Its inter-chapters were the real innovation, though. Here is part of one:
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water.
The short declarative sentences, free of dependent clauses; the documentary edge to the precise time of day; the concrete details like the pools of water – all work to establish that off-hand tone so typical of Hemingway’s prose. Hard boiled it may be, yet it’s hardly without feeling, what with that sombre irony of the hospital backdrop: the caring institution with its shutters ‘nailed shut’.
The most daring thing about the passage is what might be called its pseudo-reference. What cabinet ministers? Who are the ‘they’ who shot them? What’s the occasion? The definite article ‘the’ implies that readers know the context, but of course we don’t. But then we don’t need to; it’s an atmospheric sketch, not a history – nor, for that matter, a conventional novel – and it’s very Hemingway.
27 February
Poet meets drummer
1972 The distinguished journalist Nicholas Tomalin reported for the Sunday Times on the lavish party held by the Burtons, to commemorate Elizabeth Taylor’s 40th birthday. She and Richard were joined at the time in one of their serial marriages. The event was held in Hungary, where Burton was making the monumental flop (as it turned out) Bluebeard’s Castle.
Everyone who was anyone (Brando, Frankie Howerd, Michael Caine) was invited – the Burtons picking up travel and hotel expenses. Stephen Spender knew Richard Burton through mutual Oxford University friends (notably Nevill Coghill). On meeting the actor in 1982, at the Gritti Palace, Venice, Spender found him as ‘friendly, quiet, curiously assured, as I’ve always found him – so much in contrast with his drunken public image’.
For the 1972 birthday party, only one air ticket was provided per guest. Stephen found himself a little lonely, but struck up conversation with Ringo Starr. As Tomalin records:
They chatted for 10 minutes and, as they drifted apart, Spender suggested it might be nice to meet again in London. ‘What did yous [sic] say your name was?’ Ringo asked. ‘Stephen Spender,’ said Stephen Spender. ‘Yes, well, Stephen, just you telephone the Apple recording company in London and tell them we’ve met, that your name is Stephen Spender and I said you should ring. And do make it clear it was at Elizabeth’s party we met.’
The anecdote must, of course, have originated with Spender and indicates why, throughout his life, he was regarded as one of the most amusing dinner-party guests in literary London.
28 February
F.R. Leavis demolishes C.P. Snow
1962 C.P. Snow began revolving his thesis about the ‘two cultures’ that were impeding the progress of modern Britain as early as 1956, in an article in the New Statesman. The thesis was elaborated in a talk delivered on 7 May 1959 in Cambridge, subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.
There were, Snow argued, ‘New Men’ and ‘Old Men’. The first knew Shakespeare but were stumped by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the others vice versa. There was, he implied, one man who effortlessly bridged the two. There should be more Snows.
The two-culture thesis was influential and adopted as holy writ in the sixth-forms of Britain. Congenial as it was with liberal educationists, it provoked ferocious refutation from the leading literary critic of the time, F.R. Leavis.
In an answering lecture, delivered at Cambridge on 28 February 1962, Leavis, much the more effective polemicist, denied any such cultural split. He mocked the pontifical tone of Snow’s argument which, as he bitingly observed, only genius could justify: but, then, who could imagine genius using such a tone? As for Tolstoyan pretension:
Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist … his incapacity as a novelist is … total … as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist … Not only is he not a genius … he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.
Snow’s reputation among the discriminating few, and his amour propre, never recovered. With the public at large his reputation was unaffected. Sixth-formers still read and disgorge it.
29 February
Gay’s ‘Newgate Pastoral’ will do
1728 John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (known as a ‘Newgate Pastoral’) was produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (along with Drury Lane, one of the two principal playhouses in London) on 29 February 1728. It was a tense occasion for the playwright and his fellow members of the Scriblerus Club (Alexander Pope, for example), who were among the audience. The work was, as the Daily Journal described, a ‘new English opera in a manner entirely new’. The novelty was stage dialogue interspersed with ballads (to musical accompaniment). The Beggar’s Opera was satirical – Swiftian, almost, in its critique of the English criminal justice system. It daringly attacked the leading politician of the day, Robert Walpole (as Bob Booty); and it ran entirely against the accepted norms and conventions of Italian opera. Colley Cibber, the proprietor at Drury Lane, had played safe by turning Gay’s offering down.
The work opens in Peachum’s house, in which the thief-taker cheerfully outlines his nihilistic philosophy of life:
Through all the Employments of Life
Each Neighbour abuses his Brother;
Whore and Rogue they call Husband and Wife:
All Professions be-rogue one another:
The Priest calls the Lawyer a Cheat,
The Lawyer be-knaves the Divine:
And the Statesman, because he’s so great,
Thinks his Trade as honest as mine.
At the end of the first act (of three) on the first night there was complete silence. The absence of applause was not, however, evidence of audience displeasure but head-scratching uncertainty as to how to react to this spectacle of roguery, thievery and whoredom. When the curtain descended on the third act, the clapping was thunderous. Pope realised that his friend had triumphed when he overheard the Duke of Argyle exclaim, in his adjoining box: ‘It will do.’
