The Novel

A Biography

Michael Schmidt

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674724730
• eBook ISBN: 9780674369061
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity.

Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature, Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but "artist practitioners," men and women who feel "hot love" for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.

Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliché—some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages.

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“Literature Is Invention”

Mandeville’s Travels, Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, De Proprietatibus Rerum

One of the first popular English authors of fiction is Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville’s Travels, originally known as The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, is not a novel as such, but it has a consistent narrator who combines personal memoir and travel book. It pretends to be true but is in fact woven from half-truths and lies. For a century and more after it was written, readers believed it. They believed in Sir John. Gradually his book has found its place in the realm of fantasy, but fantasy based less in romance than invention. Most of the invention was not Mandeville’s own: it was borrowed from “authorities.” The author may himself have believed what he pretended to have seen: lands where men’s heads grew under their arms, for example; gryphons, hippocentaurs, men with dogs’ heads, dames with breasts like basilisks, banana trees figuring the Cross, lambs that grew on plants.

The narrator is English. The book was composed in French around 1356 or 1357 and disseminated in manuscript between 1357 and 1371. It was so popular that more than 250 manuscripts survive, among them translations into Latin and most of the vernaculars of Europe. In English it soon existed in at least five different versions, one of them in galumphing rhyming couplets. None is authoritative: scribal copies seldom are. Copyists making cheap scripts truncated the text, or worked from defective sources with sheets missing, or had deadlines to meet. If the copyist knew something the “original” omitted, he had no compunction in adding it. We talk with caution about “form” in early works. The process of transmission distorted whatever the original forms might have been.

First printed in English in 1496, Mandeville’s Travels has stayed in print ever since, often in illustrated editions. Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton’s successor in the printing business, published an edition in 1499 with bold woodcuts, following in the manuscript tradition that included illustrations, some pious, some bizarre. The Duc de Berry had the Travels illuminated. There is a Czech manuscript of the first half of the book, the journey to the Holy Land, in which the travels are told entirely in clear grisaille images, a proto–comic book.

The first part of the Travels is a pilgrim’s guide, not a pious Fodor or Guide Bleu but a “personal” account tracing the routes a traveler might take to get to Rome and the Holy Land, and a description of the holy places. Mandeville’s Rome is recognizable, but once off the beaten track things get brighter, more allegorical, fantastic, and yet more orderly than the actual places ever were. A traveler trusting him as sole guide would never get home. After Jerusalem, he ventures south and east. He becomes embroiled in Egyptian politics, Chinese conflicts; he works as a consultant, even a mercenary, before making his way back to Europe suffering from a rheumatic gout (“gowtes artetykes that me distreyen”: that much is quite believable), and stopping in Liège to convalesce is attended by Bearded John, a physician he had vaguely known in Cairo, who urges him to write down his story, to combat boredom. This the earliest Latin translation tells us. The earliest surviving French version is mute on the subject.

So plausible is the narrator’s courtesy, his unemphatic, persuasive manner, his firsthand witness, his amazement at the things he sees and does, and his backing evidence of other witnesses, from Roman Pliny to sources nearer to his own day, that it is no wonder he was believed. He is also steeped in scripture that underwrites his truthfulness. He invites readers into complicity, challenging them to supply further wonders from their own travels. Given the variations from text to text, it would seem that some scribes did just that. In one version Sir John remembers a story he heard as a boy, about a man who traveled east and east until one day he arrived at an island where a ploughman called to his oxen in words he understood. He had gone around the world. For Mandeville the world was round, even if not quite in the way that our world is. But round enough to inspire a reader a century later, Christopher Columbus. Chaucer, the Gawain poet, the mathematical magician John Dee, and (more skeptically) Shakespeare read him too, and Donne, and Milton; his enchantment (by then celebrated as mere enchantment) affected Keats and the Romantics.

“A writer’s country is a territory within his own brain,” writes Virginia Woolf in her first contribution to the Times Literary Supplement in 1905, “and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar.” More emphatically: “Literature is invention,” Vladimir Nabokov tells us. “Fiction is fiction.” This is most true when (as it so often does, from Mandeville to Defoe, from Flaubert to Atwood) it either claims to be fact or seems to imitate “the real world” in detail. Fiction not only requires the reader to suspend disbelief, as poetry does; it also requires the reader for the duration of reading to believe, not with the skeptical, critical kind of belief we reserve for history, but with the unironic belief we reserve for dreams. Plausibility, the connection of fact and fact, the sequence of cause and effect, movement from place to place as on a map (credible space) we expect from most fiction. And yet we expect fiction. “To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.” Nabokov’s insistence on the fictionality of fiction is important in our pursuit of the lives of the novel. We know lives in a retrospect that finds shapes, narrative pattern, consistencies. Biography, though not fiction, shares crucial elements with it. “The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books,” Nabokov says. “In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book.” Even a history book.

Sir John Mandeville is a knight, born and bred in St. Albans, Hertfordshire. At Michaelmas (September 29) 1322 he left his country suddenly, for reasons variously explained (perhaps he slew another nobleman and fled), and went on a pilgrimage; but pilgrimage turned to obsessive travels that were to last for thirty-four years. The things he saw! In Turkey, in little and big Armenia, in Chaldea and Ethiopia and Libya, in Syria, in little and middle and larger India and Tibet, in Java and Sumatra … He traveled to Russia and Poland and to places so wonderful and remote that they do not appear on maps. He even managed, on the Malabar Coast, to drink from the reviving Well of Youth, which explains why he was able to travel so far and long. He watched the stars right side up and upside-down and recorded his bearings. When gout got the better of him, he went home—not all the way home to St. Albans, but to Liège—and wrote his book. We know rather too much about Mandeville. And this is because he, too, like his travels, is fictional. A real medieval author would not go out of his way to tell about himself and his circumstances. Mandeville is explicit; and he has consistency of tone unusual in medieval prose. We cannot say for certain that the author was English or, more likely, Belgian or French. Was he a cleric masquerading as a layman? His piety, especially in the epilogue, is priestly, his learning broad, but his attitude to the papacy and church at large sometimes sounds a dissenting note, at least in the English versions we have. Why do we assume him? One scholar, Linda Lomperis, argues that the author was a woman living in male disguise.

The Mandeville we come to know in “his” narrative makes sense as a voice. Much of what he says, and the ways in which he speaks, his tolerant, curious manner, more like a modern anthropologist than a devout pilgrim, would have exposed a monk to censure. Some of the incidents in the book, too, are inappropriate for one who had tied the knot of celibacy. There is little exceptionable in the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a common enough type of travel book, but the journey onward is marked by unorthodox matter and manner.

Mandeville draws on various writings. His travels attempt a synthesis. His prevailing tone is that of witness. Coming from one end of the world to its center (Jerusalem), he travels away from the center to the far end, then returns exhausted by age and ill health, being much wiser. In some versions he comes home via Rome and shows his manuscript to the pope, who approves it. Such an interpolation, giving the book papal sanction and exonerating the author of heresy, adds authority.

He almost reaches the Earthly Paradise in Asia, a reward for his tolerance and persistence. In a sense, for a man of his temperament, the various world is itself paradise, so full of wonders, what with the diamond growing or diamond breeding; and the monopods of Ethiopia, who, when they rest, raise a giant foot like an umbrella to shade themselves from the sun; and the barnacle geese, who are hatched from barnacles attached to floating driftwood; and the grape clusters so large that a strong man could hardly bear a single one on his shoulder; and the massive ipotaynes (hippopotamuses), phoenixes, crying crocodiles, and goat-men; bearded women; snails with shells huge as houses; the isle where each inhabitant enjoyed the sexual organs of both sexes; and the grains of paradise out of which grew the trees used to make the Cross.

The Travels ends with a blessing and a prayer, and beautiful they are, spoken by a man who abruptly casts off the dusty trappings of the traveling knight and becomes an aging priest, soliciting our prayers for his soul, and offering his work and himself to God, invoked in a traditional series of paradoxes. Here is how, before his spirit takes flight, he solicits us, in a form whose unmodernized grace is remote in time and intimate in tone and effect: “And alle tho that seyn for me a Paternoster, with an Ave Maria, that God forgeve me my synnes, I make hem parteneres and graunte hem part of all the gode pilgrymages, and of all the gode dedes that I haue don, if ony ben to his plesance; and noght only of tho, but of all that euere I schall do unto my lyfes ende.”

Thus Sir John Mandeville, the first almost consistent and coherent English voice in prose, the first fictional narrator, almost the first novelist, bids adieu. Prose was functional, used in church, in education, the courts, and public administration, in keeping records, chronicles, and histories. Here it fulfilled a different purpose, telling lies as artfully as if they had been truths. Prose could make characters, invent lands and creatures. Conditions for fiction were not yet right: Mandeville is a prophet in the wilderness before printing and the standardization of a national English (or any other national language of northern Europe). Something new is promised.

The Scottish writer Andrew Lang addressed one of his Letters to Dead Authors to Mandeville, imitating the unstable English of his correspondent. Confessing him a liar, “nevertheless, Sir John, for the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a good fellow, and a merry; so now, come, I shall tell you of the new ways into Ynde.” How strange is the Victorian India he depicts, the routes there, the imperial conquests that opened them, then jealously guarded them, the whole colonial enterprise. Mandeville would never have believed such tosh, yet Lang tells him history in a parody of his own form.

The English prose tradition from which the novel emerges began in the Middle English period. Latin and French were the languages of administration and the church. Old English had been outlawed but a hybrid vernacular evolved, differently in different parts of the country. Common folk did not understand the languages of spiritual and secular power and required translations. The Latin used in accountancy and clerical work was full of English words. The French used in government was similarly corrupted by the vernacular, but the vernacular itself was submerged.

Then, in 1362–1364, three successive parliaments were opened with speeches in English. It was an English remote from King Harold’s eleventh-century Old English. But the Norman tide was receding. Pleading in English courts of law began to be conducted in the vernacular. After the black death (1347–1350), the language of teaching was English rather than French. John Cornwall, abetted by his follower Richard Pencrich, helped to effect this change: “In all the grammar schools of England children leaveth French and construeth and learneth in English.” The key speeches during Richard II’s deposition (1399) were conducted in English (and his Master Cooke set down his Forme of Cury in English).

Three books, all taken to heart not only as “wisdom” but as “fact” in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Britain, had virtually the authority of scripture and helped establish English prose as a narrative and reflective medium. All three were translations. Mandeville we have considered. John de Trevisa’s version of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon (1387) and of De proprietatibus rerum (On the Right Order of Things, written between 1240 and 1250, translated from the Latin in 1398) were the other two. This latter was by Bartholomeus Anglicus, who, his name indicates, was English. He was not, as far as we can tell, a fiction: so little is known about him, he must have been real. He may have been nobly born and studied at Oxford, and his original surname may have been Glanville. In 1231 he traveled to Saxony to teach, and there in a school for friars he composed De proprietatibus rerum.

These books, along with the Bible, which was being seriously translated by John Wycliffe and his comrades, describe a European Christendom and an emerging English consciousness. They complement one another: religion, geography, history, and the material world. The three nonscriptural books are underpinned by scripture. Mandeville’s geography and anthropology are the most suggestive: spiritually restive if not insubordinate, radical in entertaining without censure customs and beliefs remote from his declared faith. Higden’s Polychronicon is universal history, so revered a century after its first publication that William Caxton revised and updated it to 1467, printing it in 1482, the most important partly original work by Caxton that we possess. Bartholomeus’s De Propietatibus, an encyclopedia in nineteen volumes, includes the natural sciences, astrology, and theology, as understood by one of the great synthesizing minds of the mid-thirteenth century, touched by the Arabic scholarship of the time, yet rooted (sometimes incongruously) in the orthodoxies of his received faith. He includes bees among the birds, and his bestiary is celebrated.

The emergence of a coherent intellectual culture in the vernacular was delayed by the variations in English spoken and written in the British Isles. The south was more deeply infected with French, the north remained in a loose Scandinavian orbit, as regards diction and accent. John de Trevisa in his translation of Polychronicon comments: “It seemeth a great wonder how English, that is the birth-tongue of Englishmen, and their own language and tongue, is so diverse of sound in this land,” while Norman French, a foreign idiom, was the lingua franca. Trevisa’s language makes sense when read aloud: “For men of the est with men of the west, as hyt were vnder the same party of heuene, acordeth more in sounyng of speche than men of the north with men of the south. Therefore hyt ys that Mercii, that buth men of myddel Engelond, as hyt were parteners if the endes, vnderstondeth betre the syde longages, Northeron and Southeron, than Northeron and Southeron vnderstondeth eyther other.” But it is the Southeron idiom that prevails and becomes the written form, even for Northeron writers. The Northeron, Higden says, is scharp, slyttyng, and frotyng—harsh, piercing, and grating (early evidence of an abiding prejudice).

The emergence of prose, especially with the translation of the Bible, so long resisted by the Roman Catholic Church, coincided with a period of ferment and spiritual revolt. The black death gave new power to the laboring classes, whose value rose steeply. An urban middle class was shaping. Schooling spread, and with it instruction in English. If the medieval period was marked by a strong sense of Christendom, and Europe was an entity that, whatever its secular variations, was united by allegiance to Rome, in the fourteenth century questioning began, first within the church itself; the Reformation contributed to the growth of distinct vernacular cultures. A gathering protestant spirit of individual witness and salvation affected the sense of “self” and community. These selves, from Mandeville to Gibreel Farishta, are at the heart of this book.

