Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  One of us – John Sutherland – also lives in Camden, where Bainbridge, now a ‘dame’, used to take a shortcut in front of where he lives. Her lungs were ruined by years of smoking and she would often take a minute or two’s wheezing rest on a doorstep with a street drunk called Tom, with whom, she said, she discussed such things as W.B. Yeats’s late poetry.

  It was a remarkable life. But – prepared as the world was for it – no one knew precisely when it would end. Her death was a wholly random event. She herself confidently expected to die in her 71st year (the age her mother and grandmother passed away) and made a touching TV programme, Beryl’s Last Year, a kind of Ignatian meditation on her own end. She was, as it happened, wrong – surviving, as she did, three more years.

  Life (and death) are – unless you are facing execution like Gary Gilmore (see our entry for 17 January) – random events. Literature itself comprises nothing but a mass of randomness. If a novel, or poem, is rejected early on, a major writer may never happen. Any author’s life is full of accidents, tosses of the coin that can fall either way up – one leading to literary creation, the other to silence. What if Dickens had been killed in the Staplehurst crash (see our entry for 9 June)?

  For our convenience we package literature into syllabuses, curricula, canons, genres, Dewey Decimal Sectors. But literature is vast, growing (ever faster) and inherently miscellaneous. This book, using a calendrical frame, is a tribute to that miscellaneity. Anything can happen anywhere anytime. As can ‘nothing’, as Philip Larkin sagely reminds us.

  The authors have between them a hundred years of scholarship, teaching and conversing about literature (often between themselves). What they know is like two crammed attics – full of interesting junk. But that junk is worth having. The world of books, they believe, is something forever to be explored, never comprehensively mapped. As you read this book, diurnal entry by diurnal entry, stop and try to predict (without peeking) what is going to happen on the next day. Chances are you won’t be anywhere close.

  Stephen Fender, a pioneer of American Studies in the UK (and an expatriate American) is responsible for many, but not all, of the New World entries. John Sutherland, a Victorianist by speciality, is responsible for many, but not all, in that period.

  1 January

  Peter Pan: eternal boy, eternal copyright

  1988 The copyright history of James Barrie’s most famous creation, Peter Pan, is vexed – and legally unique.

  The origin of the character was in stories Barrie told to the children of one of his friends. One of them was called Peter. The image of Pan – thanks to cultish 1890s literary paganism – was current in the Edwardian period (the mischievous goaty-god makes an entry, for example, into another favourite children’s book of the period, The Wind in the Willows).

  At the time Barrie was best known as a novelist. His contemporaries would have predicted that his reputation with posterity would rest on such works as Auld Licht Idylls, or The Little Minister. These are out of print nowadays and largely forgotten, while Peter Pan, thanks to the Christmas pantomime, is set to fly on till the crack of doom.

  The character was first introduced in Barrie’s 1902 novel for adults, The Little White Bird. The play (aimed at children, principally) Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up had its premiere in London on 27 December 1904. The novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens was spun off as a follow-up to the play in 1906. Barrie then adapted the play into another novel, Peter and Wendy (usually shortened to Peter Pan), in 1911. In 1929 Barrie, who had no children of his own, donated the work, and all the Peter Pan revenues, to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, in London.

  These differing initiation dates, originating conceptions and ownership issues have caused copyright confusion (as has the fact that there is, in Anglo-American law, no copyright in ideas, scenarios or characters – only in the verbal forms in which they are expressed).

  Further confusion has arisen in the decades since Barrie’s death, in 1937. The work, popularised by such (copyright licensed) adaptations as Walt Disney’s in 1953, has been a major source of revenue for the hospital. The normal term of copyright in the UK is 50 years post mortem, which meant that Peter Pan entered the public domain at the end of 1987.

  It then re-entered copyright protection with the EU ‘harmony’ regulations of 1995, which extended copyright to 70 years post mortem. This was done largely to compensate German literary estates, which had lost out on international copyright revenue during the Second World War. Along with Mein Kampf (whose copyright had expired in 1995) Peter Pan was given a new lease of copyright life until 2007, when – in the normal course of events – it would have popped back into the public domain on the 70th anniversary of Barrie’s death.

  This process, however, was forestalled by a measure introduced by the Labour government in 1998 (interested in keeping a healthy income stream into the NHS). This extraordinary amendment to the law affecting intellectual property:

  conferred on trustees for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, a right to a royalty in respect of the public performance, commercial publication, broadcasting or inclusion in a cable programme service of the play ‘Peter Pan’ by Sir James Matthew Barrie, or of any adaptation of that work, notwithstanding that copyright in the work expired on 31 December 1987.

  The situation (particularly in the US) is tangled and has led to serial litigation. But in essence the situation is simple. Peter, the perpetual boy, has – from 1 January 1988 onwards – perpetual copyright. For ever and ever, amen.

