On the whole, though, authors are solidly behind their local. On this day it was reported that the Booker-winning novelist Dame Antonia Byatt had joined battle against the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in support of hers.
The Minster school, which trained the choir of Lincoln Cathedral, had acquired the adjoining site on Lindum Hill, on which was situated Lincoln’s oldest pub, the Adam and Eve – named after mankind’s first sinners – a nicely ironic tavern sign. Having bought the property from the brewery which owned it, the Church Schools Company (whose patrons are the country’s two archbishops) intended to take over the pub’s gardens for its own purposes, de-license the listed building and convert the shell of what was once the pub into a student hostel. No more cakes and ale at the Adam and Eve.
A.S. Byatt learned about this desecration (it could hardly, in the circumstances, be called ‘sacrilege’) from the American film star Gwyneth Paltrow, who had starred in the recent film adaptation of Possession (1990). The Adam and Eve had been a location for scenes in the movie.
Dame Antonia, whose novel was set around Lincoln, and who had been brought up herself not far away, made her views publicly known: ‘I would be very upset if the pub closed. I have known it since I was a child. In places like Lincoln, where there isn’t much left, it really ought to be left alone.’
Happily, the Adam and Eve pub survived. It supports (under a medallion of the city’s most famous literary personage, Alfred Lord Tennyson) the annual Lincoln Beer Festival.
15 January
The youngest novelist in English literature dies, aged 89
1972 Margaret Mary Julia Ashford, nicknamed by her family ‘Daisy’, was born in 1881 and brought up in Lewes, Sussex, among a prosperous and numerous Catholic family. As a nine-year-old girl she wrote novels after tea and before bedtime (a strict six o’clock) for the delectation of her father, a civil servant in the War Office. A readership of one. He copied the stories out for her, in a more legible adult hand, but retaining her turns of phrase and orthography. Given the size of the Ashford brood, Daisy clearly won more than her fair share of paternal attention.
Before she could put pen to paper she dictated to her father her first story, The Life of Father McSwiney, which she composed aged four. Daisy’s mature oeuvre includes The Hangman’s Daughter, Where Love Lies Deepest, and the novel on which her fame rests, The Young Visiters.
This last work was published in 1919 by Chatto and Windus as a curiosity, with an introduction by J.M. Barrie, who – manuscript in hand – vouched for the bona fides of the ‘nine-year-old authoress’ and that the work was ‘unaided’.
The Chatto editor in charge of the project, Frank Swinnerton (himself a novelist), interviewed the now fortyish author before giving it the go-ahead. Miss Ashford daringly asked Swinnerton for as much as £10. Chatto came through, voluntarily, with £500 and eventually paid thousands more. As the Daily Mail recorded, one half of London was laughing over The Young Visiters in 1919. The other half was impatiently waiting for the next edition to be printed, so they could get hold of the work that everyone else was in fits about.
Miss Ashford wrote nothing more after going to board at a convent school aged thirteen, in Haywards Heath. Fiction was put away with other childish things. She married a farmer, ran a hotel and had children of her own. Doubtless she told a rattling good bedtime story. Her identity as the authentic author of a work that was often considered a fake because it was so good was confirmed, at the end of a long and useful life, on 15 January 1972, in a Times obituary.
The flavour of the romance is given in the first paragraph:
Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him. He had quite a young girl staying with him of 17 named Ethel Monticue. Mr Salteena had dark short hair and mustache and wiskers which were very black and twisty. He was middle sized and he had very pale blue eyes. He had a pale brown suit but on Sundays he had a black one and he had a topper every day as he thorght it more becoming. Ethel Monticue had fair hair done on the top and blue eyes. She had a blue velvit frock which had grown rarther short in the sleeves. She had a black straw hat and kid gloves.
Ethel is also given to ‘sneery’ looks when things do not go quite her way. Happy to say, everything does go her way and all ends happily other than for Mr Salteena. But at a superannuated 42, what could the old codger expect?
