Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Instead of going to his office, he walked out onto the upper level of the Washington Avenue Bridge … Three quarters of the way across, he stopped and stared down. A hundred feet below and to his right rode the river: narrow, gray, and half frozen … He climbed onto the chest-high metal railing and balanced himself. Several students inside the walkway stopped what they were doing when they saw him and stared in disbelief. He made a gesture as if waving, but he did not look back … Three seconds later his body exploded against the knoll, recoiled from the earth, then rolled gently down the incline. The campus police were the first to arrive and found a package of [Tareyton cigarettes], some change, and a blank check with the name Berryman on it.

  8 January

  Villon escapes the rope, and is never heard of again

  1463 Little is known of Francois Villon’s life (even his surname is uncertain – it may have been a nickname with an etymological connection with ‘villain’). Although he graduated from the University of Paris his later career was that of thief, vagabond and rogue. He was also (more memorably) one of the greatest vernacular poets of the French medieval period.

  His most famous line, ‘où sont les neiges d’antan?’ (translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’) has become proverbial. It sums up the mordant wit of his balladry.

  After a street quarrel in June 1455 – one of many recorded in court documents – Villon was arrested, tortured and condemned to be hanged. It was the occasion of his most famous poem, ‘Ballad of the Gibbet’ (‘Ballade des Pendus’):

  Brothers and men that shall after us be,

  Let not your hearts be hard to us:

  For pitying this our misery

  Ye shall find God the more piteous.

  Look on us six that are hanging thus,

  And for the flesh that so much we cherished

  How it is eaten of birds and perished,

  And ashes and dust fill our bones’ place,

  Mock not at us that so feeble be,

  But pray God pardon us out of His grace.

  The pardon came not from God, but the court. On 5 January 1463 the sentence was commuted, on appeal, to banishment from Paris for ten years. A full pardon was denied on the grounds of his ‘wicked life’.

  Banishment involved the sentence being read out, publicly, in front of the gallows which Villon had cheated and apostrophised. Villon tossed off a couple of witty ballades of gratitude to the parlement which had commuted his sentence.

  He left Paris on the 8th of the month. ‘After January 1463,’ his biographer Michael Freeman writes in The Villain’s Tale (the author’s name is as apt as the title) ‘we lose all trace of Francois Villon.’

  9 January

  Deconstruction deconstructed?

  1988 If deconstruction, as a dominant Anglo-American literary theory, was constructed on 21 October 1966 (see the entry for that date), it was profoundly shaken on 9 January 1988 with Jon Wiener’s article in The Nation (‘Deconstructing de Man’).

  Wiener was indebted to a young Belgian scholar, Ortwin de Graef. De Graef (initially a disciple, and a graduate student doing a thesis on Paul de Man, the leading exponent of the new critical school) had turned up some 170 articles written by de Man during the Nazi occupation of Belgium – most of them for the country’s leading newspaper, Le Soir (known, during this sad period, as Le Soir volé – ‘the stolen Le Soir’). They were mainly hack work, but a handful offered clear evidence of party-line anti-Semitism, notably a piece published on 4 March 1941, ‘The Jews in Contemporary Literature’, which concluded:

  A solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its higher laws of evolution.

  Even if he did not know the ‘solution’ his current employers had in mind, de Man, it was pointed out, could not but have noticed the current persecution of Belgian Jews who, at this date, were banned from professional employment (not least writing for Le Soir) and branded with yellow stars. Was the deconstruction enterprise an attempt by de Man to erase his past, render it meaningless so as to soothe a nagging conscience? There was much ingenious psychobiography on the topic.

  In the wake of de Graef’s revelations, and their follow-up reverberations in the Anglo-American press, other skeletons were hauled out of the deceased de Man’s cupboard: bigamy, lying to immigration officials, allowing it to be thought he had been involved with the Belgian resistance.

  Deconstruction was not, as a critical procedure, destroyed by the revelation of de Man’s wartime publications and alleged malfeasance. But it was substantially deconstructed.

  10 January

  In Philadelphia, Thomas Paine publishes a pamphlet that will change the world

  1776 Today it’s hard to imagine a published essay changing history. However stirring the argument, however profoundly researched, the article in the magazine or morning paper will leave the world pretty well unchanged. But Thomas Paine lived in a period in which the ‘media’ were not the newspapers, television and the internet, but the printed word and the word from the pulpit – itself often distributed in print after the first hearing.

  Born in Thetford, Norfolk and radicalised in Lewes, Sussex, where he organised the local excise men, Paine was persuaded by Benjamin Franklin to emigrate to Philadelphia. There he was quickly caught up in the arguments for and against American independence from Great Britain.

  Yet despite two decades of polemic, protests and petitions, not to mention skirmishes like the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party and the opening of actual hostilities in 1775, when the ‘shot heard round the world’ forced a party of British soldiers to retreat from Concord, Massachusetts, through Lexington back to Boston, to be harried by colonial militias all the way – despite all this, only a third of the delegates to the Continental Congress at the beginning of 1776 were in favour of severing ties with the mother country.

