral infections, Nabokov worked
on a final novel,
The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun).
The novel was never completed and he instructed the manuscript be destroyed. He was not one to leave working materials lying about: ‘Rough drafts, false scents, half-explored trails, dead ends of inspiration,’ he once wrote, ‘are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius.’ The lordly crack about mediocrities (a category which includes, for Nabokov, many of the reading public, most living authors, and all professors of literature) is hackle-raising, but no genius was more concerned with ‘finish’. And if not finished one way the book must be finished the other – destroyed. Nabokov’s wife and son, defying (like Max Brod and Kafka) his instruction, preserved and in 2009 published
The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun)
. The scrappy, bewildering, narrative ends with a thesaurus of finalities:

efface

expunge

erase

delete

rub out

wipe out

obliterate

Perhaps it should have been.

If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it, or well I’d be a prize fighter – anything for the thrills.
Margaret Mitchell, aged fifteen, in her diary

The author of
Gone with the Wind
(‘
GWTW
’ to its in-group fans) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where her father was an attorney with a distinguished southern bloodline. Her mother, ‘Maybelle’, was Irish by ancestry and fiery by temperament and – one may plausibly suppose – the original of Scarlett O’Hara. As a child, Margaret
saturated herself in the history of the South, and specifically of Atlanta during the Civil War and Reconstruction. They were still relatively recent and deeply felt events and there were those living who could remember the burning of their town, which is the centrepiece of both novel and film. ‘It’s happened before and it will happen again,’ Maybelle once told her daughter, ‘and when it does happen, everyone loses everything and everyone is equal. They all start again with nothing at all except the cunning of their brain and the strength of their hands.’ Personal disasters, and the need to start over again and again, certainly afflicted Mitchell in her young womanhood. Her fiancé was killed fighting in France in 1918. Her mother died in the 1919 influenza epidemic and her father was invalided at the same period. Margaret was obliged to give up her studies at Smith College, Massachusetts, to come home and take charge – all of which can be tied in, allegorically, with the fictional sufferings of the indomitable Scarlett, and her return to Tara after the sack of Atlanta and the ruin of her plantation, with the stoical ‘tomorrow is another day’.