16 January
Samuel Clemens, aged fifteen, publishes his first story in his hometown paper, the Hannibal, Missouri Western Union, edited by his older brother
1851 Humorous sketches were a staple of the American popular press at the time. They kept people reading, and, since they were usually undated, could be slotted in whenever a filler was needed. Samuel Clemens wrote over 350 of them wherever he worked as a journeyman printer, and later reporter – in St Louis, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Carson City, Nevada.
His first was a short piece of about 150 words, headed ‘A Gallant Fireman’. In it, a fire breaks out next door but one to the Union printing house, forcing Clemens and his workmates to consider moving their material out of the way, in case the fire should spread. In the process, ‘our gallant devil [printer’s apprentice] … immediately gathered the broom, an old mallet, the wash pan and a dirty towel … rushed out of the office and deposited his precious burden some ten squares off’.
Trouble was, he was ‘of a snailish disposition, even in his quickest moments’, so the fire had been put out before he got back. On returning, ‘thinking he had immortalized himself, [he] threw his giant frame in a tragic attitude, and exclaimed, with an eloquent expression: “If that thar fire hadn’t bin put out, thar’d a’ bin the greatest confirmation of the age.”’
Alright, maybe compared to Mozart, who wrote his first opera when he was eleven years old, Clemens was no prodigy. But the sketch does contain important clues to the later work of the man who would become Mark Twain. Here the author is already deriving humour from accents as indicators of social level, and from elevated rhetoric – especially when it misses the mark, as in ‘confirmation’ for ‘conflagration’.
It also shows just how deeply interwoven with newspapers Clemens was. The story didn’t just appear in a newspaper; it’s also about one. And so were a number of his later sketches – those written in Nevada, for example, where local reporters, especially those of rival papers, often form the target of good-natured jokes.
Clemens himself started out as a printer’s devil, when he went to work for the Hannibal Gazette at the age of twelve. The editors of the Early Tales and Sketches think he not only wrote ‘A Gallant Fireman’, but set it up in type as well.1 From the beginning his involvement with publishing was underpinned by the physical process itself. And if laboriously hand-setting a stick of type teaches you anything beyond the craft itself, it’s the virtue of brevity.
1 E.M. Branch, Robert Hirst and Harriet Smith (eds), The Works of Mark Twain, Vol. 15, Early Tales & Sketches, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, pp. 5–6.
17 January
Gary Gilmore is executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah, ending nearly a decade’s moratorium on the death penalty in the US
1977 In the 1960s people in the USA began to question the fairness and efficacy of the death penalty. It was racially biased, with African- Americans – 12 per cent of the population – making up 54 per cent of those executed. It was arbitrary, with some states invoking the punishment for rape and other offences as well as murder. By 1967 an informal moratorium was in place pending a definitive judgment by the Supreme Court.
When it came in 1972, Furman v. Georgia didn’t really decide the issue. The majority of Supreme Court justices ruled that the death penalty constituted a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ in violation of the eighth amendment of the Constitution, but only two of them declared the penalty to be unconstitutional in all instances. The main burden of the judgement hit out at the arbitrary nature of offences punishable by death, and the r
acial bias of the penalty. The states were ordered to bring their statutes in line so as to reflect these concerns.
Gilmore was the ideal way back into the death penalty. First, he was white. Second, he had been convicted of shooting a motel manager in Provo, Utah, on 20 July 1976, and (though the second case never came to court) a gas station attendant on the day before. Third, he wanted to die, rejecting all attempts of anti-death-sentence groups to have the sentence commuted, and attempting suicide three times while awaiting his execution.
He was killed by firing squad at 8.07 in the morning on this day. Lacking a regular room for firing squads, the prison used its abandoned cannery instead. Gilmore’s last words were ‘Let’s do it’.
