Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  He was evidently financially distressed in the years that followed. In 1613 he is found, with fellow playwrights Nathan Field and Robert Daborne, writing from the Clink debtors’ prison (another few hundred yards from the theatres and Southwark Cathedral), asking a theatrical manager acquaintance for £5.

  As with Shakespeare (who was retired to Stratford during the years of Massinger’s fame as a dramatist), Massinger’s relationship with the Catholic Church is uncertain. It was a difficult time to have too pronounced a faith. Internal evidence of his drama suggests that he was cognisant with Catholicism, and he had relatives who had been recusants.

  During the years of his main activity as a playwright (the second decade of the 17th century) Massinger fell into the common practice of collaborative authorship (with Fletcher, notably), something that has led to problems for scholars trying to distinguish various hands. His favoured genre – much to the taste of theatregoers of the period, evidently – was the tragicomedy.

  After 1620, Massinger left the company he had been with for several years (the King’s Men) and wrote a number of single-handed works, notably his best-known and most-revived play, the comedy A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625) – one of the earliest and most effective satires on mercantilism and the corruptions of early capitalism, in the magnificent character Sir Giles Overreach.

  Massinger seems to have been relatively well off at this period of his career. Various bits and pieces can be picked up about his professional life (mainly through quarrels with fellow authors) over the next fifteen years. But he is one of those major figures in English literature whose biography, as we know it, could be written on the back of a postage stamp. He died in March 1640 in a house in the South Bank theatre district. It is recorded that ‘he went to bed well, and dyed suddenly – but not of the plague’. He was buried on 18 March, at the cost of £2 (Massinger not being a parishioner), by one account in the same grave as John Fletcher. His last collaboration.

  19 March

  As Philip Roth turns 74, his alter ego begins to feel his age

  2007 It was some time around – or shortly before – his 74th birthday that Philip Roth decided to dispense with his alter ego – not kill him off, because you never know when he’ll come in handy again – but at least stop using him as a stand-in for his own anxieties, fantasies, obsessions and paranoia. Exit Ghost, which came out later that year and deftly takes its title from a stage direction in Macbeth, is supposed to be our last sight of Nathan Zuckerman, who first strode the boards in Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979).

  Latterly – as in American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000) – Roth had taken to using Zuckerman as a (never quite neutral) narrator of stories whose interest lay beyond him. But in Exit Ghost Zuckerman returns to the centre; the book is about him – just as were The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983).

  Those books can best be understood as Roth’s ways of dealing with the reaction to his smash hit, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), another American good-bad boy story (see 16 July), about an adolescent’s raging hormones struggling against the taboos of a Jewish upbringing in Newark, New Jersey. Amid high praise, the book also came in for a lot of criticism for its satire on Jewish social aspirations and matriarchal family politics.

  Through Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer Roth could unmake his recent notoriety and sudden fame to revert to a version of his younger self, the earnest, high-minded author of a handful of short stories, who idolises the reclusive E.I. Lonoff as a father to his talent, and fantasises that Amy Bellette, the great author’s mysterious young mistress, is Anne Frank, somehow preserved from the Holocaust, who – when she marries him, as of course she must – will absolve him from imputations of anti-Semitism. The whole construction is so improbable, and in such bad taste (while also being so very funny), that of course it had to be the work of Zuckerman’s fevered imagination, not Roth’s. Zuckerman Unbound deals directly with the post-Portnoy furore, by liberating a degree of comically excessive bad temper in Zuckerman from which a more discreet Roth might want to hold back.

  Half a century on, and if Roth feels his age, he wants Zuckerman to be its outward show. Still impotent and incontinent from an old prostatectomy, Zuckerman returns to New York for medical treatment to stop the leakage. Arranging to swap his house in the Berkshires (not unlike Lonoff’s of long ago) with a young couple who write, he falls in love with the woman, returning to his hotel, until they vacate their apartment, to write a one-act drama called ‘He and She’, to the backdrop of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. He has already run into Amy Bellette, now impoverished, emaciated and dying of brain cancer. Meanwhile, a brash young Harvard man called Kliman from (God forbid) Los Angeles is hot on the trail of a long-suppressed sexual secret involving the long-deceased Lonoff. Cheerful it’s not, if mordantly funny in parts. For Zuckerman (and Roth?) the worst memento mori is not the impotence and incontinence but the thought that a Kilman may come after him/them one day.

  20 March

  After being serialised over 40 weeks in an abolitionist periodical, Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes out as a book

  1852 Ten years after it came out, on meeting the book’s author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, President Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said: ‘So this is the little lady who made this big war.’ Historians now doubt the literal truth of that anecdote, but its larger truth is undeniable. In its first year alone the book sold 300,000 copies, and after a dip in sales, went on to become the best-selling novel of the 19th century, clocking up figures second only to the Bible. And if it didn’t cause the Civil War, it did more to convert people of the northern states to the abolitionist cause than a million speeches by single-issue campaigners.

