The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  King Louis XV was a gift to writers of scandals, his love life so public, his mistresses so powerful in making and unmaking governments, his ministers so unpopular and incompetent. It was very easy to hold him up to ridicule and contempt, as he grew older and corruption ruled. He was powerful and dangerous, distributing lettres de cachet to people who annoyed him, exiling them and imprisoning them for years without trial.

  Taine, after deep research throughout France and writing one hundred years later, considered privilege, in all its unfairness and stupidity, had more to do with making revolution than any other factor. Doubtless the forbidden bestsellers amused their readers, with their unedifying tales of those in authority, King and Church, but people heartily disliked the police state and arbitrary injustice. As to the Terror, it grew year by year until it reached a climax four years after the taking of the Bastille. Unlike the Gordon Riots in London a few years earlier, the French Revolution was backed by the educated middle class, which had real grievances. But when every owner of property, however modest, became the target for pillage and murder by the mob the bourgeoisie took fright and has been frightened on and off ever since.

  Robert Darnton’s researches and his potted French history don’t take us far in understanding what happened in 1789 and beyond, but they permit him to include lengthy translations of soft porn: Thérèse Philosophe, or stories of Mme Du Barry—always popular. Truth to tell, his book is disjointed, prolix and rather dull. The dust jacket, a reproduction of Jean François de Troy’s masterpiece The Reading From Molière, is a colour-printing disgrace, the faces and hands of the elegant ladies and gentlemen bright scarlet. For a work of ‘scholarship’ the proofreading is shoddy and one of the French advisors mentioned might have told the author that Mme Du Barry’s house near Marly was at Louveciennes, not ‘Lucienne’.

  The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Darnton, R. Evening Standard (1996)

  Golden Porn

  Oscar Wilde said he took his diary with him when he travelled, to have something sensational to read in the train. Anaïs Nin would have loved to have her diary with her, but it was enormous. It grew and grew, to about a hundred volumes. It was her end all and be all. She stored it in vaults of which she kept the key.

  She was part Spanish, part Danish, part French, of a mixed-up Cuban family abandoned by her musician father, who left his wife to bring up the children as best she could. Very beautiful, she considered herself a great artist, but her writing was refused by publishers over and over again, which made her furious. She lived near Paris with her rich banker husband, Hugo, and distributed the money he gave her for housekeeping among her penniless lovers, chief of whom was Henry Miller. Terrified of starvation he insisted upon his stipend, as he called her largesse. Everything went into her diary, her innumerable affairs, including one with her own father, every compliment she received, her rows with publishers and lovers.

  Anaïs spent every day with Henry Miller, and when Hugo was away on business he moved in with her. There were many abortions, and she and Hugo spent fortunes on doctors and psychoanalysts. When the war came they all went to America, where she bigamously married a much younger man in California.

  Then began a wild life of lies, two husbands, trying to believe in ‘jobs’ she pretended to have in Los Angeles and New York, commuting between Rupert and Hugo. As usual, Hugo paid. When no publisher would take her work she bought a printing press and published it herself.

  Although the diary and her outsized ego filled her life, she was also a wonderful wife to her two husbands; they found her indispensable and swallowed the lies in order to keep at least half of her. Her avid self-promotion worked up to a point, and she often lectured at universities, charming dons and students. Hugo left the bank, and there were moments of financial disaster. Her old lover Henry Miller behaved well; as Anglo-Saxon Puritanism changed into permissiveness his Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn became best-sellers, he was rich, and considered a major writer. He allowed Anaïs to sell his love letters to her, a great help.

  She herself had written a good deal of porn, which came in very handy. It was a little pot of gold for the old age of her husbands after she died. In her lifetime she was rewarded by becoming a cult figure, her old novels and edited diaries selling at last.

  Deirdre Blair’s book is immensely long, with copious scholarly notes. It is very funny in parts, which Anaïs would not have approved of. Nothing is left out, but far from boring the reader this biography fascinates from beginning to end. American dream or American nightmare? In any case, American.

