Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Read Free

Africa, he has heard of the execution of Charles I and found it – as did all right thinking people – ‘deplorable’. The narrator is struck by the couple’s native dignity, though their beauty is anything but native. Oroonoko (renamed ‘Caesar’ by his captors) has straight hair and ‘Roman’, not negroid, features. He is less a noble savage, a hundred years
avant la lettre
, than a noble,
tout court
. A black blue-blood. We recall that the nickname for the notoriously swarthy Charles II was ‘the black boy’ (it survives as a common pub name in England).
    But Oroonoko is no common slave. He kills two tigers and has a vividly described battle with an electric (‘benumbing’) eel. When Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko is determined that his son shall not be born into slavery. He organises an uprising, and is cheated into surrendering on the point of victory. Realising it is the end, Oroonoko cuts off Imoinda’s face, after he has cut her throat, so that no one will gaze on her beauty again. He disembowels himself, but is sewn up by surgeons tobe executed, sadistically, for the delectation of a white rabble. Behn’s Royal Slave is even more stoic, at the moment of regicide, than the Royal Captive, Charles I, calmly puffing away at his pipe as his genitals are cut off.
    Oroonoko
is short (at 28,000 words it might have problems qualifying for the 1689 Man Booker Prize) and it lacks
Crusoe
’s narrative machinery and masterful suspense (whose
was
that footprint on the foreshore?). But no one can deny Behn’s inventiveness and intuitive feel for the as yet undefined elements of fiction. They are well worthy of Woolf’s bouquet.
     
FN
Aphra Behn (‘Aphora’, née Eaffrey Johnson)
MRT
Oroonoko
Biog
J. Todd,
The Secret Life of Aphra Behn
(1996)

3. Daniel Defoe 1660–1731
    It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.
Along with Oliver’s gruel, the best-known moment in English fiction
     
    If Daniel Defoe had died in 1718 he would be remembered, if at all, as a fertile pamphleteer and pioneering English journalist with an adhesively memorable name. Living as he did, until 1731, he ranks as a founding father of the English novel – as significant a figure in the evolution of the national fiction as Cervantes in Spain or Rabelais in France.
    Tantalisingly little is known of Defoe’s life. ‘Did he in fact exist at all?’ asks one recent study. Even more tantalisingly, it is not known why a man close on sixty years of age (Methuselean in the early eighteenth century) should suddenly change his literary modus operandi so drastically and creatively. In the absence of intimate information, one is thrown back on the skeletal public records. The first fifteen years of Defoe’s life occupy barely that number of pages in Paula Backscheider’s 700-page biography. ‘Lives’ of Defoe, like hers, dissolve into lifeless catalogues raisonnés of his tracts, articles and occasional writings (whose precise authorship is much disputed) – with a running commentary on the big historical picture in whose foreground any image of ‘Daniel Defoe’, infuriatingly, refuses to materialise. The curriculum vitae, as we know it, is easily summarised. If there are interesting times in English history, Defoe lived through the most interesting. Something that fascinated him throughout his life, judging by his choice of subject matter, is that he
had
actuallycontrived to survive an infancy surrounded by such an array of danger. Robinson Crusoe wonders the same thing.
    ‘Daniel Foe’ (the French prefix was a later affectation) was born (quite likely, the date is hopelessly insecure) a Londoner in the year of the Restoration 1660. His first conscious observations, as an embryonic historian of his country, would have begun in what Dryden called the
annus mirabilis
, 1666. It was less