Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Donne himself rose to the witty prompt when the two occasions coincided, when he wrote ‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day, 1608’. ‘My soule eats twice’, he marvels, ‘Christ hither and away’. On ‘this doubtfull day / Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away’. For Mary, this ‘abridgement of Christ’s story’ is beyond comprehension: ‘At once a Sonne is promised her, and gone; / Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John; / Not fully a mother, Shee’s in Orbitie [mourning]’.

  The poem is a meditation, leading Donne (or his devout voice) to the conclusion that ‘Death and conception in mankinde is one’. It’s a lesson he will lay up in his ‘Soule’, ‘And in my life retaile it every day’.

  26 March

  Modernist meets Anthroposophist

  1911 On this day Franz Kafka attended a lecture by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. It was, on the face of it, an epic collision of contemporary philosophy and of modernist literature. Kafka, aged 27, was already well into his (very private) writing career and had, in 1910, begun to keep a diary. Steiner (1861–1925), like Kafka a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian empire by upbringing, had carved out a (very public) religio-philosophical doctrine he termed ‘Anthroposophy’. His Outline of Esoteric Science had recently been published. Steiner was then embarked on building a palace of art (bringing together music, painting, drama, dance, architecture and literature) called the Goetheanum. His enthusiastic, quasi-spiritualist ideas would leave a lasting imprint on European education. It’s not clear that they had any lasting effect on Franz Kafka.

  Kafka attended the lecture less as a potential convert than as a novelist, observing rather than listening; merely seeing what Steiner was doing, as if he (Kafka) were at a theatre rather than a lecture. He recorded his observations in his diary:

  Rhetorical effect: relaxed discussion of the objections of opponents, the listener is amazed by this strong opposition, further development and enlivening of these objections, the listener falls into worry, sinks entirely into these objections as if there were nothing else, now the listener takes a response to be impossible and is more than satisfied with a fleeting description of the possibility of defence.

  This rhetorical effect corresponds, incidentally, to the commandment of the devotional spirit. – Continual gazing on the surface of one’s extended hand. – Leaving out the final point. In general the spoken sentence begins at the speaker with its great capital letter, in its course bends as far as it can out to the listeners, and turns back to the speaker with the final point. But if the final point is left out, then the sentence, no longer held, blows directly onto the listener with the entire breath.

  Were ever the semaphorics of a lecture better caught?

  27 March

  The Vicar of Wakefield is published, never to go out of print

  1766 It was on this day, and in this year, that the archetypal ‘sentimental’ novel in English literature was published, in two volumes, at 6s apiece, by the Paternoster Row printer, F. Newbery. The work was immediately successful, has never been out of print, and was much imitated (it still is: the popular TV serial, The Vicar of Dibley, is a distant offspring). The year of publication has, however, always been somewhat mysterious.

  It is known that Oliver Goldsmith completed the work at least four years earlier. It was Samuel Johnson, Goldsmith’s patron, who urged him (along with the gift of a guinea) to publish the work when the notoriously improvident author declared himself in acute financial distress (his usual condition). His landlady was threatening him with debtors’ prison. When he went round to see Goldsmith, Johnson found that his guinea had been expended on a bottle of Madeira (a suitably expensive tipple – no gin for Oliver). Johnson replaced the cork in the bottle, and began to ‘talk to him about the means he might be extricated’:

  He then told me he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return; and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.

  Johnson was a friend in need if not the astutest of literary agents. The sale ranks with Milton’s £10 for Paradise Lost as one of the worst deals in literary history.

  Money is, as it happens, at the heart of the novel’s plot. Dr Primrose is a country vicar. He outlines his benign philosophy of life in the opening sentences:

  I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface but such qualities as would wear well.

  Mrs Primrose not only wears, but bears well. They have six children (‘the offspring of temperance’, Dr Primrose is in haste to assure us) and the family lives comfortably, if modestly, off the father’s invested wealth. His £35 a year stipend would not keep his church mice in crumbs. Disaster hits when his little fortune is lost through the malfeasance of a City merchant (who leaves ‘not a shilling in the pound’ for his investors). Job-like tribulation ensues. Adversity serves not to destroy, but to ennoble further the hero and his family.

  The gentle comedy of Goldsmith’s novel, and its uplifting faith in the essential goodness of human nature, has charmed readers of every subsequent generation.

  28 March

  Isaac Rosenberg sends his last poem to Edward Marsh

  1918 Isaac Rosenberg was born to a Jewish family that had recently emigrated to England from Lithuania, fleeing the tsar’s pogroms. The Rosenbergs moved, shortly before his birth, to London’s East End.