  Then came Tom Paine’s Common Sense, 48 treasonable, incendiary pages, calling for an end to compromise and a decisive break from Britain. The pamphlet was an instant sensation, selling 120,000 copies in the first three months. ‘Given that America had only two million free citizens at the time,’ writes Brendan O’Neill, ‘that is the equivalent of an American author selling 15 million books in three months today.’1

  By the end of the year Common Sense had sold half a million copies and gone through 23 editions. These masses of ordinary readers forced the authorities to change their minds, from those delegates to the Congress to General George Washington, who would soon lead the American Continental Army into battle against Great Britain, funded in part by the royalties from Common Sense.

  How did Paine do it? He appealed to people’s common understanding of ‘nature’, a concept repeated frequently in the pamphlet. It was against the nature of geography for a small island to govern a continent. Men and women are born equal by nature, therefore it was unnatural for one man to rule others in perpetuity, especially when he had not earned his position, but merely inherited it.

  Above all, knowing his audience to be made up largely of dissenting Protestants, he borrowed the non-conformist language used by radicals like Gerrard Winstanley and the 17th-century Diggers, or ‘True Levellers’ (see 10 October). ‘Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens’, he wrote, ‘from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.’ (Italics added.)

  Those words in italics were hot buttons in Digger rhetoric. So were the terms Paine used to dismiss the notion that Britain was the mother country. All ‘the more shame upon her conduct,’ he parried, ‘even brutes do not devour their young’. But in any case, ‘the phrase PARENT OR MOTHER COUNTRY hath been jesuitically adopted by the King and his parasite
s, with a low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds’.

  In fact even more than nature, it was the credulity and idolatry that many Protestants supposed to be so characteristic of Roman Catholicism that underpinned Paine’s strictures against compromise with Great Britain. Hence his devastating satire on the notion that the divine right of British kings to rule over their subject peoples had somehow descended unimpeded and undiluted from William the Conqueror:

  A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. However it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right; if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the Ass and the Lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion.

  1 Brendan O’Neill, ‘Who Was Thomas Paine?’, BBC News magazine, 8 June 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8089115.stm

  11 January

  Lorna Sage dies as her memoir triumphs

  2001 Few important books have been published in a closer race with the undertaker than Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood. Her best-selling personal memoir (the procreator of what, in more debased form, would become a genre of so-called ‘misery memoirs’) was published in October 2000.

  Bad Blood went on to win the Whitbread Prize in the first week of January 2001. Sage died a few days later. She described what writing Bad Blood meant to her (and illustrated the remarkable vividness of her literary style) in an article in the Guardian, shortly before her death:

  Starting a memoir, you open a door on to the past. The moment Bad Blood became real to me was when, in my mind’s eye, I saw just which door, and who was leading the way:

  ‘Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on.’

  I am still pleased with the book’s first words, though I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. My bitter, theatrical vicar-grandfather, stagnating in the remote rural parish of Hanmer in North Wales for his sins (women and drink, mostly), was my reference point, my black flag on the map of the past, my arrow pointing – ‘You were here’, this is where you begin.1

  A chronic sufferer from terminal emphysema, Sage knew, while writing the memoir, that this was also where she would end.

  The life recorded in Bad Blood is remarkable, but in its way typical of the meritocratic opportunities opened in the second half of the 20th century by the Butler Education Act, and the Robbins expansion of the universities in the 1960s.

  She was born Lorna Stockton in rural Shropshire on 13 January 1943. Her father, a peacetime haulage contractor, was serving in the army. Her mother was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. Neither Lorna’s mother nor her grandmother had been happy with their marriage partner. The Stockton family lived in a council house after her vicar grandfather retired from his living.

  While still at her girls’ high (i.e. grammar) school, Lorna met, married and had a child by Victor Sage. She was a mother at sixteen. Despite the obvious handicaps, she made it to Durham University, graduating in 1966 with a first-class degree in English (as did her husband, Vic). She never – as would soon become necessary for an academic career – did a PhD, but got an assistant lectureship at a ‘new university’, the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, where she would spend the remainder of her working life (her husband also landed a job in the department).

  Sage became an authority on modern women’s literature, and a prominent reviewer in national newspapers, magazines and on cultural TV programmes. Her marriage to Sage was dissolved in 1974, and she remarried five years later.

  Bad Blood is a voyage of introspection. Sage locates the fluid of the title – and her extraordinary drive to succeed in life – in her grandfather (who died when she was nine): ‘I … acquired from grandpa vanity, ambition and discontent along with literacy. I didn’t know my place.’

