Living Your Life In Fiction

Novels don’t always stay within their pages. The revelation, last week, that the Swedish novelist and campaigning leftwing journalist Stieg Larsson, author of the best-selling Millennium trilogy, was instrumental in training Eritrean women fighters during that country’s civil war, might have come straight from one of his own novels. Nor are Larsson’s the only works of fiction in which the distinction between life and art seems blurred. Ernest Hemingway lived at least the latter part of his hard-drinking, hell-raising life like a character from one of his own books. One would not have been surprised to learn that he had been training Eritrean fighters (or the 1940s equivalent) in the intervals between turning out his exquisitely mannered prose. Marcel Proust was also very much the ‘hero of his own life’, establishing not only the vogue for quasi-autobiographical confessional novels that has persisted to this day, but setting the trend, in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, for central characters with the same name as their author.

My own experience of the strange symbiosis between life and art has been less dramatic than Larsson’s (or Hemingway’s), but has involved some of the same confusions. Perhaps it goes with the territory. One doesn’t always know when one is making things up, and when one is not. My first novel, A Mild Suicide, whilst conforming to the autobiographical tendency of many first novels, blended its ‘real life’ episodes – or so I thought – with those that were definitely fictional. I could not have been more taken aback, therefore, to receive a (fortunately good-humoured) letter some months after the novel’s publication, from one of my ‘characters’, who’d recognised himself under the less-than-scrupulous disguise I’d contrived for him.

With Fabulous Time, I also unwittingly found myself trespassing into the grey area between truth and make-believe. Again, it wasn’t until after the book was published that I learned that the blackly comic tragedy at the heart of the novel was not, as I’d supposed, a total fantasy, but almost certainly took place. In my defence, I should say that, as I was only a teenager at the time the events described in the novel occurred, my choosing to write about it was less an act of deliberate provocation of the ghosts of the past, and more an instance of the weird alchemy by which a work of fiction comes about. Suspension of disbelief doesn’t convey half of it. Suspension of the conscious mind’s more like it.

“To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal,” wrote Henry James, in his autobiography. Writing, in effect, is like coming face to face with the ghosts of your own life. Nowhere has this been more the case than with my – now resurrected – second novel, Undiscovered Country. From the beginning, this was a book which invoked the spirits of the past. ‘In Search of Lost Time’ would in fact have done very nicely as a title for it, if someone else hadn’t thought of it first. As it was, I had to make do with a quotation from my favourite Shakespeare play – the one, it seems to me, which gives us the most insight into Shakespeare’s own sense of being ‘haunted’ by his own past, and by the memory of those, like his son, Hamnet, who had gone before him to ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveller returns…’

Since Undiscovered Country was about my late parents, there was a particular resonance for me in this. The world described in the novel is one that has now vanished; the world of the early 1950s, with its arcane social rituals, its impossible glamour. In writing about it, I was revisiting, not so much my own past – since the story is set just before I was born – but the lives of my parents when young. Here they are, dancing out of the past to the strains of ‘In the Mood’, or sipping a ‘sun-downer’ on the veranda at dusk. As I wrote, I started to ‘see’ them more and more – their mannerisms, and turns of phrase appearing out of the aether, and transferring themselves to the page. During those few months of writing, I felt I was exploring a place I’d never been – slowly mapping a territory I’d previously only glimpsed in photographs, or through half-remembered anecdotes.

That the story had resonance for others became apparent after its first publication, in 1997, when I started to hear from readers whose own family histories had, to some extent, mirrored mine. Readers from South Africa (long before I ever went there), from Nigeria, and Hong Kong – all places with a colonial past, in which a generation of children had grown up, with the sense of displacement I myself had felt. Of being part, not just of one world, but two; and of perhaps belonging to neither. One reader, himself a teacher, recalled the school near Maracaibo, at which my mother had taught when she first went out to Venezuela in 1952. Another was interested in my Dutch ancestry – was a branch of my family, like hers, originally from Dordrecht? (It was.) A still more startling communication came from my father’s second wife, whom I had never met, but who had preceded my mother as the teacher at the Shell school in Casigua: would I send her a signed copy of the paperback of Undiscovered Country (which had a photograph of my father on the cover), in exchange for a copy of a studio portrait she had of him on her mantelpiece at home? I instantly agreed.

Letters were exchanged. I learned that Myfanwy had never re-married, after leaving Venezuela; but that she had settled in West London; that she still retained vivid (and affectionate) memories of my father, and that she was more than a little eccentric. Meetings were arranged and cancelled at the last minute; letters arrived demanding the return of photographs never sent. In the end it seemed wiser to allow the relationship to dwindle to an annual exchange of Christmas cards. When Myfanwy died last year, a friend of hers contacted me to say that there were mementos of my father I might like to have amongst her effects. Photographs and paintings of Venezuela, a silver dish with my father’s initials on it, and no fewer than eight steamer trunks with his name stencilled on the side – in which, presumably, his ex-wife had transported her worldly goods from South America, sixty years before.

A still more extraordinary brush with the past was to come. One of the letters I received after Undiscovered Country was published, was from someone who wondered if perhaps my parents had known her parents in Venezuela during the early 1950s. I’d used their name – Porter – for a couple of minor characters (who bore no relation, I hasten to add, to her very charming and attractive parents). Would it be possible to meet? Intrigued, I agreed at once, but for various reasons – not least because Maggie lives in Hong Kong – we didn’t get together until a few weeks ago. It was then that Maggie handed me a letter, which she had turned up when going through her late mother’s papers, and which had been written by her father, on the occasion of her brother’s birth in 1953. Suddenly, the years fell away. For here – in a love letter, written by a man just a little bit the worse for wear after celebrating the arrival of his son, was a portrait of my father – with whom, it appeared, he’d been doing much of the celebrating.

I was sitting in my room, showered and shaved, waiting for time to pass in order to go along to the Mess Hall for dinner. I suppose it was around twenty minutes to seven when Gerry Koning came in and suggested we have a drink. I got the ice etc, and poured them not really interested in what I was doing, when the telephone rang. It was the Central to say the Telegraphic boy was looking for me. Well Anne, I think Gerry was as excited as I was and at any rate, he drove me down the hill faster than it has ever been done before. I picked up the cable in nothing flat and then did not know what to do with it, Gerry had to tell me to open it…

A few tender phrases follow, in which Ian (a k a ‘Jock’) conveys his love for his wife and new-born child, and his relief that Anne has come through her ordeal safely (“It is like being released from some horrible dark prison”). Then the celebrations begin in earnest:

After seeing what was in the Cable we took off for the Telegraph Office and then sent a reply and then Gerry and I went to my room again for a good drink this time and toasted your health and love and the health of the baby. From there I went to the Club and bought cigars and drinks all round, all round to the extent that I am now a bit squiffy…

As indeed he probably was if my father – never a man to turn down a drink – had anything to do with it. It is a delightful story. Quite apart from the fact that it gives a glimpse of my adored and much-missed Dad, very much as I remember him (he was a great man for a party), it conveys so much about the time and place in which it was written. Here is the Company ‘Mess Hall’ where the single men (and those whose wives, like Jock’s, were away in England having babies) had their meals. Here, too, is the ‘Club’, centre of all social activities for the expat community. Apart from these pleasingly specific details, it is the letter’s central situation – that of a man separated from the woman he loves, and putting a brave face on it – which touches the heart. I’m just glad my Dad was there to cheer him up.