  Isaac left school at fourteen to become an apprentice engraver. His family had fallen on hard times. He hated the work and continued his education – at great personal difficulty – at the University of London’s night school, Birkbeck College. Rosenberg had already displayed remarkable talent – artistic and literary. He studied intermittently at the Slade School, published his first volume of poetry in 1912, and had his first artwork exhibition in 1914.

  He was also chronically invalid. His lungs were bad (TB, and other pulmonary ailments, were running at epidemic levels in the East End). Physically, he was a tiny 5 feet 3 inches.

  These disqualifications, what with the trenches’ insatiable appetite for new blood as the Great War entered its most furious stage, did not trouble the nation’s recruiting sergeants. His country needed him. Despite deep-held pacifist beliefs (and a very German name) Rosenberg volunteered, and was sent to the front in 1915. He remained a private – declining any promotion, even to a lowly NCO rank. He was killed, in hand-to-hand combat, on April Fools’ Day in 1918. He had, a couple of days earlier, sent what would be his last poem to his friend and patron, Edward Marsh. Due to delays in getting correspondence from the trenches, the poem was not posted until 2 April, by the poet’s dead hand. Entitled ‘Through These Pale Cold Days’, the poem combines a powerful sense of impending death with an awareness of his racial heritage:

  Through these pale cold days

  What dark faces burn

  Out of three thousand years,

  And their wild eyes yearn,

  While underneath their brows

  Like waifs their spirits grope

  For the pools of Hebron again —

  For Lebanon’s summer slope.

  They leave these blond still days

  In dust behind their tread

  They see with living eyes

  How long they have been dead.

  Rosenberg’s body was never identified among the other corpses, although a headstone was erected for him, with a Star of David on it and the inscription: ‘Artist and Poet’.

  29 March

  Brave New World is liberated in Australia

  1933 Aldous Huxley began writing Brave New World (as it was to be entitled) two years befor
e it was published in 1932. It was a conscious change of style for him and a deliberate bid for popularity, using, as it did, the styles and conventions of science fiction.

  It had higher purposes. He explained to his schoolmaster father, Leonard, on 24 August 1931 that the work was designed to satirise ‘the appallingness of Utopia’ – with specific darts directed against the doctrines of Freud, the Pavlovian educational systems currently advocated by behaviourists, and the commercial practices of Henry Ford (whose English Fordopolis was founded in Dagenham in 1928). But the seed of the work, he informed his father, was ‘the production of children in bottles’ – ectogenesis.

  Huxley was the most magpie-eclectic of thinkers. The ‘bottled baby’ idea was not his, but was picked up from the bio-mathematician J.B.S. Haldane, in a paper read to the Heretic Society, Cambridge, on 4 February 1923. Entitled ‘Daedalus: or Science and the Future’, it forecast, in pseudo-documentary style, the social repercussions of the advance of life-science over the next decades:

  It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion, and it was not till 1946 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using Kehlmann’s solution as medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of nutrition and support of the embryo was more difficult, and was only solved in the fourth year. Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air … France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method.

  As Haldane foresaw, and Huxley imaginatively described, bottled babies would erode the traditional nuclear family structure and render sexual intercourse a means of pure carnal pleasure. A never-ending orgy. In fact, Haldane was ten years out in his prophecy. It was the contraceptive pill, in the early sixties, that brought about this drastic change in social life and sexual behaviour.

  Sexual liberation was an uneasy subject for the authorities in 1932. Brave New World was banned in a number of countries – notably, with much huffing and puffing, in Australia. The ban was lifted on 29 March 1933. The Times drily noted: ‘It certainly has given the book an immense amount of gratuitous advertising.’ Not that Huxley’s witty dystopia needed it. The book remains his most popular, is widely prescribed in schools (even in Australasia) and will doubtless sell until AD 2540 (632 AF, i.e. ‘After Ford’), the year in which the action is set.

  30 March

  John Cheever (‘Chekhov of the Suburbs’) makes the front cover of Time magazine

  1964 John Cheever was born in New England, of ‘good stock’. His father was a shoe salesman, an early casualty of the Great Depression. Slump meant a rackety childhood. He grew up, around Boston, disliking his bossy mother and despising his drunken father.

  As a boy he received a bad education at a good school – Thayer Academy. He was expelled in the twelfth grade on grounds (as he variously fictionalised it in later life) of either sexual delinquency, smoking, or poor classroom performance. He serenely turned his disgrace into a short story, and submitted it to Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic. Amazingly, the magazine published ‘Expelled’ in October 1930. He was in print, in a national magazine, at eighteen. What did it feel like? he was asked in later life. ‘Eighty-seven dollars’, he replied.

