Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

The jewelled crown of Art the wizard, seen

  Since Noah’s trade in Shinar’s land began.

  It does not improve over the following 150 lines.

  Less lofty was the popular song of 1912, ‘My Sweetheart Went Down with the Ship’:

  My Sweetheart went down with the ship,

  Down to an ocean grave,

  One of the heroes who gave his life,

  The women and children to save,

  Gone but not forgotten,

  Tho’ the big ship rolled and dipt’

  He went to sleep in the ocean deep,

  My Sweetheart went down with the ship.

  The Oscar-winning 1997 film Titanic inspired another tidal wave of verse, much of it by schoolchildren as classwork. Many anthologies’ worth can be found on the web.

  1 April

  Scientifiction blasts off

  1926 Science fiction has been traced as far back in literature as Aesop and deep beyond that into pre-literary myth. As a modern fictional genre it was given its form by one patriarchal figure, and one magazine: Hugo Gernsback and Amazing Stories.

  Gernsback (1884–1967) was born in Luxembourg and emigrated to the US in 1905. A pioneer of radio and TV technology (and an inventor), he defined what would be known as ‘science fiction’ (he coined the term – after an unhappy flirtation with ‘scientifiction’, which never really caught on). In Gernsback’s definition, it was factually hard – not what H.G. Wells called ‘scientific romance’. Gernsback’s favourite explanation was the equation:

  science + fiction = science fiction

  Gernsback’s most famous contribution to the genre was the similarly algebraically entitled Ralph 124C 41+, first published in 1911 (the title is acronymic, like the modern bumper sticker, or texting: ‘one to foresee for one’). Essentially it was a tutorial on the author’s beloved new technology. Some of his foreseeings, such as planes travelling at the speed of sound, hit the mark. Others, such as Meteoro-Towers (weather control stations) are, alas, still SF.

  The first issue of Amazing Stories contained items by Verne, Wells and Poe. It cost 25¢ and was printed on pulp paper, with a coloured cover illustration (earth being hit by a Saturnian planet) by Frank R. Paul – later to become a leading SF illustrator. The first issue came out on 10 March 1926, with a cover date of 1 April, which enabled it to stay on drugstore racks for six rather than four weeks.

  Within a year, the magazine recruited a readership of 100,000. It was less successful in recruiting top-rate contributors, largely because of Gernsback’s parsimony. It was not until the 1950s, in other hands (Gernsback surrendered editorship in 1929), that Amazing Stories began featuring the likes of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.

  The significance of Amazing Stories was its being the first all-SF magazine, and its laying down clearly the literary space the genre would colonise. Gernsback created the genre that others would fill.

  2 April

  Alexis de Tocqueville sets sail from Le Havre to examine the American prison system

  1831 Ever since 1790, when American prisons had pioneered the layout of cells flanking a central corridor, the segregation of prisoners by age, sex and gravity of crime, and the solitary confinement system, Europeans had wondered whether they could learn anything useful about their own ways of locking people up. So in 1831 the French government sent Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont to investigate the American penal system. Eleven years later, Charles Dickens would set off on the same quest.

  Dickens would find American jails oppressive. De Tocqueville admired them – as he would many other things about America. In the event, both authors would range well beyond prisons, into the physical, political, economic and social geography of the country: Dickens in his acutely observant (though often biased) American Notes (1842) and his picaresque satire Martin Chuzzlewit (1833–4); de Tocqueville in the magisterial Democracy in America (two volumes, 1835, 1840), still the foundation text for students of the American scene.

  Here was democracy at work, thought de Tocqueville. Most governments claim to be acting on behalf of ‘the people’, but in America the sovereignty of the people was a working principle ‘recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws’. Here, ‘every man works to earn a living. … Labor is held in honor’. Because land was free or cheap to the immigrant willing to work hard, European-style economic and social elites based on hereditary land-ownership were thin on the ground.

  But ‘natural’ elites of the virtuous or intellectually superior also fell victims to the levelling spirit, he thought. And the down-side of the free-land promise was a tendency to restless movement ever westward, without pause to develop what had been settled. ‘In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age’, he writes, ‘and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing.’

  He recalls exploring an island in the middle of a lake in upstate New York, ‘one of those delightful solitudes of the New World’, in which – to his surprise – he uncovers the traces of a settler’s log cabin. ‘The logs … had sprouted afresh … and his cabin was transformed into a bower.’ Confronted with this emblem of death in life, of old age in the New World, ‘I exclaimed with sadness: “Are ruins, then, already here?”’

  3 April

  Mr Pooter decides to keep a diary

  1892 George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody was first published serially in Punch in 1891, and following its huge success in those pages, as a book the following year. The ‘nobody’ of the title is Charles Pooter, who works in a City office as a clerk under Mr Perkupp. He lives in a rented villa, The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, with his wife Carrie. And it is on taking possession of his Englishman’s Castle that he resolves to keep a diary. The first entry is businesslike:

  April 3

  Tradesmen called for custom, and I promised Farmerson, the ironmonger, to give him a turn if I wanted any nails or tools. By-the-by, that reminds me there is no key to our bedroom door, and the bells must be seen to. The parlour bell is broken, and the front door rings up in the servant’s bedroom, which is ridiculous. Dear friend Gowing dropped in, but wouldn’t stay, saying there was an infernal smell of paint.