And the literary consequences? One was very short, a T-shirt sporting the murderer’s three last words. The other, weighing in at 1,024 pages, was the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Executioner’s Song (1980), arguably the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer’s best book. As though struck by the unfamiliar reality of Gilmore’s story, Mailer abandoned his usual self-referential, rococo style, in favour of a moving, documentary insight – based on interviews, letters and court records – into a complex personality and a momentous event.
18 January
Imagists, ex-Rhymers and aesthetes dine on roast peacock at Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s stud farm
1914 It was Ezra Pound’s idea. From 1913 to 1916 he shared the six-room Stone Cottage in Sussex with W.B. Yeats, serving as the elder poet’s secretary. One day Pound suggested that they do something to mark the 74th birthday of Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the revered poet of love and nature, and campaigner against British imperialism in Egypt and India.
Yeats and Pound rounded up some poetic allies – the former drawing Victor Gustave Plarr and Thomas Sturge Moore from the old London-based Rhymers’ Club that he had founded, the latter inviting fellow imagists Frederic Manning, F.S. Flint and Richard Aldington. According to Yeats’ biographer Roy Foster, all seven travelled down on this day to Blunt’s stud farm in Horsham in a car hired for £5, carrying their poems of homage in ‘a stone casket carved with a recumbent figure by Gaudier-Brzeska’ (the sculptor was another of Pound’s enthusiasms).
Despite the cold, the occasion went off well. ‘The meal included a roast peacock, allegedly at WBY’s request’, Foster adds. Blunt himself ‘responded to his lionization with a slightly crusty amusement. He claimed he had never really been a poet, had only ever written verse “when I was rather down on my luck and made mistakes either in love or politics or some other branch of active life”, and preferred to be celebrated as a horse breeder’1.
A few mundane questions remain. How did they all fit in the car? Since £5 is worth over £400 in today’s money, it may have been a very big car. And where did they find the peacock? Not at the local butchers, surely.
In any case, it’s a good story in which everyone plays out according to form: Yeats exotic, Pound generous and Blunt – well, blunt. Do poets have so much fun nowadays?
1 R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 509.
19 January
The Irish author Christopher Nolan wins the Whitbread Prize
1988 Compared to his namesake, the Anglo-American film director of Insomnia, Batman Begins and The Prestige (2002, 2005 and 2006), this Christopher Nolan was born under a darker star. Deprived of oxygen for two hours at birth, he came into the world with cerebral palsy, paralysed apart from his head and eyes. Forty-three years later he died. A statement released by his family a day later said: ‘Following the ingestion of some food into his airways yesterday, oxygen deprivation returned to take the life it had damaged more than 40 years ago.’
But in between, what a life. He couldn’t speak, but his loving parents sensed the clever, talented personality within. His father used to read to him – excerpts from Joyce’s Ulysses and poetry. When he was eleven, Christopher was prescribed Baclofen, a muscle relaxant that calmed the worst spasmodic movements of the condition, and increased his control over his head and neck. With what he called a ‘unicorn stick’ fixed to his head, he learned to poke the keys of a special computer, but it could take twelve hours to write a page, and his mother had to cradle his head while he did it.
At last his thoughts and feelings could reach the outside world. In his first letter to his aunt and uncle, he wrote: ‘I bet you never thought you would be hearing from me!’ The words came out like water from a burst dam. In fact that’s what he called his first book, a much acclaimed collection of poetry called Dam-Burst of Dreams, published when he was just fifteen.
More followed – Torchlight and Lazer Beams (1988), a play written with Dublin theatre director Michael Scott, a novel called The Banyan Tree (1999) – but the book that won the Whitbread was Under the Eye of the Clock, his autobiographical study written in the free-indirect style – that is, in the third person inside the head of a character – who was in this case an alter ego of the author himself named Joseph Meehan.
