Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (85 page)

Young Georgette had no ambitions to get into print, however: these early ventures in fiction were for the private entertainment of her ailing, haemophiliac brother, Boris. It was her father who encouraged her to go public with her first historical romance,
The Black Moth
. Written when she was seventeen, it was a hit, and was followed by a dozen more in the same mould over the next ten years. They sold strongly, and had titles which attracted devotees like iron-filings to a magnet:
The Great Roxhythe
(1923),
The Masqueraders
(1928),
Beauvallet
(1929),
Powder and Patch
(1930). As Heyer always insisted, her romances were stiffened by ‘research’ – those massed ranks of notebooks which raised her work above that of her principal ‘plagiarist’, Barbara Cartland (a woman she royally despised). Some of her novels she wrote with an eighteenth-century quill pen, authenticating the self-immersion in ‘her’ period. It is not recorded whether she affixed a beauty spot to her cheek while writing.

In the 1930s, Heyer varied her staple historical romance with detective stories. Jaunty in style, e.g.
Why Shoot a Butler?
(1933), they featured the series heroes made fashionable by Dorothy L. Sayers and the ‘cosy’ country-house settings which were Agatha Christie’s stock-in-trade. But she gave the genre up on the sensible grounds that Regency sold better than murder in the conservatory.

Her father, one of the few people whose opinion of her work she trusted, died prematurely in 1925, playing a hard game of tennis with her fiancé, Ronald Rougier. The couple married a few weeks later. Rougier was a mining engineer and
prospecting meant long sojourns in rough areas of Africa and Macedonia. There was one child, a son Richard, born in 1932. On her father’s death, Heyer took over financial responsibility for the family. Her brothers were still at school; her mother was ‘difficult’. She persuaded her husband to settle in England and, after a few unlucky commercial ventures, to study law, with a view to becoming a barrister: a respectably professional line of work. She, of course, would pay: or, put another way, her bucks, beaux and beauties would pay. Rougier qualified and eventually, in 1959, was made a QC. In later life her husband was the only judge whose opinion of her work she trusted.

In 1937 Heyer produced what is usually thought of as her best work,
An Infamous Army
. Like
Vanity Fair
, it is a Waterloo novel – but, she maintained, better researched than Thackeray. She was wrong about this, but, as editors discovered, she was not the kind of woman to be contradicted on such matters. It was a source of pride to her to learn that
An Infamous Army
came to be prescribed in the war history course at Sandhurst. The other contender for ‘best Heyer’ is
The Spanish Bride
(1940), a novel of the Peninsular War. Yet it was the Regency romances which sold most reliably, and the best of this genre her loyal readers judge to be works of the early 1940s, such as
Devil’s Cub, Faro’s Daughter
and
Regency Buck
.

There seems to have been a mysterious domestic crisis (a ‘bad time’, her biographer calls it) which cast a palpable shadow over these wartime works. The Rougiers moved to the select apartment block, the Albany, in Piccadilly (near Regent Street, pleasingly), where they lived elegantly, expensively and very privately. Not even the most addicted admirer of her work would know her married name – under which she went into society – until they read it in the obituaries. And most of those who met Mrs Rougier socially had no idea she wrote novels. In the 1950s Heyer set up her own company, Heron Enterprises, something that never quite, as she intended, put her beyond the grip of the Inland Revenue. She hated modern times: ‘Oh Christ!’, she ejaculated in one letter of the mid-1950s, ‘why did I have to be born into this
filthy
age?’ It was a ‘disgusting era’. She had no time for contemporary fiction (‘kitchen sinks and perverts’). A staunch Jacobite (one of her earliest novels,
The Masqueraders
, glorified the Bonnie Prince), she stamped her foot in rage when the Queen dared to name her son and heir ‘Charles’. A Conservative voter, she could not stand their Albany neighbour, Ted Heath: ‘the most deplorable Prime Minister that our country has had since Lord North lost the American Colonies’. In fact, she ‘loathed’ all the current crop of politicians: ‘the only one of the bunch who has courage and a great many proper ideas’, she believed, ‘is Enoch Powell’. Her views on geo-politics were similarly unreconstructed. ‘Isn’t it FUN,’ she wrote to a friend in 1967, ‘to see the Israelis beating hell out of the Wogs?’