  Anaïs Nin: A Biography, Blair, D. Evening Standard (1995)

  On a Sea of Hope

  The image is familiar. Robert Louis Stevenson was a delicate, sickly child, terrified by hell-fire, full of dreams and nightmares, whose parents took him to the Riviera when the Edinburgh climate became too raw for him. The father, a prosperous engineer who hoped his only son would join the family firm, was bitterly disappointed when Louis decided to be a writer. It was even more bitter when Louis told him he had lost his Calvinist faith.

  He made so little money with his writing and had such wretched health that his father, unwillingly, had to support him until he was 30.

  At 30, he provided his parents with another dire disappointment by going to America to try to marry an American; she had a husband to divorce, several children and was ten years older than Louis. Yet, like all his decisions, it turned out to be the right one.

  Fanny was tiresome, vain, possessive, jealous, but she looked after him devotedly. He suffered from frequent haemorrhages, was as thin as a rail with a concave chest, and his survival seems almost a miracle. Fanny did all he wished, living for months at a time on board a small yacht in the Pacific despite her seasickness because Louis felt relatively well at sea.

  After his marriage, he wrote best sellers: Treasure Island, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, one of his nightmares put to good use. Finally, with Fanny and her children, he settled in Samoa, built a house and cleared the wild land round it. He wrote letters to his literary friends, including Henry James and Gosse, but had no wish to return to civilisation. He died, aged 44.

  The South Sea islanders revered him, and he loved them. They carried him up the mountain to his grave, to which, Ian Bell tells us, there is now a chair-lift for tourists. The great charm of the man comes across in this biography, and Ian Bell, though unable to like her much, is perfectly fair in giving Fanny her due.

  Robert Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile, ed. Bell, I. Evening Standard (1992)

  Erotic Tales of Discovery

  In the nineteenth century syphilis played the dread part Aids does now. Until a cure was discovered, mercury kept it at bay, but Gustave Flaubert changed in a few years from a beautiful young Viking to a fat, bald, middle-aged man with one tooth, his mouth blackened by mercury treatment.

  Was Louise Colet the muse of this genius? They had a short, passionate love affair, but to her disgust Flaubert left her to devote himself to his art. Louise suffered from his neglect and consoled herself with other men, usually well-known writers, sometimes Immortals from the Académie Française. She was a poet, who won the poetry prize of the Académie several times. Whether it was awarded for her beauty or her verse is unclear.

  Flaubert wrote her love letters from Normandy, where he lived with his mother. She was forbidden to visit him, but they sometimes met at Mantes for a day or two of lovemaking at a hotel. Louise had a little daughter at home, which made her small Paris flat less than ideal for her countless affairs.

  She had several great qualities; she was beautiful and extremely courageous, and almost more than politically correct, really a red revolutionary, extravagantly anti-clerical, anti-Bourbon, anti-Bonapartist. After the disastrous Commune she went to Italy to help Risorgimento, and insult the Pope.

  She wrote hundreds of letters to Flaubert, which he burned, but she kept all his. He began to write to her again when he was working, slowly as was his wont, on Madame Bo
vary. He was familiar with the Norman background to his story, but he wanted her to describe the feelings of a wildly romantic provincial housewife, bored by her life, which is what Louise had been until she managed to get to Paris. It was part of his eternal search for the mot juste. He loved her beauty, but her unending reproaches and tempers must have been tiresome.

  Are muses tiresome?

  He had seduced Louise in a cab driving about the Bois de Boulogne, called by the author a hansom cab. The idea of erotic gymnastics taking place in a hansom cab is hilarious. Flaubert is accused of indelicacy because of the scene where Madame Bovary and her lover drive round and round Rouen in a cab with the blinds drawn (also called a hansom). Yet it is something that must have happened hundreds of times in the history of men, women and four-wheelers. The muse is unlikely to have minded, but she disliked Madame Bovary intensely.

  A much deeper and more rewarding friendship was Flaubert’s with George Sand, but on the whole he preferred the company of his men friends, and from time to time undemanding prostitutes.

  Mrs Gray’s book is very well researched and she has discovered interesting details about her heroine. It is a lively picture of nineteenth-century literary Paris seen through American eyes.

