Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Rowlandson was disappointed not just because the English failed to save her, but also because of what the episode portended. After all, she knew her Old Testament. It was God’s chosen people who crossed the Red Sea dry-shod, and the heathen Egyptian army that got swallowed up in the converging waters. Something was wrong here. The best she can offer by way of interpretation is: ‘We were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance.’ And by ‘we’ she means not just the captives but also their would-be rescuers.

  5 March

  Shakespeare comes to America. Very slowly

  1750 There is dispute as to where and when the first Shakespeare was performed in the American colonies – much of the confusion arising from the difficulty of distinguishing between amateur and professional performance.

  The first permanent playhouse was built in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1716. It is hard to believe that some Shakespeare productions did not grace its boards. An amateur performance of Romeo and Juliet is recorded as having taken place there on 23 March 1730.

  The first professional performance of a Shakespeare play is commonly assumed to have taken place on 5 March 1750, when the scratch Murray and Kean troupe performed Richard III in New York. Louis Hallam’s wholly professional ‘Company of Comedians’ performed The Merchant of Venice at Williamsburg in 1752, which is taken by the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre as the true starting point.

  What is clear is that theatre – and specifically Shakespearian theatre – was slow to take hold in the Colonies. Two reasons are put forward: the strong residual antagonism of Puritanism, which regarded the theatre as a sink of iniquity; and republican resistance to England’s national poet (the anti-monarchical Richard III might have appealed on that ground).

  Puritan hostility was probably the stronger factor (there is, for example, no volume of Shakespeare in the 1682 Harvard Library catalogue, compiled by Cotton Mather). Lingering Puritanism also inhibited the growth of any native theatre culture. The first professional performance in America of a play by an American playwright was as late as 1767 (Thomas Godfrey’s The Prince of Parthia – until well into the 19th century, the company of American dramatists is as wholly undistinguished as Godfrey).

  Hostility to the stage climaxed in the period immediately preceding the Revolution. The first Continental Congress, held on 20 October 1774, banned:

  every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horseracing, and all kinds of gaming, cock fighting, exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.

  No American cakes and ale. But not, thankfully, for long.

  6 March

  Poe meets Dickens. Ravens fly

  1842 In histories of detective fiction, two primal texts are routinely cited. One is the short story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in Graham’s Magazine on 20 April 1841. In this ‘tale of ratiocination’ (‘detective story’ had not yet been coined as a literary term) the French sleuth, Auguste Dupin (based on the real-life Eugène François Vidocq), is confronted by the archetypal ‘locked room’ mystery. Two women are discovered, mutilated and brutally murdered. But their apartment in the rue Morgue is wholly sealed. How did the murderer gain ingress and egress? The culprit, it emerges (improbably, but with impeccable logic), was an acrobatic, fenestrating, orang-utan.

  In England, Dickens is credited with the first detective in fiction, if not the first detective novel (that credit usually goes to his protégé, Wilkie Collins), with Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (based on Dickens’s admired ‘thief taker’, Inspector Field, of the newly-formed Scotland Yard). Bleak House was published serially, from March 1852 to September 1853.

  Fascinatingly, Dickens met Poe on the English novelist’s first visit to America. The occasion is recorded in a letter from Dickens, dated 6 March 1842. It is clear that the two of them had been corresponding on the finer points of their art:

  My Dear Sir, — I shall be very glad to see you whenever you will do me the favour to call. I think I am more likely to be in the way between half-past eleven and twelve, than at any other time. I have glanced over the books you have been so kind as to send me, and more particularly at the papers to which you called my attention. I have the greater pleasure in expressing my desire to see you on this account. Apropos of the ‘construction’ of [William Godwin’s] Caleb Williams, do you know that Godwin wrote it backwards, – the last volume first, – and that when he had produced the hunting down of Caleb, and the catastrophe, he waited for months, casting about for a means of accounting for what he had done ?

  Faithfully yours always, Charles Dickens

  It would seem the two writers met the following day, or shortly thereafter.

  Caleb Williams is also credited by some partisans as the proto-detective story. But what is most interesting in Dickens’s letter is his mention of the backwards construction trick. This is elaborated in Matthew Pearl’s 2009 novel, The Last Dickens, in which it is fantasised that somewhere Dickens, following Godwin’s example, wrote down the ending of his tantalisingly incomplete last work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Cunning detective work uncovers it (in Pearl’s novel, that is).

  What conversation the two writers had is, sadly, unrecorded. But it is likely that Dickens (‘Great Inimitable’ that he was) took some inspiration for Bleak House from his admired American counterpart. Even more likely is that when Poe published his most famous poem, ‘The Raven’, on 29 January 1845 he owed the idea of the ominous bird to Barnaby Rudge’s Grip. Poe had reviewed Dickens’s novel, enthusiastically, in Graham’s Magazine on its publication in 1841, taking particular note of the symbolic bird.