  Tom is a loyal slave with high Christian principles. Sold down the river by gentle but financially distressed owners, he saves the life of little Eva, whose father, the wealthy plantation-owner Augustine St Clare, buys Tom in gratitude as his own household slave. When Eva dies and her father is accidentally killed, Tom is auctioned to the wicked Simon Legree, a brutal, drunken planter who eventually has Tom flogged to death.

  The book’s power lies in its Dickensian blend of a strong moral message wrapped in situations stirring the readers’ sentiments. Chapter V, in which Tom’s original owners discuss the conflict between their loyalty to their slaves and their need for money, is worthy of Dickens at his best. Mrs Shelby objects more to the boorish manners of the slave trader than to what he’s come to do, and next morning, after a guiltily sleepless night, still complains when her personal servant doesn’t answer her call.

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been blamed for introducing or perpetrating a number of black stereotypes, like the genial matriarch Mammy the cook and the pickaninny child Topsy, who just ‘growed’. And throughout the civil rights movements of the second half of the 20th century, ‘Uncle Tom’ was a byword for the compliant negro. Yet without him and the novel bearing his name, black progress might have started from much further behind.

  21 March

  Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer, is burned at the stake for heresy in St Giles, Oxford

  1556 He had been Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury, a conscientious Protestant who worked out the arguments and tactics to support the annulment of the king’s marriage with Catherine of Aragon, and then the doctrinal and liturgical consequences of the split with Rome that followed. Under the evangelical regency of Henry’s son, the boy king Edward VI, Cranmer strengthened Protestant reforms in the English church, consolidating its identity as well as his own position.

  Then the young king died of tuberculosis at the age of only fifteen. With the succession of Mary Tudor, it was pay-back time for the Catholics. Mary recognised the supremacy of the Pope, married Charles V of Spain in order to cut her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth out of the succession, repealed Edward’s religious laws, and had 284 Protestant reformers burned at the stake – among them Thomas Cranmer.

 
In his Actes and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, that great chronicler of the Marian persecutions, John Foxe, tells the moving story of Cranmer’s last days. ‘Both English and Spanish divines had many conferences with him’, after which he ‘signed a recantation of all his former opinions’. This abject humiliation cut little ice with the queen, who (in Foxe’s brilliant formulation) ‘was resolved to sacrifice him to her resentments’.

  Cranmer was expected to broadcast his backsliding. Instead he recanted his recantation, ‘refusing’ the Pope as ‘Christ’s enemy and Antichrist’ and reaffirming his doctrinal and liturgical beliefs. He was brought to the stake at the bottom of St Giles street, bound with a chain, and, as ‘the fire began to burn near him, he stretched forth into the flames his right hand which had signed his recantation, and there held it so steadfastly, that the people might see it burned to a coal before his body was touched’.

  Yet his imprint on the Anglican Church has lasted to this day, not least his elegant solution to the furious debate over transubstantiation – the Catholic belief that Christ was really and corporally present in the Eucharist, and the extreme Protestant view that the bread and wine were symbolic only. Cranmer’s solution was that Christ’s body was indeed present in the consecrated elements, but spiritually rather than bodily.

  Because of its clean, compact expression of complex ideas, Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (BCP) of 1549 has infiltrated English literature almost as much as has the Bible. Its prose has proved impossible to modernise without lapsing into absurdity. For example, the petition to Christ in the BCP ‘Gloria’ goes:

  O Lord God, Lamb of God, son of the father, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us: thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer. Thou that sittest at the right hand of God the father, have mercy upon us.

  Which the latest modernisation of the BCP, Common Worship (2000), renders as:

  Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer.

  You can see that the modernisers are trying to make the petition more ‘relevant’ to the 21st century – and especially to the ‘youth’ of our era. So out go the old-fashioned ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and their appropriate verb endings. Fair enough. But also effaced are the relative clauses – presumably on the grounds that subordination makes the prayer too hard to grasp. As a result, Jesus Christ, who already knows that He takes away the sins of the world and is seated on the right hand of God, is told these things, as though in a newsflash. This is the clinching proof of Cranmer’s verbal power: to unpick it is to turn it into baby talk.

  22 March

  Goethe’s last words – and the other last words

  1832 If Heine’s are the wittiest last words of a German man of letters (see 27 November), the most exalted are those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. As recorded by his faithful biographer Johann Peter Eckermann (author of Conversations with Goethe), they were ‘Mehr Licht! Mehr licht!’ (‘More light! More light!’) As a child of the enlightenment, the leader of Sturm und Drang, a major philosopher as well as a toweringly great writer, they make a fitting epitaph.

  There have, however, been contradictions to this most perfect of valedictions. It is suggested that what Goethe actually said was: ‘Open the second shutter, so that more light may come in’ (some versions have ‘second blind’ – the exact domestic layout of Goethe’s death chamber is not recorded). The central element is there (‘more light’) but the instruction is anything but lofty. Banal even. More so in the original German: ‘Macht doch den zweiten Fensterladen in der Stube auch auf, damit mehr Licht hereinkomme.’

