Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (90 page)

West soldiered on with
Miss Lonelyhearts
(1933). His own description of the novel is succinct: ‘A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a legman.’ Being an agony aunt, he discovers, is worse than doorstepping. It’s an open line to the misery of the world. The eponymous, unnamed hero becomes a Christ-figure, tormented by a nihilist editor, Shrike (a bird which West, a knowledgeable ornithologist and avid hunter, particularly loathed). In Delehanty’s bar, where hard-bitten newspapermen hole up, he is regarded contemptuously as a ‘leper-licker’. He is, ultimately, assassinated by a cripple he tried in vain to help spiritually. The novel, razor-sharp in its writing, is a parable of Marxist alienation. W. H. Auden, one of the novelist’s
admirers, called it ‘West’s Disease’. Unfortunately the author’s albatross-luck struck again.
Miss Lonelyhearts
was glowingly reviewed but, thanks to a distributor’s glitch, no copies reached the bookstores. But even a novel as great as
The Great Gatsby
withered on the vine at this period, with only a couple of thousand sales. Towards the end of his life West calculated that all his novels combined had barely brought him a thousand dollars’ income.

For his third novel,
A Cool Million
(1934), he refined his ‘comic strip’ technique. A Voltairean parody of Horatio Alger, it is ironically subtitled ‘
The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin
’ and has the even more ironic epigraph: ‘John D. Rockefeller would give a cool million to have a stomach like yours. (Old saying).’ Assured that ‘the world is an oyster’, and buoyed by an Algerist belief in the American Dream, Lemuel sets out on his life’s adventure. America defeats him and he ends up a prostheticised clown, dismembered daily on stage for the amusement of burlesque-house audiences. Meanwhile, the American financial system crashes, the ‘Leather Shirts’ take over the country and adopt the martyred Lemuel Pitkin as their Horst Wessel.

In 1933 West was hired as a screenwriter by Columbia Studios, then under the management of the crassest of moguls, Harry Cohn. Cynic about the movie industry that he was, the work came easily to West and for the last years of his life he was a prisoner of what he called the ‘dream dump’. It furnished the material for his last effort in fiction,
The Day of the Locust
(1939). While his friend Scott Fitzgerald, in
The Last Tycoon
, targeted moguls such as Irving Thalberg, West did Hollywood from the bottom, with painter Tod Hackett (i.e. ‘Death-Hack’), an artist forced into studio hackery, dreaming all the while of the burning of Los Angeles. The novel ends with a ‘premier’ outside a thinly disguised Grauman’s Chinese Theater, on Hollywood Boulevard, under a huge marquee sign: ‘Mr Kahn a Pleasure Dome Decreed’. (He was, luckily for him, no longer working for Cohn who, anyway, would have needed one of his flunkeys to explain the Coleridge allusion.) The rubber-neck crowd explodes into city-destroying rioters, engendered by the sheer
tedium vitae
of LA life. ‘Sunshine isn’t enough’ was West’s verdict on the west.

Aged thirty-seven, a few days after Scott Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack, West crashed his car, driving back from a hunting trip. He was a ‘murderous’ driver and had recklessly shot a crossing. He was killed, as was his newly married wife, Eileen McKenney, who normally, for reasons of self-preservation, refused to drive with him. As Freud maintained, there are no accidents in life. Everything has its motive – particularly self-destruction.

The whole of life is about escape.

Allingham’s parents (‘second-generation London Irish’) were journalists – her father Herbert specialising in hack adventure stories for the magazines. The line of work paid better than the quality fiction he was capable of writing, and he was not a writer to make sacrifices for art. Born in Ealing, Margery was brought up, until her thirteenth year, in an old rectory in rural Essex which she found idyllic, despite difficulties with her mother ‘who never wanted children’. As the family fortunes waned with the decline of her father’s energies, the Allinghams returned to London and Margery – a ‘nervy, big-boned girl’ and a precocious writer of stories – was bundled off to the Perse boarding school in Cambridge. She went on to study speech and drama at Regent Street Polytechnic in London, partly to ‘cure her stammering and snobbery’ but mainly ‘to learn to write under my father’. She actually outwrote him. He was, however, her closest male companion until her twenties – a period of life which, incredibly, she passed ignorant of the ‘facts of life’, as sex was coyly called. Her speech impediment (‘my ingrown hobble’) was cured, but her lifelong tendency to thyroid-driven bulimia was not. It put an end to any dreams she might have had of a stage career – what trade paper, she wryly asked, advertised for ‘fat actresses’? Her first effort in fiction,
Blackkerchief Dick
(1923), a tale of eighteenth-century smuggling, in her father’s derring-do mould, was published when she was nineteen. It signposts two lifelong preoccupations: her love of coastal Essex and her fascination with spiritualism.