  1 Guardian, 12 January 2001.

  12 January

  Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery, and Dame of the British Empire, dies

  1976 One of the larger mysteries about the ‘queen of mystery’ is why – of all the crime novelists who have put pen to paper – she should be the most overwhelmingly popular. A devotee website set up in 2008 plausibly asserts: ‘Agatha Christie remains the most popular novelist in history with over two billion of her books sold at a conservative estimate.’1

  Christie’s tentacles spread worldwide, and magma deep. On 24 May 2009, Iranian authorities reported that a woman serial killer (unnamed) had killed some six victims. A doped glass of fruit juice was her weapon of choice. The murderess confessed that she had picked up her poisoning techniques from ‘the novels of Agatha Christie’.

  The Iranian fan was not the first to use the queen of crime’s toxic expertise. The mass poisoner Graham Young (memorialised in the 1995 film The Young Poisoner’s Handbook) was inspired to use his toxin of choice, the ‘undetectable’ and lethal thallium, by Agatha Christie’s 1961 novel The Pale Horse. Young was dubbed ‘the teacup murderer’ by the tabloid press – the friendly ‘cuppa’ being his preferred way of administering thallium to his luckless victims. He committed suicide in prison: poison unknown.

  Christie was famously good on poisons. During the First World War, and newly married, she worked as a voluntary nurse at Torquay Hospital and was put in charge of the dispensary. Here it was that she gained her formidable expertise about dangerous drugs.

  The largest mystery in Christie’s life will never be solved. 1926 was the critical year in her life. Her mother died. Her marriage, to the ne’er-do-well Archie Christie, broke down. Archie, she learned, had been flagrantly unfaithful. On 6 December 1926 British newspapers carried screaming headlines about Mrs Christie’s mysterious disappearance. A car with articles of her clothing had been found abandoned. A nation-wide woman-hunt was mounted. Rivers were dragged.

  Eleven days later she was discovered serenely taking tea in a hotel at Harrogate, registered under the name of Archie’s mistress. The unconvincing explanation given out to the world was that she had suffered an attack of ‘amnesia’. Christie never revealed (nor would allow to be discussed in her presence) what happened, or what she had intended, during those eleven days in May.

  Despite long-running tax problems, Christie, the ‘queen of crime’, was, in her later years, a wealthy and honoured woman of letters (and, on the strength of her late-life marriage to the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, happily married the second time round). She was awarded a CBE in 1956 and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1971. She died on this day in 1976. Her tombstone at Cholsey in Berkshire is inscribed ‘Agatha Christie the writer’.

  1 www.agathachristie.com

  13 January

  Truth on the march

  1898 What history calls ‘the Dreyfus affair’ began in 1894 when it was discovered that French military secrets about artillery dispositions were being passed to the Germans. Since the Franco-Prussian war, relations between the countries had been tense. Suspicion fell on a French officer of Jewish origin, Alfred Dreyfus. He was arrested on 15 October 1894, stripped of his captain’s rank (the epaulets ritually torn from his uniform) and sentenced by court martial, in camera, to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island.

  Two years later the real culprit was identified, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. To save military embarrassment, it was covered up and Dreyfus left to rot in French Guiana. The story leaked out. To the allegations of rank injustice were added those of institutional anti- Semitism. Dreyfus’s case became a ‘cause’. It was raised to white heat by the acquittal, after inquiry, of Esterhazy.

  This it was that provoked, on 13 January 1898, Emile Zola’s 4,000- word open letter, addressed to the president of France, in the newspaper L’Aurore, headlined ‘J’accuse!’. Two hundred thousand copies of the newspaper were sold that day. ‘La verité est en march
e et rien ne l’arrêtera’ (‘truth is on the march and nothing can stop it’), proclaimed the novelist-turned-campaigner.

  The authorities had every intention of stopping it. A fortnight later Zola was put on trial for criminal libel (the libel was to have alleged that Esterhazy’s tribunal was knowingly complicit in corruption). Zola’s trial dragged on for two weeks, with ugly mobs – some shouting anti-Semitic slogans – outside.

  Zola was convicted and sentenced to the maximum punishment allowed by law, a year’s imprisonment. He fled to England, where there was considerable sympathy for Dreyfus, living there for a year. In September 1899, Dreyfus was finally pardoned. Zola returned, but was financially ruined and exhausted. He died in 1902, in mysterious circumstances (he was asphyxiated by a defective chimney – anti-Dreyfusards were suspected by many).

  Full military reparation did not come for Dreyfus until 1906, when, at a full-dress parade, he was promoted to major and returned to service in the artillery. He attended the ceremony to install Zola’s ashes in the Panthéon in 1908, at which he was wounded by a gunshot from a journalist and would-be assassin, Louis Gregori.

  14 January

  A.S. Byatt fights for her local

  2001 The connection between literature and the public house is honourable. The first great vernacular poem in the language, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, opens in a Southwark hostelry, the Tabard. Inspirational as its conviviality is in some cases, pubs – and the booze they serve – are sometimes inimical to the production of literature. The inebriated muse rarely produces masterpieces. Probably more good poetry was lost than conceived in the Wagon and Horses, known as the ‘Glue Pot’ because once you went in you were stuck all day, where the BBC poets – Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Roy Campbell, W.R. Rodgers – liked to drink their day away.