  Another account has it that his last words were intimately tender to his daughter-in-law: ‘Come, my little daughter, and give me your little paw.’ It’s nice to think of him entering eternity, hand in hand, with her. Other accounts have ‘little woman’ and even ‘little wife’ (the German ‘Frau’ translates either way).

  23 March

  Sexual intercourse has begun – or has it?

  1963 Philip Larkin’s opening lines from ‘Annus Mirabilis’ are (along with ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’) his most quoted:

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Which was rather late for me) –

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  The chronology is both precise and vague. And, for all its ubiquity in dictionaries of quotation, ultimately meaningless – at least historically.

  D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned in the UK ever since its first (offshore) publication in 1928, was acquitted at the Old Bailey on 2 November 1960. The Beatles’ first LP – Love, Love Me Do – was released on 22 March 1963 (Larkin was jazz critic of the Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1967, and was up with discography).

  The title, ‘Annus Mirabilis’, signals the ‘wonderful year’ (not three-year ‘era’), 1963, to be when sexual intercourse began. And given the precise terminal date of the Beatles’ LP, it must be the first three months of 1963. Or, more likely, these months were when a number of trends crested.

  One trend was the pill. The contraceptive Enovid was licensed in the UK in 1961. For women, it meant that they – not their untrustworthily condomed partner – controlled their fertility. This ‘empowerment’ coincided with the birth of the women’s movement, whose primal moment was 19 February 1963, when Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published and, immediately after, NOW (the National Organisation of Women) was formed.

  For men, the pill meant sex without fear – or, more often, responsibility. The result was an orgiastic release of pre- and extra-marital sex. What Larkin expresses in ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (published in 1967) is something akin to Lear’s disgusted:

  The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly

  Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive.

  The mournful parenthesis, ‘(Which was rather late for me)’, could be read as suggesting that Larkin himself had missed the boat sexually, having been born in 1922, and was now too old to swing along with the swinging sixties. It would be a misreading.

  Larkin had his first serious sexual relationship with seventeen-year-old student Ruth Bowman, in 1945 (he was some seven years older, and already embarked on his career as a librarian). The relationship lasted three years. In 1950, he began what was to be the longest relationship of his life, with Monica Jones (a lecturer at Leicester University). While involved with her, he had a string of other sexual relationships, sometimes conducting three at the same time. Philip Larkin is, it is worth noting, the only major poet in the English language whom we know (from eyewitness report) to have had a large penis.

  24 March

  Nietzsche’s typewriting course ends

  1882 Mark Twain asserts, in 1905, in his essay ‘The First Typing Machine’, that the first such writer/typewriter was none other than Mark Twain:

  I will now claim – until dispossessed – that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  As Darren Wershler-Henry points out in his ‘fragmented history of typewriting’, The Iron Whim, this may be what Huck Finn would call a bit of a ‘stretcher’. The evidence of the literary remains indicates that it was not Sawyer (1876) but the much later Life on the Mississippi (1883). This later date puts Twain in second place, some months behind another famous name.

  ‘Hurrah! The machine has arrived at my house’, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a postcard to his sister on 11 February 1882. For the sum of 375 marks the philosopher had acquired a Hansen ‘writing ball’, or ‘Schreibkugel’. Hansen was a Swedish pastor and teacher of deaf-mutes. He intended his invention as an aid for these unfortunates, not German philosophers. Nietzsche wrestled with his new device for the following fe
w weeks. One sample of his typewriting survives (in German):

  THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF IRON

  YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.

  PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE,

  AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS, TO USE US.

  Thus typed Zarathustra. He did not have fingers sufficiently fine, or the necessary patience and tact, Nietzsche eventually decided. Malling Hausen, in his study of the episode, Nietzsche’s Writing Ball, records that on 24 March 1882 the experiment ended. Nietzsche’s fingers could not stand it.

  There is speculation that – disappointing as the experience with the writing ball was – it had an influence on the ‘telegraphic’ or ‘fragmentary’ style of Nietzsche’s later philosophical writing. No effect on Twain’s fiction has ever been discerned.

  25 March

  The Annunciation and Good Friday fall on the same day; John Donne doesn’t know whether to feast or fast

  1608 The Feast of the Annunciation has always been fixed on 25 March. Until 1752, England and its colonies used to mark the new year from that date too. Easter, on the other hand, is a moveable feast – it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox – so Good Friday slides back and forth on the calendar, forever yoked to Easter.

  Every once in a while the two dates coincide. It doesn’t happen all that often – it last occurred in 2005 and will again in 2016 – and when it does, it sets people to thinking. Beginnings, endings; conception, death; God become man (and suffering and dying as a man) – and all reconciled within the overarching divine narrative working itself out in time on earth. What a theme for metaphysical poets, ‘catching the sense at two removes’, as George Herbert (who was one himself) chided the school of Donne in his poem ‘Jordan (I)’.