Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“AUTHOR, AUTHOR” by David Lodge (first
published in 2004); “CORA CRANE” by Paul Ferris (first published in 2004)
Recently (issue
of 1 April 2017 to be precise), I wrote for the New Zealand Listener a review of a rather sentimental novel by
Polly Clark called Larchfield, which
introduces the young W. H. Auden as
a main character. I said in my review that I always feel a little queasy when
canonical authors are introduced into fiction this way. In most cases, novelists
who do this seem to be reaching for easy and ready-made cultural
respectability. But, I have to add at once, there have been novels about real
novelists and other writers that have worked reasonably well. About 13 years
ago, I found myself, as a newspaper book-reviewer, being deluged with novels
about real authors. Here are the reviews I wrote of two of them in the year
2004-2005.
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First, and certainly the better, David Lodge’s novel
about HenryJames, Author,
Author. By coincidence, Lodge, well known as both a literary critic and a
novelist, wrote his novel in the same year that Colm Toibin, the gay Irish
novelist, was also writing a very different novel about Henry James called The
Master. Reviewers had great fun comparing Toibin’s (more solemn) novel with
Lodge’s (more genial) one.
Anyway, unaltered from its appearance in the old Dominion-Post
(17 October 2004), Here is my review of David Lodge’s Author, Author.
In Author, Author, David Lodge presents a
proposition about sex that is so shocking, daring and contrary to current
received morality that it is likely to outrage quite a few readers. Lodge
suggests (and I did warn you this was pretty shocking) that some people can
live productive, significant and worthwhile lives without engaging in sexual
activity at all. Astounding as it may seem in this day and age, he implies that
there may be something to be said for celibacy.
Author, Author is Lodge’s
novel about Henry James. Thanks in large part to his authoritative biographer
Leon Edel, James is now seen by many as the paradigm of repressed
homosexuality. Clearly James lived and died a virgin, but that hasn’t stopped Queer
Theorists from combing through his convoluted prose for signs of covert sexual
activity. Lodge’s James is a different creature. The James of this novel does
indeed admit to himself that he is probably a “Uranist” by inclination (the
term “homosexual” was only just beginning to be used in his day). But the
thought of actual sexual contact with anyone horrifies him. On the one occasion
a man propositions him, he flees in terror. His one meeting with Oscar Wilde
convinces him that Wilde is a flashy cad and bounder. In fact, Uranist or not,
says this novel, James’ most significant emotional relationship was probably
with the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who may have committed suicide
because James did not reciprocate her passion for him. Only later, implies
Lodge, did James come to realise how much she meant to him, thus inspiring him
to write his sad short story The Beast in
the Jungle.
Actually James’
sexuality is not centre-stage for most of this novel, even if it is likely to
cause much comment…. More central for Lodge is the tale of how James, the
literary perfectionist and high-brow, tried and failed to turn himself into a
bestseller. Framed by scenes at James’ deathbed in 1916, the novel focuses on
James’ friendship with the vulgarian bestselling George Du Maurier (author of Trilby) and James’ disastrous attempts
to write a popular West End play. The failure of his Guy Domville – which also features in Toibin’s The Master – was a great humiliation.
Though
thoroughly enjoying every page of Author,
Author, I did find myself asking anxiously whether it is really a novel, or
simply dramatized literary biography. In extensive author’s notes at the
beginning and end of its leisurely 400 pages, Lodge assures us that all major
characters are real, as are all quotations from letters, plays and so forth.
Characters’ thoughts and much dialogue, however, are inevitably Lodge’s
invention.
I approve of his
admiring, affectionate portrait of the novelist plugging away despite adversity
and depression. I enjoyed playing the game of recognising which of James’
novels and stories are being referred to, in embryonic form, in those scenes
where James gets sudden inspiration. But
in some sense the game is up about six pages from the end when Lodge tells us,
in his own voice, exactly what he thinks of James and his achievement.
I’m sure James
would have loved the affirmation Author,
Author gives him. But his fastidious soul might have been outraged by the
literary form.
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Now for a novel which is sort of about the novelist,
journalist and short-story writer Stephen Crane, although he is not the main
character. Once again, the man who wrote the novel, Paul Ferris, is novelist
and literary critic and biographer, just as David Lodge his. Ferris’s biography
of his fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas sits on my shelf next to other attempts to biographise
the drunken bard and his wife. Again unaltered from its newspaper appearance (Sunday
Star-Times, 10 October 2004), here is my review of Paul Ferris’s Cora
Crane:
It seems to be
part of the postmodern condition that novelists write novels about other
novelists. The world is now awash with works of fiction about Oscar Wilde,
Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway and so forth.
In Cora Crane, Paul Ferris, a novelist and
seasoned literary biographer, tries something a little different. This isn’t a
novel about a novelist, but a novel about a novelist’s spouse.
Cora Stewart was
the common law wife of the young American Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage.
They couldn’t
marry because her husband, raffish twit of an English army officer, refused to
give her a divorce even though he had deserted her.
Cora and Stephen
met in the American brothel of which she was the madam and he a bashful
customer.
This was the
1890s so, when they settled in England to start a new life together, they
pretended to be respectably married.
But Stephen was
as much in love with being a war correspondent as he was in love with Cora. He
left her stranded and without an income, while he set off to cover the
Spanish-American War in Cuba.
Ferris’ novel
concerns Cora’s time alone in London, waiting for Stephen to come back while
fearing that he never will, and trying to scrape together a living among the
literary set. Some authors are kind to her, especially the discerning Polish
genius Joseph Conrad who respects Stephen as a rising talent. But high society
and the law are suspicious of Cora’s background and her former profession. Much
of the novel concerns detective inspector Fred Hooper, more than a little of a
P. C. Plod, who sniffs around after Cora imagining that she is trying to set up
a white slavery ring.
It is hard to
know how much of this story is true. Unlike, for example, David Lodge in his
recent novel about Henry James, Paul Ferris gives us no detailed author’s
notes. There is only the one-sentence statement “Some of this story is true.”
Perhaps the
literal truth doesn’t matter. More important is the clash between Cora and
late-Victorian social rules. Ferris scores well in the untidy atmosphere of
unhygienic old London, with its conmen, child-traders, odd religious sects and
incongruous tea parties.
Less successful
is the depiction of the luckless Hooper. The vigorous suppressor of vice, who
proves to be neurotic and sexually repressed, is a teensy bit of a cliché.
The novel’s
biggest asset is its convincing portrait of the female protagonist’s mind and
preoccupations.
It still worries
me that I don’t know how much is fiction, though.
FOOTNOTE: It turns out that I was right to worry in
the above review about the historical veracity of Cora Crane. Subsequent
research tells me that the character of detective Hooper is pure fiction and
some reviewers, more au fait with the Cranes than I am, pounced on the
novel’s fabrications.
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