It did very well for Gay, running as it did for 62 nights (with every third night a benefit for the playwright – who was estimated to have made some £600 from the first run). On the strength of the play’s success the manager of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, John Rich, was able to construct a fine new establishment (the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden), the forerunner of today’s Royal Opera House. Bertolt Brecht paid Gay the sincerest flattery by imitating his work as Drei Groschen Oper (Threepenny Opera) with music by Kurt Weill.
1 March
The witch trials open in Ingersoll’s Tavern, Salem Village, Massachusetts
1692 At first only three women were charged. Over the rest of that spring and summer, as the confusion and hysteria grew and the examinations were moved to the meeting house, 55 men and women would ‘confess’ to witchcraft. Over 150 would be imprisoned, nineteen hanged, and Giles Corey, aged 81, pressed to death under a platform loaded with stones.
The panic was fed by underlying anxiety about whether the colony’s royal charter would be renewed, combined with fear that the devil was actively and secretly undermining the pious community. The effects of his work were plain to see: a number of adolescent girls were falling about convulsed into grotesque postures, complaining of invisible bites and pinches on their arms and legs.
Who had done the devil’s work? As always in witch scares, suspicion fell on older women, many widowed or single, marginal to the town. One by one they were accused. Since they bore no marks of their wickedness, the court had no way of determining their guilt apart from forcing confessions through leading questions:
Sarah Goode what evil Spirit have you familiarity with?
None …
Why do you hurt these children?
I doe not hurt them. I scorn it.
Who doe you imploy then to do it?
I imploy no body.
What creature do you imploy then?
And so on. No wonder Arthur Miller was so fascinated with the Salem trials. His play The Crucible (1953) kept the language and characters of the original, but the audience knew it was really about the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), another ‘court’ that could subpoena witnesses, deny them the right to cross-examine others testifying against them, try to brow-beat them into admitting to invisible abuses, then charge them with contempt if they refused to confess.
On 18 August 1955, HUAC questioned the folk-singer Pete Seeger on his performances for alleged communist-front cultural organisations:
MR TAVENNER: […] I have before me a photostatic copy of the June 20, 1947, issue of the Daily Worker, [in which] … appears this advertisement: ‘Tonight—Bronx, hear Peter Seeger and his guitar, at Allerton Section housewarming.’ May I ask you whether or not the Allerton Section was a section of the Communist Party? …
MR SEEGER: I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this …1
Because he refused to plead the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which allows witnesses to refuse to testify if their testimony would incriminate them, Pete Seeger’s failure to answer landed him in jail for a year for contempt of Congress.
1 http://www.peteseeger.net/HUAC.htm
2 March
Lucky Jim is conceived
1948 Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin forged their friendship as undergraduates at Oxford (their drunken nights are commemorated in Larkin’s poem, ‘Dockery and Son’) and confirmed the relationship with a lifelong, immensely comic (and often scatological) correspondence. On 2 March 1948, Amis wrote to his chum Larkin, now a junior librarian at the University College of Leicester, to say:
I will arrive in Lester [sic] at lunch time on Friday [5 March], precise details by card or wire to follow. Will u meet me at the station or what? Inform by card where. Hasta vista.
It was Amis’s first visit to Leicester. He himself was in Oxford, collecting a degree, but about to apply (successfully) for a junior lectureship at Swansea. Neither man (first-class degrees both of them, from a real university) had much regard for red-brick. Both were writing, ambitiously. Larkin had already done a couple of novels. Amis was thrashing around, looking for a subject. In the 2 March letter he thinks he may have got a lead from the ghost stories of M.R. James (much later this would emerge as his fantasy of alcoholic haunting, The Green Man, 1969).
Larkin picked up Amis at Leicester station and walked with him to his ‘digs’ in Dixon Drive, which he shared, glumly, with ‘a dough-faced physicist co-lodger’. The library opened on Saturday morning and required Larkin’s attendance. The two men walked to the university, located opposite the municipal cemetery (later immortalised in Larkin’s poem ‘Toads Revisited’). The buildings were a decommissioned Victorian lunatic asylum. Even by the standards of that municipal architecture it was not a distinguished edifice.
Larkin parked Amis in the Senior Common Room while he went off to work. As Amis recalled: ‘I looked around a couple of times and said to myself, “Christ, somebody ought to do something with this”.’
Something was done, after much confabulation with Larkin, with Amis’s first novel, the story of Lucky Jim Dixon and his trials at the converted lunatic asylum university.
3 March
The Birth of a Nation is released: literature meets film
1915 Having established itself in Hollywood (to escape copyright complications about camera technology on the east coast, and to take advantage of California’s never-ending sunshine), the movie industry eagerly sought material to film. They found it in popular fiction. At first (as with camera technology) they plundered, reaping where they had not sown.
