BOOKS

A new and agreeable companion

Barbara Trapido

THE READER'S COMPANION TO TWENTIETH CENTURY WRITERS edited by Peter Parker, consultant editor Frank Kermode Fourth Estate and Helicon, £25, pp. 285 Did you know that Willa Cather was sustained in her dispiriting decline by a friendship with Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters; that Stevie Smith acquired her name because she rode like a jockey called Steve; that David Storey — in debt and living with his pregnant wife in a room over a sweet shop — spent his prize money for This Sporting Life on a white Jaguar; that Deborah Moggach has taught horseback riding in the Rockies; that a medley of school songs was sung at John Betjeman's funeral; that David Lodge's MA thesis was so immoderately long that it caused the authorities at University College, London, to introduce a word limit for succeeding candidates; and that Paul Theroux once fled Malawi, having been accused of plotting the assassination of Dr Hastings Banda?

All this and more is to be found in the companion to The Reader's Companion to the Twentieth Century Novel. It certainly makes an excellent companion to any reader and a seductive escape from mince pies and warm sherry. The book is so readable it is easy to forget what a compre- hensive work of reference it is and what a prodigious feat of literary criticism. Above all, it makes one eager to read the authors within.

The editor has, as he explains, opted for waywardness over caution, where decisions about inclusion or exclusion were in doubt, and readers will thank him for the book's Consequent greater liveliness. And he has Pursued a policy of including writers' lives along with works, justifying this by pointing out that an interest in human behaviour is one of the driving forces of literature. As a result, the book informs while having the pull of being richly gossipy. Certainly, some writers have travelled uneventfully through Eton and Oxford, marriage and middle age, but most have lived more hazardously and have thereby provided us with far bet- ter entertainment.

Writers' parents make good reading too, their various occupations indicating that the apple can fall any distance from the tree. The Scottish poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay's father was a bootlegger in the Bahamas and Andrew Motion's a brewer. Beryl Bainbridge's father introduced the first safety matches into Berlin, while John Betjeman's invented a locking rack to keep the servants from stealing the master's drink. Michael Dibdin and David Lodge's male parents were folk-dance instructor and band-master, respectively, though the former went on to become a physicist. Penelope Mortimer's father was an Angli- can clergyman who used the parish maga- zine to praise the Soviets for suppressing religion. Several fathers have been baronets and quite remarkable numbers have been coal-miners and share-croppers. Sara Banerji is possessed of a baronet father and a novelist mother descended from Henry Fielding. The baronet went bankrupt and retired to an African mud hut, but not without despatching Sara, post-tick fever, to be 'brought out' by an aunt who had married Prince Bliicher.

Distant connections are equally reward- ing. Christopher Isherwood is descended from the judge who signed King Charles's death warrant; Fiona Pitt-Kethley from an 18th-century hymnist; David Plante from a Blackfoot native American; Colin Thubron from John Dryden and Flora Thompson, a travel writer whose journey took her from Larkrise to Candleford.

Religion is prevalent, as is politics mainly leftish, along with not infrequent incursions into fascism: Conversions to Catholicism are markedly thick on the ground. Leaving aside Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and G. K. Chesterton, there are, at a glance, Alice Thomas Ellis, Rumer Godden, Ronald Firbank, Muriel Spark, Sara Maitland, Henry Greene, Mary Wesley and Beryl Bainbridge. Only one of these — Ronald Firbank — ever applied for a job as papal guard (he was turned down) and only one — Beryl Bainbridge — was received and lapsed within the year (her 19th). John Betjeman, by contrast, is described as 'a troubled Anglican' and Stevie Smith as a 'troubled agnostic'. Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm, was a 'committed pantheist' and Dodie Smith a Christian Scientist. Her friend Christopher Isherwood spent time in a Vedantan monastery. Several have broken out of extreme forms of Calvinism, most unexpectedly the brilliant and worldly Peter de Vries, described here as 'the only wisecracker to find repeated inspiration in Sir Thomas Browne'.