  2 January

  The SS Commodore sinks off the coast of Florida, leaving Stephen Crane adrift in an open boat

  1897 Leaving Jacksonville, Florida, for Cuba, the ship struck a sandbar that damaged the hull and started a leak in the boiler room. When the pumps failed she settled in the water and finally sank some sixteen miles offshore. Aboard was Stephen Crane, poet and novelist, renowned author of Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895). When the crew took to the lifeboats, Crane found himself in a ten-foot dinghy along with the injured ship’s captain, its cook and an engine-room oiler.

  What followed was his best-remembered short story, ‘The Open Boat’, which he would publish in Scribner’s Magazine just four months later. The narrative is freighted with portentous, third-person irony to reflect the seriousness of the men’s situation. Only the oiler Billie is named; the others are just ‘the correspondent’ (Crane’s stand-in), ‘the captain’ and ‘the cook’.

  ‘None of them knew the color of the sky’, as the famous opening words have it. Crane is good on contrasting points of view. ‘Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque’, but what the men see are the huge waves that threaten to swamp them if not kept a close eye on. They know the colour of those all right.

  The men support each other, taking turns at the oars without complaint, doing their best to steer in the heaving seas. But set against the fellowship of comrades is the indifference of nature. They catch sight of land but it’s out of reach. ‘If I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?’ Nature’s answer to this question – as to all others – is a ‘high cold star on a winter’s night’. Finally they get ashore, but only after the dinghy has capsized in the surf, forcing the men to swim for it. Billie is drowned. The nameless ones survive.

  The truth fell short of this elemental struggle between nature and humanity. In real life the Commodore, not much larger than an inshore trawler, had been loaded to the gunwales with munitions for the Cuban insurrection against Spain. Crane had been sent along as a reporter for the Bacheller-Johnson newspaper syndicate to get the story. The whole adventure took just a day and a night. Just four days after the Commodore went down, Stephen Crane was back in the arms of his new girlfriend, a brothe
l madam named Cora Taylor whom he had met in Jacksonville before leaving for Cuba.

  3 January

  Construction begins on the Brooklyn Bridge, long-standing icon of American modernism

  1870 It took thirteen years to build, but when it was done it spanned more than a mile over the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, then the longest suspension bridge in the world and the first to be held up by filaments of steel wire.

  Even before the bridge was started, the idea of crossing that stretch of water had fascinated the poet Walt Whitman as an image of links between work and home, between fellow voyagers, even between the poet and his future readers. This is from ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1860):

  I too saw the reflection of the summer night in the water,

  Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,

  Looked at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the water,

  Looked on the haze on the hills southward and south westward,

  Looked on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet.

  But it took the bridge to bring technology into the optimistic future vision, in the aesthetics of the machine age. Precisionist painters like Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella and George Ault rendered factories, skyscrapers and grain elevators almost cubistically – as simplified planes of light and colour. In two paintings by Stella and a film photographed by Sheeler and Paul Stand (Manhatta, 1920) the Bridge is imaged head-on, its suspension cables focusing on the arches of its pillars.

  Not just painting but poetry too had to accommodate the commonplace present – and especially modern industrial technology. ‘For unless poetry can absorb the machine,’ Hart Crane wrote in 1929, it will have ‘failed of its full contemporary function.’ Crane’s ambitious sequence The Bridge (1930) both begins and ends with the Brooklyn Bridge, imagining it as the first link westwards and backwards in time to an American past to be recuperated for use in the present.

  O sleepless as the river under thee,

  Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

  Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

  And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

  4 January

  The death of T.S. Eliot

  1965 No British poet’s death was more momentous (particularly among his fellow poets) than that of T.S. Eliot on this day. It was his stature as a patron, as much as a practitioner, which rendered his death the end of a literary period.

  In his private journal, Ted Hughes (all of whose major works had been published by Faber, of which Eliot was senior editor) recorded that the death was

  like a crack over the head. I’ve so tangled him in my thoughts, dreamt of him so clearly and unambiguously. At once I feel windswept, unsafe. He was in my mind constantly, like a rather over-watchful, over-powerful father. And now he has gone.

  In the genuinely windswept wastes of Siberia, where he was in exile, Josef Brodsky wrote, on 12 January, the elegy ‘Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot’. It begins (translated from the Russian): ‘He died at start of year, in January’ and clearly evokes Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats.

  A continent away, in the Sewanee Review, Allen Tate wrote, with Dantean flourishes:

  It was only several days later that I understood that T.S. Eliot was dead. One dies every day one’s own death, but one cannot imagine the death of the man who was il maestro di color che sanno1 – or, since he was an artist and not after his young manhood a philosopher: il maestro di color che scrivonno.2

  Those who were not poets were less poetic in their response. Groucho Marx wrote in a letter:

  I was saddened by the death of T.S. Eliot. My wife and I had dinner at his home a few months ago and I realized then that he was not long for this world. He was a nice man, the best epitaph any man can have.