The formal relationship between screen and printed page was inaugurated – controversially – on 15 April 1914 when D.W. Griffith closed a deal to buy the rights to Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (Griffith’s employees, reports Wyn Craig Wade in The Fiery Cross, ‘thought their boss had gone mad’). Griffith began shooting the movie in California on 4 July – meaningful date.
Dixon (1864–1946) was born, during the Civil War, in North Carolina, one of five children of a Baptist minister. Before the war the Dixon family was rich. After the war they found themselves plunged in abject poverty, down there with the ‘darkies’ they had always lorded it over. It had a (de)formative effect on the growing Thomas.
During these hard years his father (also Thomas Dixon) rode with the Ku Klux Klan and became a senior member, or ‘Wizard’, as did other disaffected members of his family. The KKK, an underground movement, was formed by veterans of the Confederate Army to assert white supremacy (by violence if necessary) against reforms imposed by the victorious North and the hated Republican party. It established a surrogate aristocracy for an unfairly (as they thought) degraded master-class.
A clever boy, Thomas went to Johns Hopkins on a full scholarship, qualifying as a lawyer in 1886. One of his contemporaries at Hopkins, and a personal friend, was the future president, Woodrow Wilson.
Dixon was elected to the North Carolina legislature in 1885 but resigned a year later to enter the Baptist ministry. He was a wildly popular ‘lyceum lecturer’ and gave dramatic sermons to admiring congregations as far north as New York and Boston.
Dixon’s career in fiction began with his seeing a stage performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which inflamed his dormant KKK sentiments. He resolved to strike back with romans à these arguing the southern cause, notably The Clansman (1905), which sold 40,000 copies in its first ten days of publication.
The narrative opens with victory for the Union being shouted through the streets of Washington. Young, beautiful and ‘fair’ Elsie Stoneman has nursed back to health a young Rebel officer, Ben Cameron, who will face the firing squad when he recovers for the crime of fighting behind enemy lines as a ‘guerrilla’. Elsie goes to Lincoln and successfully pleads in person for Ben’s life. The fatherly president gladly grants a pardon. He goes on to explain that his aim for the United States has never been negro emancipation, perish the thought, but repatriation of the former slaves to Africa: ‘I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the Negro into our social and political life as our equal.’ ‘Mulatto citizenship’ is an abomination.
Elsie and Ben duly marry and return to his native South Carolina, only to discover that ‘the white man’s day is done’. A band of blacks gang-rape Ben’s former love, the ‘belle’ Marion Lenoir, and her mother. Unable to live with the shame, the ladies commit suicide. The Klan avenges them. Bloodily. The ‘Fiery Cross’ burns everywhere. The white-sheeted riders restore justice and (for the uppity blacks) condign retribution. The novel’s last words are: ‘Civilization has been saved, and the South redeemed from shame.’
Immortality was bestowed on The Clansman when D.W. Griffith took it as the source for his epochal film, The Birth of a Nation. Dixon was the first novelist ever to receive ‘subsidiary rights’ ($2,000) for a film adaptation of his work. After a successful sneak preview in Los Angeles, Griffith prepared for the major release in New York. The newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) mounted a series of legal protests, on the grounds of racial defamation.
Dixon – by now a veteran in racist polemic – wrote to his college friend Woodrow Wilson on 3 February 1915. The president, he suggested, might like to look at this crowning achievement of the burgeoning American film industry. On 18 February 1915 there was a private showing of the movie in the East Room of the White House for Wilson, his wife and daughters. Dixon and Griffith were present. The presi
dent was impressed: ‘It is like writing history with lightning’, he said.
All legal challenges overcome, the film was released in New York (at a massive $2 a ticket) on 3 March, at the aptly named Liberty Theater. Men and women (many wearing antebellum fancy dress) packed out the opening evening.
The Birth of a Nation – which closely follows the plot of The Clansman – is regarded as a classic of American film. And also, alas, an everlasting blemish on American race relations.
4 March
Kidnapped by Native Americans, Mary Rowlandson is carried dry-shod over the Baquaug River, which proves an impassable barrier to the English army pursuing them
1676 First published in 1682, Mary Rowlandson’s account of her Captivity and Restoration ran through fourteen further editions by the end of the 17th century. Clearly the theme of an innocent captured by alien forces had a powerful effect on American readers. In time, dozens more captivity stories would follow, in which the kidnappers could be Jesuit priests, or Romans enslaving Jews (in the case of Ben Hur, 1880), or even a British officer, as in Susanna Rowson’s sentimental romance Charlotte Temple (1791), the most popular work of fiction in America until Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
But in Rowlandson’s narrative there is a further layer of spiritual autobiography. She scrutinises each twist and turn of her captivity for signs of what it portends for her own salvation. So when ‘many hundreds’ of what she calls the ‘heathen’ manage to cross the river ‘bag and baggage’ – ‘some sick, some lame’, including ‘squaws’ with ‘papooses at their backs’ – she naturally expects the pursuing English army to follow on pretty smartish. But they don’t. ‘On that very day’, she writes, ‘came the English army after them to this river, and saw the smoke of their wigwams, and yet this river put a stop to them.’
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