Heyer lost control of her weight in later years and was disabled by chronic ailments, which she wrote through indomitably, producing her novel-a-year at least. They remained in print – particularly after the paperback revolution of the 1960s – pulling in as much as £70,000 in a good year. Most were good years. She died of lung cancer in 1974 and after her death her husband saw through the publication of an incomplete historical novel,
My Lord John
(1975), set in the Middle Ages which was, he claimed, the period she had really wanted to get to grips with. Rougier died not long after his wife’s death. Their son Richard went on to be a famously witty judge.

Heyer’s Regency fiction continues to have loyal readers and some eminent supporters – notably A. S. Byatt. Others, like Marghanita Laski, writing in the year of Heyer’s death, find the ‘universal blandness’ numbing and her novels comically sexless: ‘if ever Miss Heyer’s heroines lifted their worked muslin skirts, if ever her heroic dandies unbuttoned their daytime pantaloons, underneath would be only sewn-up rag dolls’.

A rather cagey cribber.
Scott Fitzgerald on Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, northern California, of mixed Irish and German descent. His father was a local government official, his mother a teacher. Steinbeck recalls the Salinas Valley of his childhood in the opening pages of
East of Eden
(1952) as itself an Edenic place to start life. He also recalls the natal moment at which the writer in him was born, when, aged eleven, he was introduced to Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
by his Aunt Molly. He pictures himself, a little boy sitting under a tree, ‘dazzled and swept up’ by the tales of knight-errantry. A romantic streak would colour his artistic make-up for the whole of his writing career – a career which can be seen as a long dialogue with other writers and thinkers. Steinbeck is the most creatively absorbent of novelists: fictional blotting paper. Alternatively, he is what Fitzgerald contemptuously terms him – a ‘cribber’.

One can follow the track of that cribbing. In late adolescence, Steinbeck came under the spell of Jack London’s
Martin Eden
. Following London’s rugged lead,
he dropped out of college at Stanford and went on the road as a hobo, making a fitful stab at running away to sea. His first novel,
Cup of Gold
(1929), based on the adventures of the Elizabethan buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan, was an acknowledged homage to James Branch Cabell’s florid historical romances. In 1929 he was introduced to Hemingway’s work by his future wife, Carol Henning, who gave him a copy of ‘The Killers’. Romantic Cabell was thrown overboard: modernism had caught up with John Steinbeck. Put another way, he became ‘the poor man’s Ernest Hemingway’. Henning also introduced him to left-wing politics and he duly became ‘the poor man’s John Reed’ – for a few years. She can be seen as the political force behind Steinbeck’s early ‘strike novel’,
In Dubious Battle
(1936): one of Steinbeck’s manifest gifts was in devising sonorous titles; he never needed to crib in that department.

There is only one recorded personal encounter between Steinbeck himself and Hemingway, in New York in the early 1940s. John Hersey, who set it up, records that the occasion was a ‘disaster’. Steinbeck had given fellow novelist John O’Hara a blackthorn stick. Hemingway grabbed the stick from O’Hara and broke it over his own head and threw the pieces on the ground, claiming it was a ‘fake of some kind’. Drink was probably behind his actions, but one is tempted to allegorise the episode as Hemingway protesting Steinbeck’s appropriation of ‘his’ style. That is how Steinbeck read the event, at least. According to Hersey, ‘Steinbeck never liked Hemingway after that – not as a man.’

In 1930, Steinbeck, now resident in the unspoiled Pacific coast around Monterey, met his guru in the form of Ed Ricketts. A maverick marine biologist, Ricketts passed down to his disciple the biological materialism that was to run through all Steinbeck’s subsequent writing. Its most memorable expression is Rose of Sharon’s suckling the starving stranger at the end of
The Grapes of Wrath
. Ricketts convinced Steinbeck of the necessity of ‘non-teleological thinking’ – the wisdom of the mollusc. When not instructing, Ricketts was a drinking buddy and – Steinbeck’s latest biographer hints – there may have been something homoerotic between the men. Ricketts is portrayed as ‘Doc’ in
Cannery Row
(1945). With his premature death in 1948 (his car was hit by a train), there is an observable reverberation in Steinbeck’s writing – throughout life, he insisted that he was a ‘writer’ not an ‘author’. He was bereft.