Everyone goes through torments of anxiety and embarrassment trying to make friends in an unfamiliar environment. Most suppress or forget the experience; few write about it. Nolan’s disability licensed him to voice, and enjoined his readers to pay attention to, those primal fears, and perhaps be reminded of their own. Here is Joseph on his first day in a new school:
Sally forward Joseph Meehan called an inner nested notion and gently heeding he damn-well forward sallied. Zoo-caged, he cracked the communication barrier by schooling hamfisted facial muscles to naturally smile on cue …
He’s both inside and outside the spectacle, feeling it subjectively, seeing it objectively. But self-pitying it’s not.
20 January
The European Union enjoys itself
1972 Friedrich Schiller’s lyric poem, An die Freude (usually translated as ‘Ode to Joy’), was written in 1785. German Romanticism theorised itself earlier than its English counterpart and the ‘Ode to Joy’ celebrated what would be an important idea in the movement internationally (see, for example, Wordsworth’s fine sonnet ‘Surprised by Joy’). An die Freude, however, simply does not translate into English as anything other than high-sounding doggerel, viz:
Tochter aus Elysium
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Daughter of Elysium
We enter, fire-imbibed,
Heavenly, thy sanctuary.
Octosyllabics rarely work in English poetry. Nor do the compounds (‘fire-imbibed’!) which come naturally to an agglutinative language like German.
Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ would have seemed destined to remain locked in its original German, but for the fact that, 40 years later, Beethoven made it the grand finale to his Ninth Symphony. As such it became the most famous Romantic poem in the world.
In recognition of the poem’s universality, and its supra-national abstractness (none of those worrying chauvinisms to be found in ‘God Save the Queen’, the Marseillaise or – most horribly – ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’), the Ode to Joy, as set to music by Beethoven, was adopted by the Council of Europe as the European Community’s anthem from 20 January 1972 onwards. The EU, as it would become, was officially joyful.
The dignity of the anthem was, however, somewhat tarnished when, in 1974, the rebel state of Rhodesia – having unilaterally declared independence and white supremacy – ran a contest for a new national anthem. The winner was Mary Bloom, a South African, with a defiant lyric set to Beethoven’s chorale:
Rise O voices of Rhodesia,
God may we thy bounty share,
Give us strength to face all danger,
And where challenge is, to dare.
For the Labour UK government of the time – desperate to end the Rhodesian crisis – it was deeply embarrassing as Europeans, albeit reluctant Europeans, to stand to attention in Brussels or Strasbourg to what was the battle-song of those disloyal white settlers (‘kith and kin’, as
they called themselves). No joy in that.
21 January
George Moore, the ‘English Zola’, dies
1933 Moore was born in 1852 in County Mayo, Ireland, the son of a wealthy Catholic Liberal MP and stable owner (a background which features prominently in Moore’s best-known and finest novel, Esther Waters (1894)). His father died (‘of political frustration’, allegedly) and Moore – already committed to a bohemian life in Paris – came into 12,000 acres of prime Irish property and an income for life. In Paris Moore was absorbed by the new aesthetic doctrines of Impressionism and Naturalism. His hoped-for career as an artist came to nothing.
He returned to Britain and made London his base in 1879. His first novel, A Modern Lover (1883), the story of a young artist in London, was a frank homage to ‘Zola and his odious school’, as the Spectator put it. The hero, Lewis Seymour, callously betrays the three women who sacrifice their virtue to him. A Mummer’s Wife (1883) opened new areas of sexual frankness for the Victorian novel and established Moore as a rebel against the kind of bourgeois decency represented, pre-eminently, by Mudie’s ‘select’ circulating library, which banned the novel.
Moore was deeply affected by the misfortunes of his publisher, Henry Vizetelly. In 1884–5, Vizetelly published five translations of Zola’s fiction, including Nana and L’Assommoir. He continued introducing a shocked British public to the French novelist until 1888, when a translation of La Terre finally incensed the authorities to legal action. Vizetelly pleaded guilty to publishing obscene articles and was fined £100. In 1889, he republished his Zola titles, slightly expurgated by his son Ernest. Again Henry Vizetelly was tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. He was 69, and in poor health. His firm collapsed and he died four years later.
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