  The diary goes on to recount Mr Pooter’s Lilliputian daily adventures at work and his social life (in which the biggest event is an invitation to the Mansion House ball). Pooter’s son, Lupin, is a source of distress. He gets engaged to a highly unsuitable girl. He joins his father to work for Perkupp, and is discharged. All ends well, however, with Pooter able to buy his own house at last, a consummation recorded as ‘the happiest day of my life’. The Grossmiths’ charming work was immensely popular and inspired a whole genre of pseudo-diaristic successors, and a new word for the English dictionary-makers, ‘Pooterism’. It does not translate well.

  4 April

  Winston Smith begins his diary

  1984 The opening sentence of Nineteen Eighty-four is (with that of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) one of the most famous in literature.

  It was bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

  The allusions are clear and traditional. April, from Chaucer’s ‘showres soote’, is the month of annual rebirth. But Orwell is more in line with Eliot’s Waste Land:

  APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  No spring crueller than 1984 in Oceania.

  We later learn that the ‘bright cold day’ of the opening sentence is 4 April 1984. The hero, Citizen Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party (and a Times journalist, whose task is to destroy news unwelcome to the Inner Party), has begun a diary. If found out, it will mean death, but he deludes himself that he has the scarcest thing in 1984, a private place.

  Keeping a journal, or diary, or chronicle was – for
Orwell – a defining act. It established one’s selfhood and one’s self-control. As he lay suffocating to death in University College Hospital he kept his terrors at bay by simply writing, as accurately as he could, the things around him in his sick room. Winston Smith’s keeping a diary is the first step to his becoming Winston Smith, rather than Citizen 6079 Smith W.

  The diary (literally ‘daybook’), however, poses an intractable problem:

  April 4th, 1984

  He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended on him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

  A world without dates induces that collective schizophrenia (melted reality) on which totalitarianism depends. Orwell should really have entitled his novel Nineteen Eighty-four(?). But of cruel April we are sure. The only historically significant event recorded for 4 April 1984 is President Ronald Reagan’s call for the abolition of chemical weapons.

  5 April

  Pocahontas marries John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia

  1614 As a daughter of Powhatan, a prominent Algonquin chief when the English first settled Virginia in 1608, Pocahontas was part of one of the great founding myths of the New World – not to mention the star of countless popular prints and a 1995 Disney film.

  It was the dashing and hot-tempered Captain John Smith, president of the English colony, who put her at the centre of the first-ever American narrative. His monumental The General History of Virginia, published long after the event in 1624, tells how Pocahontas saved his life after her father had captured him and sentenced him to death by having his brains beaten out against a large rock:

  Pocahontas, the Kings dearest daughter, when no entreaty [to spare Smith’s life] could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live.

  This promotes Pocahontas to a role far beyond her appearance in Smith’s first account of the adventure (see 14 May). If it really happened like this, it might have been some kind of initiation ceremony that Smith interpreted as threat and salvation. An earlier episode in his adventures, in which he claimed to have been released from a Turkish jail by his lover, the Pasha’s wife, might have guided his thinking on Pocahontas’s intervention.

  But then stories about heroes rescued by exotic native girls who have fallen in love with them are the stuff of balladry too, as in ‘Lord Bateman’, in which a young man of high degree captured in Turkey is allowed to escape by the jailer’s daughter.1

  Putting the episode, as he does, at the very climax of his personal narrative in Virginia, Smith produces a Renaissance pageant in which a European prince conquers and colonises the wild men of the New World. The other English settlers would reinforce this imperial theme by persuading Pocahontas to be baptised, then married in a Christian ceremony to a young plantation-owner and speculator in tobacco, John Rolfe.

  Later Americans would incorporate Pocahontas into the country’s founding story. Inside the rotunda, the Capitol building in Washington is decorated with monumental paintings of Columbus landing in the New World and the British General Cornwallis surrendering to the Americans at Yorktown. Alongside these images is Pocahontas, being baptised by a bishop in an improbably grand colonnaded hall.

  John Rolfe and ‘Rebecca’, as she was now called after her baptism, had one son. In 1616 they sailed for England, where she became something of an exotic curiosity and was presented at court. On their way back to Virginia in March 1617, Pocahontas/Rebecca fell ill with smallpox and died. She was buried in an unmarked grave at Gravesend.

  1 The ballad is no. 53 in the catalogue of Francis James Child, the professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Harvard: see his English and Scottish Popular Ballads; or consult the more accessible collection by Bronson (1959), Vol. 1, pp. 409–65.

  6 April

  Francis Petrarch catches his first sight of Laura, and will go on to write 366 sonnets about his love for her

  1327 Francesco Petrarca was a learned humanist, a priest, a great collector and reviver of the Latin classics, a poet, an essayist and a diarist to match St Augustine. Together with the Decameron (1353), by his friend Giovanni Boccaccio, and Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1308–21), Petrarch’s sonnets, the Canzoniere, form one of the three pillars of the modern Italian language.