Among marital arrangements, Margaret Drabble's is possibly the most conducive to productivity — she and her husband live in separate houses next door to each other and William Saroyan's the most odious. He divorced his wife upon discovering that she was Jewish and illegitimate. Harold Munro held onto a wife who preferred hockey to her husband, 'buoyed up by funds from a private lunatic asylum'. There have been several marriages in which both parties write, some rather incongruous — as that between the Marxist poet Charles Madge and the extremely spiritual Kathleen Raine — but only one where the wife is referred to as 'writer and hostess'.

Writing practices are intriguingly varied and their revelation here is perhaps calcu- lated to scotch all those questions that so beset writers when they appear on plat- forms (Do you use a word processor?' etc). The most memorable practitioners are Russell Hoban, who reads his work aloud to his therapist every day to help him `stay friends' with his head, and Yeats, who is reputed, during nights spent platoni- cally bed-sharing with Lady Gregory, to have used her 'broad back' as a writing surface when nocturnal inspiration seized him.

Displays of brilliance and infant prodi- giousness are not uncommon — Compton McKenzie could read at 22 months and William Golding had decoded hieroglyph- ics by seven — but more prevalent are expulsions, sendings down and sackings of every kind. Martin Amis was 'expelled from several schools', William Empson sent down from Balliol for having con- doms in his room and Hugh MacDiarmid expelled, sacked and struck off pracjically everything — the Broughton Pupil Teach- ing Centre, the Scottish National Party, the Communist Party and several jobs on news- papers. Stella Gibbons was sacked from the BBC for 'crying over a love affair'.

Art school has been a frequent way into the creative life. A random sample throws up G. K. Chesterton, John Updike, Liz Lochead, Fiona Pitt-Kethley, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Glyn Hughes, Alice Thomas Ellis and Ngaio Marsh, though other arts are also represented. Rumer Godden ran a dancing school in Calcutta, while Ishiguru hawked his demo tapes around London. Great numbers are defectors from medicine, including Dannie Abse and Chinua Achebe, who occur in this volume side by side. Sherlock Holmes came into being while his GP creator sat in his surgery waiting in vain to acquire some patients.

The editor never bores his readers with plot outlines, nor provides high school students with an excuse not to buy their own Brodie's Notes. Instead, he provides serious analyses of writers' works and makes bold and pithy judgments. In doing so, he has revived several reputations and occasionally written so movingly that a reader will be driven to read or re-read several older writers — Henry Greene, Ronald Firbank, Richard Wright and Brigid Brophy among them. He is good on writers who have been treated dismissively for being too popular, such as Roger McGough and Michael Moorcock. And he is all the better, though he harbours no prejudice and the tone is always circumspect and amiable, for having evident preferences.

It is entertaining to compare the commit- ted tone of his writing about Adam Mars- Jones or Langston Hughes, for example, with the number of writers whose assess- ments are prefaced with distancing phrases, such as, 'what many regard as . . .' or `it has been almost universally believed that . . ' There is the rare but occasional, antipathetical implication. The entry on Ian McEwan, for example, uses the words `cold' and 'chilly', refers to the writer as `the most fashionable' of his generation and describes his most recent novels as having been 'routinely successful'.

The volume is much enlivened by epigrammatic flair. For Nabokov, 'death has not simplified his relationship with the critics', and Ronald Knox, uncle to Penelope Fitzgerald, is referred to, in his role as convert priest at the Oxford Catholic Chaplaincy, as 'having a special mission to the well connected'. Iris Murdoch's more recent novels are declared `in need of a stringent editing that their author will not allow'.

One reads this book so addictively that one begins spontaneously to cross- reference. What connects Timothy Mo with Thomas Pynchon? Literary coprophilia. What connects Paul Bailey with Dodie Smith? One-time employment at Heal's. And Henry Greene with Betjeman? C. S. Lewis, their Oxford tutor, whom both so loathed that they left without taking degrees.

Prize for best unheard-of book from an established writer is Non-chemical Pest and Disease Control for the Home Orchard, by Lisa Alther, author of Kinflicks. This Companion is a joy.