  Fire and Rage: A Life of Louise Colet: Pioneer, Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert’s Muse, de Plessix Gray, F. Evening Standard (1994)

  La Belle et La Bête

  Flaubert and George Sand began writing to each other in 1863 when he was 42 and she 59. Storm and stress were behind them: the ‘scandal’ of his masterpiece Madame Bovary, and Sand’s well-publicised love affairs with Musset and Chopin.

  They could hardly have been more unalike, he an inveterate pessimist, she a motherly old optimist who enjoyed her country life with her family while writing endless books. They had in common hatred of the emperor and strong anti-clericalism.

  As to their writing methods, Flaubert could worry for a whole day about a single word—le mot juste—while George Sand churned out her books by the dozen. There are ninety six volumes of her collected works, and lately another twenty four volumes of letters.

  Struggling slowly with L’Education sentimentale, Flaubert was fairly happy. They visited each other, she went to Normandy and he to Nohant in Berry, and sat up all night talking. They met in Paris often, and became devoted friends. The reception of his book by most of the critics was a devastating blow to Flaubert. The tone of his letters changes completely.

  George Sand tells him to pay no attention, but though pretending not to care, his despair is obvious.

  Pleased by the departure of Napoleon III, George Sand had great hopes of the Republic, which were not shared by the elitist Flaubert, and were soon disappointed. He was anti-Christian, advocating the promotion of the strong and clever, not the humble and weak. Universal suffrage he thought nonsense.

  After the Franco-Prussian war he became permanently angry and miserable, and doubtless George Sand’s loving and happy letters helped him to begin to write again, even if her optimism irritated him at times. Most of his literary friends died; only Turgenev and George Sand supported him at this sombre period.

  She died in 1876. He went to Nohant for the funeral and was angry because her coffin was put in the church.

  Beautifully translated with exemplary footnotes, to read this book is to understand Gustave Flaubert and George Sand. Henry James long ago summed them up: Flaubert was of ‘a powerful, serious, melancholy, manly, deeply corrupted but not corrupting nature. He was head and shoulders above the others’; George Sand ‘was a supreme case of the successful practice of life itself’.

  Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence, trans. Steegmuller, F. and Bray, B. Evening Standard (1993)

  From Hell to Paradise and Sexual Freedom

  Mary Challans took the pen name Renault because her first novels were autobiographical and she did not wish to embarrass family and friends. She pronounced it Renolt.

  Her adult life divides easily: England 1925-1948, a sort of hell on earth; and South Africa from 1948 until her death in 1983, a paradise.

  Born in 1905, Mary Renault’s quarrelsome parents could not divorce because the father was a doctor. The atmosphere at home was miserable, but Mary had a good education and went to Oxford, for women undergraduates in those days more like a school than a university.

  She wanted to be a writer. Her father gave her £20 a year, hardly enough for shoes and stockings, let alone books, or theatre, or travel. There was no room in the house where she could write—Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, so relevant to Mary’s situation, came out in 1928.

  To escape from her unhappy family and restricted life she took a job as a nurse; it was desperately hard and grossly underpaid, but at the Oxford Radcliffe Infirmary she met the love of her life, nurse Julie Mullard. During the war they had to go on nursing, seeing each other seldom.

  Mary’s first books were about hospitals, and sold quite well, but when Return to Night was published in America in 1948, it won a huge money prize from MGM.

  Hardship, cold, poverty and austerity were cast aside, Mary Challans and Julie Mullard sailed to South Africa and Mary never set foot in England again, though she twice went to Greece.

  Her wonderful novels The Last of the Wine and The King Who Must Die, and her many books set in ancient Greece, were based on extensive reading and research. She was intent upon getting all her facts right, her clever imagination did the rest. The superb scenery and perfect Greek climate at the Cape, where the two friends lived at Camps Bay between mountains and sea, probably helped.

  Most of Mary Renault’s men friends were homosexual, like herself. She loved the theatre and the company of actors. In England there had been a certain amount of backsliding by Julie, who had a couple of affairs with men, but Mary never wavered.

  They had an ideally happy life together, Mary more and more successful and famous, Julie devotedly caring for her and keeping disturbers away when Mary was working.

