Gold mine
Richard Shone
Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller D. S. Higgins (Cassell pp. 266, £9.95) It often happens that a writer who is a popular best-seller is only interesting for that reason and if his or her life is obscure we ought to be thankful. How satisfactory it is that we know little, for example, of Captain Marryat, beyond the scraps put together in his daughter's memoir. We know something of his naval campaigns, his manner, his house in Norfolk and that there was a Mrs. S in the background who has remained unidentified. The great thing is that Peter Simple and Mr Midshipman Easy are still readable — wholesome fare certainly — but vivid, purposeful, engrossing. But if some hitherto unknown Life of Marryat were to come to light or some mass of papers were discovered, bursting a tin trunk with their revelations, who knows what effect this might have on our reading of those outwardly placid books? After finishing the present Life of Rider Haggard, a best-seller at the other end of the century, I do not feel I will ever be able to read one of his novels again in quite the same way.
Rider Haggard is still voluminously in print, still filmed and serialised. While reading this book, I asked several people what his name meant to them. To the women I asked, it meant virtually nothing, although King Solomon's Mines was a title they knew; to the men, often two or three titles came pat, even names of characters — Leo Vincey or Umslopogaas — and most had read at least one as a boy. I myself came to them later, partly because the copy of King Solomon's Mines in the school library was one of those battered and under-nourished classic reprints with hardly a binding to speak of and its pages like a pack of shuffled cards. The other reason was that I disliked anything to do with Africa in the books I read. South America was my continent until some years later Olive Schreiner drew up the blind on the despised landscape with her African Farm. It was then that I read Ayesha and King Solomon's Mines.
Looking at them again, it seems difficult to take seriously D. S. Higgins's claims for Haggard. He regards him as a truly underrated writer, stigmatised by his popularity and really an artist of considerable power. He writes of the famous passage of Ayesha in flames in She as 'one of the most impressive scenes in all literature' and then quotes its few paragraphs which seem to me flatly written, repetitious and not especially original. Of course, it's an important scene in the book, a crucial climax of the story, beloved of Hollywood. But even Haggard wrote better things than, to paraphrase from a contemporary review, this 'New Bond Street Dore'.
With this high estimate of his subject's talent, D. S. Higgins obviously feels the need for a lengthy and detailed biography. He is in a good position to give us one, having unearthed innumerable Haggard documents, edited his Private Diaries and having this, to me, questionable but sincere enthusiasm for a good many of Haggard's 68 novels. The problem is that someone who writes 68 novels is apt to be a bore. Only by a biographer's judicious quotations and his having a sharp, ironic sense could Haggard be rescued for a lengthy Life. Nevertheless, D. S. Higgins has other virtues — a sense of pace, a decent plain style, an eye for detail, accuracy, and a gift for succinct summary vital when one's subject has written all those novels and several Government Reports, travelled widely and written home (God! how they all wrote home.) The narrative is in the bag; there's little or nothing of Haggard's public life that we feel we've missed or need to know. Only occasionally is there a drift towards supposition, a loose 'it can be assured', a yearning 'it seems likely' that finds no resting place.
But what of Haggard himself, who lost his heart to Lilly but married Louie? Who believed in the immortality of his soul and the life hereafter as if it were a personal reward from Her Majesty for his sufferings on earth? Surely he would meet Lilly again at some croquet tournament on the lawns of Government House over lemonade and to the sounds of a less than celestial brass band — this woman who married another as the youthful Haggard stuck it out in South Africa, and who was to haunt him for the rest of his days? D. S. Higgins almost persuades me that they would meet, for he has lavished some care on Lilly (in fact he is the first to have properly identified her). With a dramatic gift, more acquired than natural in this instance, he has made her a central symbol in the development of Haggard's imagination and the motivating force behind much in his life.
When Haggard returned from South Africa where he had been assistant to Sir Henry Bulwer in Natal, he married a Norfolk neighbour's daughter with a dwindling fortune and a country house they were obliged to let. The author treats Louie Haggard rather badly. She remains a cardboard figure and, though the marriage was obviously strained, she cannot have been quite the tedious dumpling that D. S. Higgins maintains. They had a family and it had to be provided for. The British public did that. Haggard began to write, and by the age of 30, in 1886, King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain and She had spell-bound thousands of readers. He became rich and famous.
A lesser man might have been ruined by this sudden vault into wealthy esteem. But not Haggard. He was decent, temperate, hard-working, with a humble opinion of his talents, something of a social conscience and a firm belief in the mores of his age, although, as the author points out, his reputation for jingoistic imperialism is unjustified. He was, in fact, a gentleman. Though there were complaints — that he was flashy and vulgar and, less seriously, that he was a plagiarist (which, on the author's evidence, it seems he was) — he had concocted a flop-proof recipe that was to last until he died, tired out and knighted, in 1925.
The author gives the recipe when describing Maiwa's Revenge: 'several hunting adventures, a beautiful native girl, a missing white hunter, a battle between two African tribes, and, predictably, a severed limb.' Thread these together in a suitably digestible prose, add a touch here and there of manly comradeship (very popular at the time — Kipling, Henty, J. K. Jerome, Conan Doyle, Horning), a dash of exotic description and there you have it — a Salammbo for the damp soul of a housemaid or butcher's boy. Occasionally he strayed and there were excursions into history, allegory and domestic drama. But at his most typical, Haggard's unrequited love of Lilly and his steamy memories of native girls are released in smouldering portraits of imperious, dark heroines with — a 'master-stroke' the author calls this — white features and, as in She, a death in flames 'in case her eroticism had been too appealing'. It's an Alma-Tadema subject painted by Frank Brangwyn. At the same time there's hint enough of a whispered sado-masochism that would not have been out of place in The Yellow Book or in a drawing by a disciple of Beardsley. Both sides of the coin come together in thrilling yarns that earned Haggard nearly £11,000 in 1887. 1 feel that this historically represen tative side of Haggard's fiction — the symbolic significance and allusive power of his ingredients — has not been fully enough explored by the author. He comments on it sporadically but fails to reach any conclusion as to why it made for Haggard's phenomenal success.
It was a success that — decent fellow that he was — rapidly bored him. Increasingly the machine took over the output of novels and the real Haggard interested himself elsewhere. He tried politics but soon gave it up for doing good — sitting on committees, making reports on agricultural reform (and writing, by the way, a delightful diary, A Farmer's Year). He was much liked, though found to be reserved (disliked talking about his books), conscientious, with irons in innumerable fires, an Edwardian gentleman of enormous respectability — trim beard, a buttonhole, a faithful dog at his heel. But he was plagued by the idea of death, shattered by that of his young and only son Jock, by the deaths of friends and the horrible decline of the now widowed Lilly (with whom he had kept in touch), dying of syphilis in the Red House at Aldeburgh — 'Malicious Angel! who still dost My soul such subtle violence!' — he would have endorsed Lionel Johnson's lines.
Parts of this book are exceptionally interesting, especially Haggard's relations with his publisher, his agent and the reading public. There is something reassuring about the number of books sold, author's payments (immeasurably increased with the coming of films), the details of his contracts. In fact, looking back, they are really the only interesting thing, for there's not much else to hold one at the sight of a decent English chap forced to bring rabbit after rabbit from his well-brushed hat.
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