  7 March

  Alice B. Toklas dies at 89, 21 years after the death of her companion, Gertrude Stein

  1967 It was a lovely spring day in Paris. When he called before noon on Gertrude Stein at her legendary flat at 27 rue de Fleurus, the maid gave Ernest Hemingway a glass of eau-de-vie. ‘The colorless alcohol felt good on my tongue’, he recalled in A Moveable Feast (1964), his memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s, ‘and it was still in my mouth when I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I have never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever’:

  Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’

  He made his excuses and left without seeing the great woman again, and that, as he put it, was ‘The way it ended with Miss Stein’. They had been friends, had respected each other’s work. He knew Alice B. Toklas as Gertrude Stein’s ‘companion’. Can this really have been the first time he realised that she was also her lover? Or was it the shock of such an august figure being humiliated that ended their friendship – out of embarrassment, as it were? But then, as she once told him: ‘Hemingway, after all you are ninety percent Rotarian.’

  That last comment is reported in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written by Stein, not Toklas. Toklas’s real autobiography is spread out over two works – The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), which is only partly a cookbook since it contains as many personal reminiscences as it does recipes, and What is Remembered (1963), a moving memoir of their life together and the people they knew – soberly written, informative, and testimony to a deep mutual love, whatever occasional spats might have erupted along the way.

  The books are shot through with ironic gaps between publicity, reputation and literary value. The cookbook is one of the best-selling cookbooks ever, mainly due to a much-celebrated recipe for ‘Haschich [sic] Fudge’, which wasn’t even Toklas’s own, but given to her by a friend. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was a great commercial success. Though predictably disliked by Hemingway, it was actually a clever narrative manoeuvre, in that it tried to relate events as Toklas would have told them. Meanwhile, Stein’s own most original narrative experiments – Three Lives (1909), the ground-breakingly mo
dernist Tender Buttons (1914), and the monumental The Making of Americans (1925) – have gone largely unread. Big mistake.

  8 March

  The author of The Wind in the Willows is born

  1859 The author of The Wind in the Willows – that archetypally English idyll – was, in biographical fact, a Scot. Kenneth Grahame was born into the Edinburgh professional classes. But the solid family framework around him dissolved almost immediately. His mother died of fever, giving birth to her fourth child, before Kenneth was six. His barrister father fell into alcoholism and died alone in France. He never communicated with his children, who were left to the care of an extended family.

  There are no fathers, no mothers, no wives, no siblings in the animal world of The Wind in the Willows. After public school in Oxford (a city he adored) there arrived the great sorrow of Grahame’s life. He did not ‘go up’ to the university. His guardian uncle determined that the boy must do something useful. It was, according to his biographer, ‘the most crushing blow that Grahame suffered, perhaps in his whole life’. It’s a strange notion of catastrophe; but real enough for Grahame. Paradise was now forever lost.

  Kenneth was installed, by patronage, into the cogs and wheels of the Bank of England. In this great machine he would work, mechanically, for 30 years. Although Oxford had been denied him, Grahame imbibed the university’s 1890s Paterian-Wildean decadence. Gem-like flames licked, decorously, around his ankles. He bought into Great-God-Pan-worshipping ‘neo-paganism’, a cult that, guardedly, promulgated all those Hellenic practices that Victorian England frowned on – not least after the savage Labouchere amendment of 1885 making ‘gross indecency’ a crime.

  By day a dutiful fonctionnaire in the Bank, by night Grahame roamed Soho, a bohemian. Literary introductions furnished him an entry into John Lane’s Yellow Book. His first volume of collected pieces, Pagan Papers (1893), carried a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley. A green carnation could not have been more emblematic.

  The papers were well received. Grahame (all the while slaving by day at the Bank) followed up two years later with another series, delicately recapturing childhood experiences: The Golden Age.

  In the same year, 1895, disaster struck with the Wilde trials. Prudently, Grahame married in 1899. The marriage proved a disaster, although it put to rest any suspicions about his private life. He was 40, his wife, Elspeth, in her late thirties. Sex was discontinued as soon as begun. It produced one son. It was to young Alastair, as bedtime entertainment, that The Wind in the Willows was conceived and eventually published in 1908.

  In the book Grahame pictures an ideal ménage: women do not come into it. In their ‘digs’, like Holmes and Watson, Ratty and Moley are two chaps living together: it’s a Darby and Darby situation. No Joans need apply. The story, as the author insisted, was ‘clean of the clash of sex’.

  Grahame wrote nothing of significance after The Wind in the Willows and his later life was chronically wretched. It is recorded by his biographer that he changed his underwear once a year. He died in 1932 and left his estate to the Bodleian Library, as homage to the university he had never attended.

  9 March

  Rand’s religion: the almighty dollar

  1982 If there were an award for the most influential bad novelist in literary history, Ayn Rand would, one suspects, be a strong contender. Alisa Rosenbaum was born, Russian Jewish, in St Petersburg in 1905. It was a bad year to be Jewish, with pogroms everywhere. 1917 was a bad year to be Russian, and Alisa fled the newly established USSR in 1925 to live in the US. An astonishingly enterprising woman, she settled in Hollywood to become a screenwriter (in a language not her own, and a society of which she knew very little, and a medium that had only just discovered ‘talkies’). She changed her name to Ayn Rand, married, and made a decent living for herself in a business (films) not easy to thrive in.