There were, however, other gurus to follow. Steinbeck’s path crossed in the 1930s with that of the mythographer, Joseph Campbell, who introduced him to Jungian symbolism. In the seigneurial tradition of the West Coast sage, Campbell cuckolded his disciple: Steinbeck lost a wife – his first of three – but gained a literary device. The turtle which crawls across the road at the beginning of
The Grapes of Wrath
should have ‘Ricketts’ emblazoned on one half of its shell and ‘Campbell’ on the other. Campbell’s thinking rings out from what is the most quoted of Steinbeck’s
‘philosophical’ pronouncements: ‘The new eye is being opened here in the west – the new seeing. It is probable that no one will know it for two hundred years. It will be confused, analyzed, analogized, criticized, and none of our fine critics will know what is happening.’

The Pastures of Heaven
(1932) followed an immersion in
Winesburg, Ohio
. Sherwood Anderson did for Steinbeck’s artfully fragmented narrative structure what Hemingway had done for his literary language. Thus Steinbeck was finally primed for his first great work – and sales success –
Of Mice and Men
(1937). The tragic story of the vagrant farm-workers Lennie and George elicited accusations of downright plagiarism from Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote indignantly to Edmund Wilson:

I’d like to put you on to something about Steinbeck. He is a rather cagey cribber. Most of us begin as imitators but it is something else for a man of his years and reputation to steal a whole scene as he did in ‘Mice and Men’. I’m sending you a marked copy of Norris’ ‘McTeague’ to show you what I mean. His debt to
The Octopus
is also enormous and his balls, when he uses them, are usually clipped from Lawrence’s ‘Kangaroo’.

On his part, Edmund Wilson thought that Steinbeck’s next great work,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939) owed more than it should to the ‘newsreel’ sections of John Dos Passos’s
U.S.A.
trilogy, which came out the year before. Woundingly, even Steinbeck’s former high school teacher, Miss Cupp, gave it as her opinion that
The Grapes of Wrath
was not an ‘authentic’ book. Whatever the cavils, the epic journey of the Joads in their Hudson truck along Route 66 to the false Eden of southern California had the good luck to coincide with Roosevelt’s New Deal. No novel since Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
was more effective in, temporarily, touching the American social conscience. It headed the bestseller list for two years and earned Steinbeck the 1940 Pulitzer Prize. In England it inspired what an unimpressed Graham Greene called a ‘fetish’ for Steinbeck – something akin to whips, rubber and bondage: low things of that kind.

During the Second World War, Steinbeck put his pen to his country’s service. He proved himself a distinguished war correspondent and wrote a propaganda novel,
The Moon is Down
(1942). It was commissioned by the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) and celebrates heroic civilian resistance against Nazi occupation in Norway. When Steinbeck visited Scandinavia after the war, it was to be greeted with a headline: ‘John Steinbeck, all of Denmark is at your feet.’ In Sweden he was told that
The Moon is Down
had ‘fired the confidence’ of Scandinavian freedom-fighters ‘during the war’s darkest hours’. Gratitude was in order, and would be richly repaid in 1962 with the world’s highest literary award.

Steinbeck himself pointed to some odd inspirations with his next major work of fiction,
East of Eden
(1952). He had, he confided, drawn on the Book of Genesis and Henry Fielding. Cain, Abel and murder among the furrows one can see; Tom Jones and Blifil, it must be said, seem planets away from the fratricide of Cal and Aron Trask in the bean-fields of Salinas Valley of the pre-First World War years. He called
East of Eden
‘my first book’; it is certainly his longest. It returned to the bestseller lists in the twenty-first century when Oprah Winfrey endorsed it.

Steinbeck divorced his second wife in the same year Ricketts was killed. His marriage to his third wife, Elaine Scott (herself recently divorced from the film actor Zachary Scott), coincided with a new, and highly remunerative, line of Hollywood work. Steinbeck did the screenplay for Elia Kazan’s Brando-starring
Viva Zapata!
(1952). Kazan also did the James Dean-starring adaptation of
East of Eden
(1955). The association with Hollywood’s sexiest ‘Method’ actors kept sales of all Steinbeck’s work healthy. So too did the fact that his fiction was being prescribed at high-school level, particularly the novella-fable,
The Pearl
(1947) – one of Steinbeck’s most tediously Campbellian efforts.