  How did he come to write them? The story goes that while in church to observe Good Friday, he first saw a woman named Laura, and fell instantly in love with her. He had recently relinquished his vocation as a priest, but she was married; so the very perfection of physical, moral and spiritual beauty which the poet celebrated in her would prevent her granting his desire.

  This predicament was different from the troubadours’ old convention of courtly love, in which the young man falls for his seigneur’s wife, and the two enjoy a clandestine affair. So it needed a new rhetoric to express the genuinely irreconcilable polarities of desire and possibility: classical images of endless suffering (Sisyphus eternally pushing his rock up the hill, only to have it fall back every time); expressions of antithesis, like the Petrarchan trademark oxymorons (icy fire, living death, bitter sweetness); and figures of military advance and retreat.

  ‘Amor, che nel pensier mio vive e regna’, for example, is a miniature allegory of his love, that normally lives and reigns in his mind and heart, suddenly declaring itself by advancing to his face and planting its war banner there. At such effrontery the lady, who teaches him to love and suffer, and demands that reason, shame and reverence reign in his passion, rejects his advances. At which point Love, weeping and trembling, abandons his enterprise and doesn’t appear again. Then, as usual, the final three lines of the sestet poses the puzzle:

  Che poss’io far, temendo il mio signore

  se non star seco infin a l’ora estreme?

  Ché bel fa chi ben amando more.1

  The puzzle here lies in the productive ambiguity. Does ‘my lord fearing’ mean ‘considering my lord is so frightened’, or ‘fearing [i.e. respecting] my lord [as a good feudal subject should]’? However Laura behaves, the poet will be true to his lord/love because it’s been given a fright and because he owes it allegiance. So he will die loving well, or die well, loving, because he is loyal to the emotion – more so than to the lady.

  Petrarch more or less invented the sonnet in its quintessentially dialectic form, providing all Europe with a framework for exploring conflicts of all sorts – not only in the paradoxical emotions of romantic love, but also in politics, in work, in friendships, in day-to-day events, in life and death themselves.

  1 ‘What can I do, my lord fearing / except stand with him through his dangerous hour? / What a good end he makes who dies loving well.’

  7 April

  Edith Wharton entertains Morton Fullerton to dinner. Later that night she will write in her diary: ‘Non vi leggemmo avante’

  1908 ‘Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress?’, asks Ellen Olenska of Newland Archer in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), ‘since I can’t be your wife?’

  ‘I want – I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that – categories like that – won’t exist.’

  ‘Oh, my dear’, answers Ellen (who’s been around a bit), ‘where is that country? Have you ever been there? … I know so many who’ve tried to find it, and believe me … it wasn’t all that different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller, and dingier, and more promiscuous.’

  That was there and that was then – upper-class New York in the 1870s – a world of snobbery, scheming and hypocrisy in which there is about as much innocence as there is mirth in The House of Mirth (1905). But in Paris in 1908 Edith Wharton had fallen in love, and was on the brink of a passionate, adulterous affair. Th
e Italian comes from Dante’s Inferno, Canto 5: the affair of Paolo and Francesca, who, while reading a romance of courtly love, kiss and – on that day – ‘read no further’.

  By that time Wharton was an established author who spent part of each year in Paris, married unhappily to a man twelve years her senior, the increasingly unstable Teddy. Morton Fullerton was a cultivated bisexual American adventurer, a veteran of many affairs, and a correspondent in Paris for the London Times. He knew everyone from Verlaine and Walter Berry to Oscar Wilde and Henry James, who had used him as the model for Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove (1902).

  They shared interests – in literature, the theatre, travel and gossip – as much as they did a bed. Indeed, their sexual encounters, however revelatory to Edith (in June 1908, she wrote to him: ‘You woke me from a long lethargy’), had to be arranged to fit in with Teddy’s trips away, otherwise taking place mainly in hotels. By 1910 Fullerton had cooled on their relationship. Perhaps he feared being involved in her forthcoming divorce from Teddy.

  So how does this bear on that encounter between Ellen and Newland, imagined and articulated a decade afterwards? Was Wharton relieved that she, by contrast, had broken free of that old social prison, or did she reflect that her new life, though certainly not ‘smaller and dingier’, was, after all, ‘more promiscuous’?

  8 April

  Henry James writes of an idea for a novel that will ‘show that I can write an American story’

  1883 ‘The scene of the story’, wrote Henry James in his notebook – that rich repository of observations, anecdotes, gossip and creative ideas that fed into so many of his novels and short fiction – ‘is laid in Boston and its neighborhood’. ‘It relates an episode connected with the so-called “woman’s movement”.’ The heroine was to be beautiful, ‘a very clever and “gifted” young woman, … [the] daughter of old abolitionists, spiritualists, transcendentalists, etc.’, a fluent public speaker, able to win ‘large audiences’ to her cause.