  The authors of this book were junior lecturers at Edinburgh University in 1965. On hearing the news of Eliot’s death, a less excited colleague remarked: ‘Then I don’t suppose he’ll be turning again.’

  1 ‘The master of men who know.’ (Dante, Inferno, Canto IV, describing Aristotle.)

  2 ‘The master of men who write.’

  5 January

  Dumas fights a duel

  1825 It’s not an easy statistic to gather but, given the nature of his plots (musketeers and Counts of Monte Cristo), no novelist features more duels in his fiction, nor features them more climactically, than Alexandre Dumas (père).

  The twenty-year-old Dumas came to Paris with the restoration of the monarchy in 1822. It would be seven years before he made his name as a writer (of plays, initially), and twenty years before, with the D’Artagnan romances, he would become the most popular writer of fiction in France – specialising in the clash of swords (although the plot of The Three Musketeers hinges, initially, on duels being banned). Initially he worked at the Palais Royal, in the office of the Duc D’Orléans.

  In his memoirs Dumas recalls fighting a duel. It began over a game of billiards when one of the company chose to be sarcastic about the dandyish Dumas’s dress. The affair was arranged by the seconds, with the normal rituals, for 5 January – traditionally they were fought at dawn. Dumas was the challenger.

  Pistols were initially the chosen weapon. In the event it was changed to swords. The site was a snow-swept quarry. Dumas’s opponent slept in, however, and the date was pushed back to the sixth and the place changed to Montmartre. The event quickly descended into farce as quarry workers (who left their beds earlier than the high-born duellists) gathered to watch the fun and Dumas’s sword proved, on the routine measurement of rapiers, to be shorter than his adversary’s. Nor were things helped by Dumas’s adversary experiencing difficulty (having forgotten his braces) in keeping his trousers up. There was a serious likelihood of his expiring in his underpants. Both of them were somewhat less skilled in swordplay than Edmond Dantès.

  Honour was satisfied when Dumas drew blood by nicking his opponent in the shoulder. Duels were always more glamorous in Dumas’s later fiction and doubly so in the innumerable stage and movie versions of it.

  6 January

  The Feast of Fools and the end of the world

  1482 No novel opens with a more precise calendrical reference than Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the melodramatic translation of the author’s more neutral Notre Dame de Paris):

  Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal. The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory.

  Fiction has preserved it. The day, we learn, is notable to the citizens of Hugo’s Paris as the ‘double solemnity, united from time immemorial, of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools’. On this day the lay populace elect their ‘Pope of Fools’. On 6 January 1482 the street vote goes to the bell-ringer of Notre Dame – principally because of his hilarious physical deformity. He is a living satire less of the Pontiff than of humanity itself:

  His whole person was a grimace. A huge head, bristling with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump, a counterpart perceptible in front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each other only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable and redoubtable air of vigour, agility, and courage, – strange exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall be the result of harmony. Such was the pope whom the fools had just chosen for themselves.

  Is this the image of God? Quasimodo’s grotesque anatomy and indomitable willpower have become folkloric: as much for Charles Laughton’s classic depiction in the 1939 film as for Hugo’s 1831 novel.

  There is another significance to the date than the street festival. Hugo sees 1482 as an epochal literary moment. The point is made by ‘
the sworn bookseller of the university, Master Andry Musnier’ in conversation with ‘the furrier of the king’s robes, Master Gilles Lecornu’:

  ‘I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come. No-one has ever beheld such outbreaks among the students! It is the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining everything, – artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh.’

  By ‘no more books’ he means the end of the manuscript codex. Printing will, Musnier foresees, also be the end of monarchy and its lovely hierarchies. And the end of cathedrals – the ‘script’ of old France. After books there will be no more Notre Dames.

  Who then (historically) is the villain of Notre Dame de Paris? Not the hunchback but Gutenberg. The novel eerily prophesies contemporary 21st-century jeremiads about the death of the book with the arrival of such newfangled things as Gutenberg.org (see 1 December) and the Kindle e-reader. The end of another world draws nigh.

  7 January

  John Berryman follows his paternal destiny

  1972 John Berryman, the American poet, was born John Allyn Smith Jr. His father, John Allyn Smith Sr., committed suicide when young John was twelve. He took the surname of his mother’s second husband. After a long battle with alcoholism, Berryman seemed to have come to terms with his addiction in 1970 – writing a memoir, Recovery, recording the fact. Having been clean and sober for a year and a half, during which time a daughter was born to him and his wife, he followed his father’s example and killed himself.

  The event is vividly recorded by his biographer, Paul Mariani. It was a Friday and Berryman had passed an unsettled night. He told his wife he was going to his office at the University of Minneapolis, where he had a teaching appointment. It was bitterly cold: