Christina Stead was born in Sydney and lived in Europe and the USA from 1928 to 1974; on her return to Australia she was the first winner of the Patrick White Award. The best known of her eleven novels are The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1944).
Age in year of publication: sixty-four.
John Steinbeck 1902–1968
1952 East of Eden
Has there ever been a male American novelist who did not want to write a vast, defining history of the American soul? East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s version, is set in rural California in the years around the turn of the century. It is the story of two families of settlers, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, but it is also the story of settlement itself, of the formation of the modern United States. ‘The Church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously … the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.’
East of Eden is a rambling, garrulous family saga, with some deeply memorable characters (such as the Irishman Samuel Hamilton, the narrator’s grandfather, and the dark, almost innocent Adam Trask), and some wonderful set scenes (such as the birth of the twins Aron and Caleb, whose lives dominate the second half of the book). In the novel there is a constant struggle, epic, almost biblical (sometimes knowingly echoing the Bible), between light and darkness, money and penury, bad land and good land, water and drought, men and women, fathers and sons and, perhaps most starkly and dramatically, brother and brother. Steinbeck has a natural skill as a storyteller, and manages to make this long and powerful saga hugely credible, readable and vivid.
John Steinbeck was born in rural California and spent most of his working life there and in New York. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. His other novels include Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). East of Eden was made into a film in 1955 starring James Dean.
Age in year of publication: fifty.
Robert Stone 1931–
1981 A Flag for Sunrise
This novel is set in a fictional Central American country, its tone and sense of darkness and impending doom a cross between Conrad and Greene. Stone is at his best when he deals with loners and drifters, with drugs, uncertainty, paranoia, hallucinations, violence. There is a very accurate sense of the mixture of strange innocence and pervasive malevolence of the American intelligence services, and the novel is haunted by Vietnam, where Holliwell, one of the protagonists, has served.
A number of characters are moving and being moved towards catastrophe. One of them is a nun who has been told to be prepared to treat the injured in an insurrection, another a gunrunner, another a drug-crazed refugee from the United States, another a CIA man, another our friend Holliwell, an anthropologist, another a local cop. All of them are oddly powerless, only half-motivated; the writing is dense, concentrated and often powerful. Right in the middle of the book, there is a sensational description of Holliwell diving and the world under water: ‘On the edge of vision, he saw a school of redfish whirl left, then right, sound, then reverse, a red and white catherine wheel against the deep blue.’ At the novel’s heart is the drama of covert action versus botched revolution, how easily things are misunderstood and half understood, and how strong the lure of violence.
Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn and now lives in Connecticut. His other novels include A Hall of Mirrors (1967), Dog Soldiers (1974), Damascus Gate (1998) and Bay of Souls (2003). A Flag for Sunrise won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1981.
Age in year of publication: fifty.
David Storey 1933–
1976 Saville
For the English, the class system has been as fruitful a subject and as devastating to contemplate as serfdom was for the great Russian writers. Saville is an epic account of English life in the mid-twentieth century, told through the story of young Colin Saville, son of a miner, living in a worn-out mining community in south Yorkshire. Colin is an observer, strong in his silence, watching the weary lives of his father and mother — subsistence allowed them, but little else — as gradually the education he earns by winning a scholarship removes him from them and from his community. The school sequences are worthy of Dickens, all the more astonishing because they tell of such recent times.
Saville examines the consequences of poverty, class and environment, but there is patience and a sturdy intensity about this novel that makes the absence of so much a rich seam, for Storey elaborates many other themes — the conflict between the spiritual and the physical, the force of sexuality, the exact price paid by the English working class as they left the old ways behind. This is a realistic novel of power and beauty, full of sardonic humour and feeling and desire, using those passions of the soul which D. H. Lawrence and the Brontës drew upon to provide Storey’s people with a stoic testament.
David Storey was born in Wakefield and lives in London. A playwright and a novelist, his famous first novel was This Sporting Life (1960). Saville won the 1976 Booker Prize. His other novels include Radcliffe (1963), Pasmore (1972) and Thin-Ice Skater (2004).
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
Francis Stuart 1902–2000
1971 Black List, Section H
This is an awkward book which has become a sort of underground classic. It is told in the third person by H, whose life and opinions mirror those of the author. Real characters such as Iseult Gonne, Stuart’s first wife, Maud Gonne, her mother, and writers such as W. B. Yeats and Liam O’Flaherty stalk the pages. H is a damaged individual, estranged from accepted morality. Prison seems his natural habitat: he is incarcerated — as was Stuart — by the pro-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War and later by the Allies in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The story takes place in the literary bohemias of Dublin and London in the 1920s and 1930s and then in Berlin, where our hero goes to spend the war, as did Stuart. He is in search of punishment and redemption; he seeks an ark away from the hypocrisy he detects all around him. He finds solace among the defeated and the damned. He is obsessed by life in all its rich (and often funny) detail, by women, by horse-racing and poultry farming, by Dostoevsky, but he never loses sight of his own distance from things, his deep alienation. Black List, Section H, written in the early 1960s, in its mixture of nihilism and visionary anarchism makes William Burroughs look like a pussycat.