  Inevitably politics intervened, for these were the days of the most unfair and the most absurd aspects of apartheid. Mary was a fairly mild liberal; she did what she could, signed protests, wore a black sash, but living in the country she never saw the situation in quite the simple way its foreign critics did. She felt much more strongly about sexual freedom, and lived long enough to see it complete.

  David Sweetman’s book about this brilliant woman is a delightful success story. Like Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary Renault has shown that the historical novel can be a work of art.

  Mary Renault: A Biography, Sweetman, D. Evening Standard (1993)

  At the Mercy of the Muse

  Robert Graves was 19 when the First World War began; he was badly wounded physically, and also, like everyone else who had to endure the unendurable, psychologically. Brought up in a puritan family and sent to boarding schools he hated, he married a lovely girl, Nancy Nicholson, daughter of the painter William Nicholson.

  From the Army he went to Oxford, and while he was a penniless undergraduate began a family. Still in his twenties he had four children, no money and a head full of poetry. He also had delayed shell shock and appalling nightmares.

  Nancy Nicholson’s life in an Oxfordshire cottage with four tiny children, the only money an occasional cheque from her father or Robert’s mother, and presents from his friends Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence, must have been hard. Finally Graves unwillingly accepted an offer to teach at Cairo University. They all sailed to Egypt, accompanied by Laura Riding, an American poet whose work Robert admired. They became so ill and miserable that he took everyone back to England before he had fulfilled his contract.

  They soon left the cottage for London. Robert Graves and Laura Riding got a flat in Fulham, Nancy and the four children lived round the corner in a barge on the Thames. The ménage à trois worked rather well. The exhausted Nancy was only too pleased for Robert to have somebody to occupy his time: he was in thrall to Laura Riding, his goddess and his muse. Trouble came when they we
re joined by a fourth, Geoffrey Taylor, or Phibbs, a handsome Irish poet. Laura Riding fell in love with him, but he preferred Nancy. In a paroxysm of jealousy, Laura jumped out of a third-floor window. She broke all her bones including her spine and pelvis.

  Amazingly, she recovered. Nancy and Geoffrey stayed on the barge with the children, Robert and Laura went to France and so on to Majorca, where they built a house near the sea. This had become possible because Robert had written a bestseller, his autobiography Goodbye to All That, a truthful account of the war.

  He also wrote a short biography of T.E. Lawrence, at Lawrence’s request. Apparently he was chosen because Lawrence felt he could trust him not to mention anything disagreeable, such as his Charlus-like predilection for paying a strong man to beat him to a jelly. The book sold well. Robert published his poems, but there was no money in that, and his two bestsellers set a pattern lasting all his writing life: the prose made fortunes and paid for the poetry.

  In Majorca Graves wrote his Claudius books, still in print after sixty years. He wasted much time in the 30s and again in the 50s with cinema people who promised him enormous sums for making his books into films. Nothing ever came of these efforts. Although she liked the comfortable life, Laura Riding was jealous of Robert’s financial successes, she herself failing to find a publisher for her writing. But she remained his perfect goddess and the inspiration of his verse.

  In 1936 the Spanish Civil War sent them back to England. Robert was becoming slightly disillusioned with his muse, who for years denied him her bed while inviting her disciples and admirers to share it. ‘Bodies have had their day,’ she told him. She remained his muse and his goddess until they went to America and she fell in love with a man she subsequently married; Graves was free of her after thirteen years as her devoted slave. His new companion was Beryl Hodge, with whom he had four more children; they lived in England for the war, and in 1946 managed to leave high taxes and small rations behind and go back to Majorca. He earned money from books, lectures in America, poetry readings, translations. His career flourished. He gave the Clark Lectures at Cambridge, and in 1961 was elected visiting Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He delighted large audiences of undergraduates by telling them Yeats and Eliot and Pound, as well as Milton and Dryden and Pope, were rotten poets, which was just the opposite of what they had been taught by schoolmasters and dons. Nobody much minded all their swans being geese, but they were not so sure that his ‘discoveries’ were swans, the only poets except Laura Riding and Graves himself.