  College was out of the question (he would, however, in later years claim to be a Harvard man). It was Cowley (also Scott Fitzgerald’s literary adviser) who instructed Cheever to cultivate the short story and the New Yorker as his principal outlet. Harold Ross’s magazine would be what Cheever called his ‘lifeboat’. A price was paid. Throughout life, there would be the recurrent criticism (to which the author, in his gloomier moments, subscribed) that beneath the smart gloss of his writing there was no more ‘substance’ than in a Charles Addams cartoon.

  After a brief spell with the Federal Writers’ Project, whose proletarian zeal appalled him (too much ‘substance’ by far), Cheever married in 1941. Why? ‘Because I didn’t want to sleep alone any more’, he would blandly reply in later life. His bed-partner, Mary Winternitz, was of Yale patrician stock (with a dash of Jewish). A talented woman, she deserves commemoration as probably the most tolerant spouse in literary history.

  Like other healthy males of his age, Cheever was drafted. He was judged not to be officer material and was transferred into the signal corps and a cushy home posting that allowed him time to write voluminously, drink copiously and dabble with his closet homosexuality. ‘If I followed my instincts’, he confided in his journal, ‘I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal’. He prudently suppressed his instincts.

  His first collection was published in 1943, while he was still in khaki. After the war the Cheevers (now parents) joined the middle-class, white-flight migration to the suburbs of New York in the early 1950s. At Scarborough, (the ‘Shady Hill’ of his stories) Cheever would find his richest material. In 1961 the family moved to Ossining. His neighbours, who saw their images satirically rendered in his fiction, regarded him as their ‘skunk in the woodpile’. The world outside hailed him as ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs’. Cheever taught some creative writing classes at the nearby penitentiary, Sing Sing, the hardest of America’s ‘joints’. The rough homosexuality of the jail fascinated him.

  ‘I want a life of impossible simplicity’, Cheever wrote. Alcohol, uncertain sexuality, and infidelity did not simplify things. In 1975 he touched bottom and sobered up, with the help of AA. In recovery he at last allowed himself to become guiltlessly homosexual. He could never, however, quite eradicate the uneasiness that his writing was less important ‘than ironing shirts in a Chinese laundry’.

  Money and awards showered on him in his later years. In March 1964 he even made the front page of Time magazine. It was in recovery, and at the top of the world, that he produced the novel Falconer – set not in the New York suburbs, but Sing Sing.

  After his death, from kidney cancer, Cheever left his journal to be published. The last entry reads: ‘I have climbed from a bed on the second floor to reach this typewriter. This was an achievement.’ He was, his son Benjamin records, ‘a writer almost before he was a man’.

  31 March

  Titanic poetry

  1909 On this day in Belfast, the keel was laid down in Harland & Wolff shipyard number 401 for the vessel that would be named the Titanic.

  The largest passenger steamship ever built by man, the White Star Line’s flagship would also, it was fondly expected, cross the Atlantic at blue-ribbon-winning speed, offering unprecedented levels of luxury (in first class) and comfort (in steerage).

  On its maiden voyage, on 14 April 1912, the Titanic, popularly believed unsinkable, struck an iceberg. The provision of lifeboats was inadequate and the launching of them botched. 1,517 of the 2,223 souls on board perished.

  The Titanic was not merely a technological achievement but expressed, poetically, that quality the ancients called hubris. The name itself hinted that there might be something dangerously prideful. In Keats’s poem, Hyperion, the Titans are the giant race of gods who are displaced by the smaller, smarter, classier Olympians. Size is not enough.

  The sinking of the Titanic provoked what Aristotle, in his treatise on tragedy, called ‘pity and fear’ on both sides of the Atlantic – and reams of poetry expressing those emotions. By general agreement the best poem inspired by the event was Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ (1915). For the sage of Wessex the sinking of the Titanic was a clear d
emonstration of the essential ‘irony’ of the human condition.

  VI

  Well: while was fashioning

  This creature of cleaving wing,

  The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

  VII

  Prepared a sinister mate

  For her – so gaily great –

  A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

  VIII

  And as the smart ship grew

  In stature, grace, and hue

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  IX

  Alien they seemed to be:

  No mortal eye could see

  The intimate welding of their later history.

  There is less consensus as to what is the worst poem to be inspired by the sinking of the Titanic. A majority vote goes to the Australian poet, Christopher Thomas Nixon, who was quick off the mark in the last weeks of 1912 with ‘The Passing of the Titanic (Sic transit gloria mundi)’. Of epic length, it opens:

  Through deep-sea gates of famed Southampton’s bay,

  A mammoth liner swings in churning slide

  Her regal tread ridged opaline gulfs asway,

  And gauntlet flings to chance, wind, shoal and tide.

  Ark wonderful! Palatial town marine,

  Invention’s flower, rose-peak of skill-wrought plan;