For a few years Margery earned an honest penny reviewing films – the newfangled ‘talkies’ were all the rage. She took up longer fiction again at the time of her marriage in 1927 to Philip (‘Pip’) Youngman Carter, an artist who would later specialise as a skilled designer of book jackets, including those covering his wife’s novels. She wrote, throughout life, under her father’s surname. ‘Sex’, Youngman Carter ruefully confessed, ‘was of minor importance to us.’ Margery, in later life, described it as ‘petrol’ – a fuel which could be usefully diverted to writing ends. There were no children from the marriage, which seems to have had little internal combustion to it, but intermittent fondness.

Allingham’s first thriller – which she suppressed in later life – was
The White Cottage Mystery
(1928), followed by the work which made her name and which introduced the amateur detective, Albert Campion,
The Crime at Black Dudley
(1929). The narrative was dictated to Pip, who took it down longhand. The younger son of a duke, and described on his first appearance as a ‘silly ass’, Campion owed something
to Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. He would later marry Lady Amanda Fitton, introduced in
Sweet Danger
(1933) and, over the course of thirty years and eighteen novels, would evolve into something much less silly and ass-like. Allingham’s finest ‘Campion’ is
The Tiger in the Smoke
(1952): the ‘Smoke’ is London and the ‘Tiger’ is a sadistic killer, Jack Havoc, just out of prison and on the homicidal prowl. The narrative grips from its first sentence (‘It may just be blackmail’) to its last (‘The body was never found’). The novel’s composition was preceded by Allingham’s discovery of Pip’s flagrant adulteries, which led to a three-year separation, and extreme emotional distress – for her, particularly.

Her mature novels take the form of intricate puzzle pieces which cross-hatch sinister crime with light social comedy. ‘The thriller,’ she believed, ‘is a work of art as delicate and precise as a sonnet.’ None the less, she voiced from time to time the ambition to write a ‘real novel’, but never quite got round to it, any more than her father had. Allingham and her husband had moved to Tolleshunt D’Arcy in 1934 (with her money, of course), where they were to spend the remainder of their life. Rural Essex was where Allingham felt safe. As her biographer notes, ‘A secret unhappiness with her appearance may have contributed to her decision to move out of London.’ She had grown enormously fat.

Youngman Carter, who always chafed at being ‘Mr Allingham’, had a good war. A would-be squire in the country and a man about town in London, his dash was turned to advantage in the army during the war and he retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, in the Service Corps. In peacetime, as friends observed, he was ‘pitied and patronised … for living out his professional life in the shadow of his undeniably famous wife’, whereas in the officers’ mess he had been respected.

Allingham wrote more slowly in her later years. Huge sales in Penguin and in America (where she was a cultish favourite) kept her afloat and a step ahead of the ravenous taxman. In
The Beckoning Lady
(1955), she dramatises her epic battles with the Inland Revenue – a foe more tigerish than even Jack Havoc. Like her father, she was a chain smoker and died prematurely of cancer, aged sixty-two. Her terminal illness was preceded by a spell in Colchester’s lunatic asylum, to recover from the recurrent breakdowns which had afflicted her through life. Youngman Carter completed her last novel,
Cargo of Eagles
(1968), and, after a vain attempt to keep the Campion novels going, died a couple of years later.