A century after Richard II was deposed, Caxton took up Trevisa’s argument about language, but he was in a position to do something about it. He wrote in his preface to Eneydos (his version of part of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1490) of the diversity of English spoken in the British Isles. What advantages might accrue to a nation from a language all could understand! As a printer, translator, and publisher, he established norms unthinkable in a scribal culture, and developed some of the conventions of writing that, in evolved forms, enable the communication represented by this book. Because he could reproduce several hundred copies of the same text in more or less identical form, the peril of scribal error vanished (there was now a new problem, the universal misprint). Texts became stable in transmission. Lost was the flexibility of the scribe, who could add modern fact to out-of-date history, correct mistakes, elaborat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. “Literature is Invention”: Mandeville’s Travels, Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, De Proprietatibus Rerum
• 2. True Stories: William Caxton, Thomas Malory, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
• 3. Three Springs: Sir Philip Sidney, Fray Antonio de Guevara, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe
• 4. Before Irony: John Bunyan
• 5. Enter America: Aphra Behn, Zora Neale Hurston
• 6. Impersonation: Daniel Defoe, Truman Capote, J. M. Coetzee
• 7. Proportion: François Rabelais, Sir Thomas Urquhart, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Oliver Goldsmith, Alasdair Gray
• 8. Sex and Sensibility: Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, John Cleland
• 9. “Nuvvles”: Miguel de Cervantes, Alain-René Lesage, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Frederick Marryat, Richard Dana, C. S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian
• 10. “A Cock and a Bull”: Laurence Sterne
• 11. The Eerie: Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Brockden Brown, Charles Robert Maturin
• 12. Listening: Maria Edgeworth, John McGahern, James Hogg, Sir Walter Scott, John Galt, Susan Ferrier
• 13. Manners: Fanny Burney, Jane Austen
• 14. Roman à Thèse: Thomas Love Peacock, William Godwin, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Mary Shelley, Thomas Carlyle
• 15. Declarations of Independence: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe
• 16. The Fiction Industry: Charles Dickens, Harrison Ainsworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins
• 17. Gothic Romance: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë
• 18. Real Worlds: Frances Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli
• 19. “Thought-Divers”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe
• 20. The Human Comedy: Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola
• 21. Imperfection: George Moore, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, George Meredith, George Gissing, Samuel Butler, Edmund Gosse
• 22. Braveries: Robert Louis Stevenson, W. H. Hudson, Bruce Chatwin, Richard Jefferies, William Morris, Charles Kingsley, Henry Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling
• 23. Smoke and Mirrors: Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Rudolf Raspe, Bram Stoker, Ouida, Marie Corelli, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Denton Welch, Arthur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Kenneth Grahame
• 24. Pessimists: Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane
• 25. Living through Ideas: Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy
• 26. The Fate of Form: William Dean Howells, Henry James, Cynthia Ozick, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson, Anthony Powell, Henry Williamson, C. P. Snow
• 27. Prodigality and Philistinism: Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, Upton Sinclair
• 28. Blurring Form: Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, Marilynne Robinson, Janet Lewis, Kate Chopin, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Mary Butts
• 29. Social Concerns: H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole, Frederic Raphael, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell
• 30. Portraits and Caricatures of the Artist: James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Samuel Beckett, G. K. Chesterton, Anthony Burgess, Russell Hoban, Flann O’Brien, Donald Barthelme
• 31. Tone and Register: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Paul Scott, J. G. Farrell, Norman Douglas, Ronald Firbank, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Jeanette Winterson
• 32. Teller and Tale: D. H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, T. F. Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Richard Aldington, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac
• 33. Truth to the Impression: Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler, Julian Barnes
• 34. Elegy: Thornton Wilder, William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Thomas Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry, Joyce Cary
• 35. Essaying: Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, John O’Hara, Nathanael West, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace
• 36. Enchantment and Disenchantment: Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, Radclyffe Hall, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Muriel Spark, Gabriel Josipovici, Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, William Gass, John Barth, Harry Mathews, Walter Abish, Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen
• 37. Genre: Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Cartland, Catherine Cookson, et al.; Bret Harte, Zane Grey, et al.; Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, et al.; H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, et al.; Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, et al.
• 38. Convention and Invention: David Garnett, J. B. Priestley, L. P. Hartley, Richard Hughes, Storm Jameson, Walter Greenwood, H. E. Bates, Ethel Mannin, Olivia Manning, Stella Gibbons, V. S. Pritchett, Robert Graves, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Elaine Feinstein, Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst
• 39. Propaganda: Christopher Isherwood, Edward Upward, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Edmund White, Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, William Boyd, Graham Greene, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Rohinton Mistry, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Timothy Mo
• 40. The Blues: Richard Wright, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, William Styron
• 41. Displacement and Expropriation: Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Olive Schreiner, Bessie Head, Alice Walker
• 42. Making Space: Henry Handel Richardson, Patrick White, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Christina Stead, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Maurice Shadbolt, Janet Frame, Keri Hulme, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Earl Lovelace
• 43. Win, Place, and Show: William Golding, Angus Wilson, Margaret Drabble, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Kingsley Amis, John Fowles, Ian McEwan, Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift, J. G. Ballard
• 44. Truths in Fiction, the Metamorphosis of Journalism: E. L. Doctorow, John Gardner, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joseph Heller, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chabon, Richard Ford, Bret Easton Ellis
• 45. Pariahs: Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Mordecai Richler, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Jeffrey Eugenides, Paul Auster, Martin Amis
• Timeline
• Index