  Rand’s career took its definitive turn in 1932 with the anti-Soviet screenplay, Red Pawn. Thereafter her drama and (after 1943, with The Fountainhead) her fiction was ferociously pro-capitalist. She was, it was later said, a ‘hob-nailed Reagan’. Gordon (‘Greed is good’) Gecko was a pinko alongside Ayn.

  Rand formulated her views into a philosophy she called ‘Objectivism’, founded on a belief in ‘Rational Selfishness’. She propagated her views in her massive novel, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. The novel revolves around the idea of the wealth-creators (i.e. moguls, magnates, and millionaires) of the US imitating their workers, trade unionising, and going on strike. The capitalistic Atlas shrugs off the burden of making himself rich, and the mass of the population descends into the dystopian chaos they have brought on themselves with their irrational demand that the state look after them. The moral, as one disaffected blogger (‘uncyclopedia’) puts it, is that ‘Poor People Are Lazy Assholes’.

  Despite scathing reviews, Atlas Shrugged made the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, it recruited disciples to Rand’s political views. These views were expounded in the narrative and, in manifesto form, in a long appendix (ostensibly a radio address). In it the hero (Rand’s spokesperson), John Galt, exalts selfishness and excoriates (socialistic) selflessness. ‘Your acceptance of the code of selflessness’, he informs the American public:

  has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he’s keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.

  It is the working classes who are the ‘exploiters’ (grabbers). Galt’s philosophy can be summed up in his personal insignia, the dollar sign, ‘$’. Rand herself affected jewellery emblazoned with the same sacred $. When, aged 77, she died on this day in 1982, she was buried in the Kensico cemetery, Valhalla, New York. Alongside the casket was a six-foot-tall floral display in the shape of the dollar sign.

  Rand has always been a controversial figure. Posthumously much of the controversy centred on Alan Greenspan, who, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, effectively ran the American economy from 1987 to 2006. Greenspan was a confessed disciple of Rand’s in his younger years and attended the 1982 funeral. Was he, with the levers of power in his hand, putting into practice her principles – had the US, under his management, become ‘Aynerica’ with the motto, ‘In the Dollar we trust’? The still loyal band of Objectivists are divided on the question, many thinking he was weak-kneed (as Ayn would never have been) in his acquiescence to the ‘mixed economy’.

  10 March

  The first two Cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold are published; Walter Scott sensibly turns to writing novels

  1812 The morning of 10 March was when Byron, aged 23, ‘awoke and found himself famous’. On the day before that, the age’s most famous poet had been Walter Scott – author of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion and, most spectacularly, The Lady of the Lake (the poem that invented the Scottish tourist industry).

  The shrewdest of authors, Scott appreciated, as he said, that ‘Byron bet [i.e. beat] me’. He could not rival the author of Childe Harold when it came to popular verse narrative. So, pragmatist that he was, the Wizard of the North turned to prose narrative.

  Legend (energetically promoted by the author himself) had it that Scott had as early as 1805 ‘thrown together’ some seven opening chapters of what would later become Waverley. He’d tinkered with it but could not excite his publishers or himself with a historical romance set at the time of the 1745 uprising. And, anyway, his poetry – which he could write at conversational speed – was earning him thousands of pounds. Young Byron changed all that.

  There then occurred the famous episode of the ‘old writing desk’ – one of the hoarier myths of 19th-century literature. On giving up the ur-Waverley in 1805, Scott (allegedly) had tossed the manuscript (i.e. the opening chapters) into a writing desk drawer. On taking up residence in his grand new house at Abbotsford (built lavishly to his own specifications), new and more elegant furniture was
required for his study. The old writing desk was thrown into an attic. The yellowing manuscript was ‘entirely forgotten’ and ‘mislaid for several years’.

  Fate, in the shape of uncaught salmon (Abbotsford’s grounds had the Tweed running through them), intervened. In autumn 1813, as Scott recalled: ‘I happened to want some fishing tackle for the use of a guest [John Richardson, a fanatical angler] when it occurred to me to search the old writing desk in which I used to keep articles of that nature. I got access to it with some difficulty; and in looking for lines and flies, the long-lost manuscript presented itself. I immediately set to work to complete it according to my original purpose.’

  The ‘readiest writer’ of his time (as Carlyle called him), Scott dashed off Waverley in a few weeks and the novel was published (anonymously) in three volumes on 7 July 1814. Its runaway success, and that of a dozen other bestsellers by ‘the author of Waverley’ (Scott did not admit authorship until 1826), tilted the field of literary endeavour towards fiction for a century or more. Scott had made the form not merely respectable but, as Henry James (in another context) put it, discutible.

  Scholarly research has exploded the ‘old writing desk’ genesis. Waverley’s manuscript suggests that Scott initially set to work on the project in 1810, not 1805, and never threw his work-in-progress away into some forgotten drawer. Readers have, in general, always preferred the myth – as, indeed, they have always preferred Scott’s romantic account of the ’45 over historical accounts.