It is not a good idea to have only one biography of Greene.
Biographer Michael Shelden

A quiz. Answer to the following ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’:

1. George Orwell shot an elephant

2. Olaudah Equiano was born in Africa

3. Jeffrey Archer attended Oxford University

4. Oscar Wilde died of syphilis

5. Graham Greene played Russian roulette

The answer to the first four is ‘no’; to the fifth – ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’, according to whichever account of Graham Greene’s life one selects. ‘Maybe’, in fact, is the word that attaches itself adhesively to everything posterity has been allowed to know about this most enigmatic of writers. Norman Sherry notes, warily, in the preface to his monumental ‘authorised’ (but grossly impeded) biography, ‘A man who would write two versions of his diary was not a man who would give up his secrets easily.’ Nor did he.

Sherry’s attitude is properly deferential. Had he not admired Greene, he would not have spent the best (thirty!) years of his scholarly life on the project to be roundly abused at the end of it. The countering devil’s advocate case was put by Michael Shelden, perhaps the least authorised biographer in literary history. The opening sentence of Shelden’s biography,
The Man Within
, establishes the presiding shriek of denunciation: ‘Young Graham Greene acquired a diverse experience of sin. He drank to excess, chased prostitutes, flirted with suicide, investigated whipping establishments, volunteered to spy against his own country.’ In other words, a sexual degenerate and a traitor, to which, as the Sheldenian catalogue unrolls, one can add ‘rabid anti-Semite’, ‘insincere convert to Catholicism’ and ‘practising paedophile’. Greene too, it is alleged, lusted rampantly after nine-year-old Shirley Temple’s jiggling ‘rump’. It was, implies Shelden, no accident that Greene should be the principal advocate for
Lolita
being published in the UK. No novelist, Shelden argues, has ever more appropriately worn the DOM’s gabardine raincoat (in point of biographical fact, the trenchcoat was Greene’s favoured dress). Shelden’s disgust at Greene’s sexuality is encapsulated in an index entry of de Sadeian depravity:

sex 68ff, 110, 192

anal sex 175

flagellation 161

incest theme 201–3

interest in male love 68, 72, 117–18, 122–3, 157–9, 192, 253, 331, 422, 474

possible actual homosexuality 82–3

masochism, including cigarette burns 161–2, 276, 365, 411–12

and paedophilia 80–1

prostitutes and brothels 114–15, 161, 162, 175, 325–6, 338, 417–18, 427–8, 439

young girls 210

How, one wonders, can these sexual depravities be related to the novels which one used to read with such enjoyment? Shelden’s implied answer is that Greene hated women and abused them. Similarly he hates his readers and abuses us. We should realise it.

Shelden’s iconoclasm extends to the most famous of Greene’s life-episodes – ‘The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard’. Greene tells us that in 1923, paralysed with
Weltschmerz
, he took a firearm (‘a small ladylike object’) owned by his brother, loaded it with one bullet and strolled into the woods alongside his home. He then spun the chamber, put the muzzle ‘into my right ear’, and pulled the trigger. He lived. It was a cure – or so Greene claimed. The authorised biographer, Sherry, accepts the episode as both iconic and gospel: it happened. Shelden begs to differ: there was no Russian roulette; almost certainly the cartridges were blanks; the ‘weapon’ was a harmless starting pistol – all Greene risked was a ringing in the ears, if, indeed, the event happened at all. Quite likely it was a literary trope, lifted from Stevenson’s short story, ‘The Suicide Club’ (1882) – RLS was a distant relative of Greene’s.

The ‘shilling facts’ of Greene’s life, about which there is less dispute, are as follows. He was the fourth son, of six children, of the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, where he himself went to school. As a schoolboy, Greene lived, ambiguously and unhappily, on both sides of the ‘baize door’. At Berkhamsted he was tormented by a classmate (later identified as ‘Carter’) who was the ‘incarnation of evil’. Greene also recalled the influence Marjorie Bowen’s now wholly forgotten historical romance,
The Viper of Milan
, had on him, aged fourteen. Bowen’s villainous Visconti supplied, he later said, ‘the pattern’ to which Catholicism would later give theological shape: ‘perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again’. A key date in Greene’s personal literary history was 1916. After the death of Henry James, he believed, the novel lost its ‘religious sense – the sense of the importance of the human act.’ It was a morally lost art form.