Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  The tone is dismissive – the quotation marks make that clear, even without the ‘etc.’ after the various ‘isms’ that (to James’s mind) had so plagued Boston. But he complicates the issue by bringing onto the scene another woman, this time from a ‘rich, exclusive, conservative family’, someone without ‘talent for appearing in public’, who has ‘conceived a passionate admiration for our young girl’ and ‘dreams that the two can work together to “revolutionize the condition of women”’.

  Enter the fly in the ointment, though, in the shape of a handsome young man, just returned from ten years in the West, who falls for the beautiful orator while sharing none of her ambitions. He proposes marriage, on condition that she give up her ‘mission’. The long struggle – between the two women, and in the mind of the younger between her ideals and attraction to the man – finally ends in ‘various vicissitudes, with her letting everything go, breaking forever with her friend, in a terrible final interview’.

  No prizes for guessing that James was plotting out what would become The Bostonians – not least because the novel, first serialised in The Century from February to February, 1885–6, would follow the sketch so closely in both story and characters, in the shape of Verena Tarrant, Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom. The one crucial difference, though, is that James decided to have Ransom come, not from the West, but from the South. His was a slave-holding family, and he had fought in the Civil War. This makes him a much greater threat to Olive – coming very much from the other side of the abolitionist campaign, yet also mature and (and Olive has to admit) seasoned by loss and danger.

  The Bostonians may (unusually for James) have been set in America, but it did little to allay the contempt of such as Theodore Roosevelt (see 29 June), who would continue to dismiss James as an effete turncoat.

  9 April

  Dylan gets a Pulitzer

  2008 The Pulitzer is America’s oldest and most prestigious prize for literature, art and music. On 9 April 2008, Bob Dylan joined Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow as one of its laureates. The award drew even more attention than for those eminent writers. He had, newspapers declared, ‘made music history by becoming the first rock musician to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize’.

  But Dylan was not, of course, merely a rock star. He was a great writer. The point was made by the Pulitzer Prize administrator, Sig Gissler: ‘this award reflects the efforts of the Pulitzer board to broaden the scope of the music prize, and encompass the full range of excellence in American music. It also recognises Mr Dylan’s lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.’ The lyre, of course, is the instrumental ancestor of the guitar. Possibly Homer accompanied himself on one.

  That Robert Zimmerman regarded himself as primarily a poet is evident from the name he adopted as a public performer, taken from the Welsh bard, Dylan Thomas. The public recognition of Bob Dylan as a major poet can be credited to the efforts of one of the leading literary critics of the 20th century, Christopher Ricks.

  As early as the 1960s, Ricks was making the point on the BBC’s Third Programme. It was then widely seen as a mild donnish eccentricity, or perhaps an ill-advised attempt to play Professor Trendhound. Over the years, as his albums went multiple platinum, Ricks continued to give Dylan respectful attention, and critical respect for Dylan as a literary troubadour for his age grew proportionally.

  In 2004, Ricks published a 500-page exegetical work, Dylan’s Vision of Sin, which placed the singer’s lyrics within large theological and literary frameworks. Dylan’s lyrics, Ricks insisted (as he had been insisting for 40 years), ‘have entered the realm of the enduring’. He was, Ricks said (in interviews promoting his 2004 book), ‘on the same level as Milton, Keats and Tennyson’ (on all of whom Ricks had written authoritative monographs).

  Dylan was not, Ricks maintained, ‘an obscene howling hobo’, as some would like to see him: ‘a lot of his songs are full of intelligent witty resourceful references to people like Verlaine and Rimbaud, and to Shakespeare and to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. I don’t know why people think that he doesn’t know anything about those people.’

  Ricks’s Dylanology was, plausibly, responsible for the singer’s being awarded an honorary doctorate in 2004 from St Andrews University, and the Pulitzer four years later. Who knows, perhaps the Nobel is in the future. If so, Ricks should be on the podium in Stockholm as well.

  Oddly, it seems that Dylan and his most eminent exegeticist met only once, in 1999. As Ricks recalled in an interview:

  Five years ago he played a concert here at [Boston] university and I had no hand in arranging it; I was told about it rather late and could have killed the organizers. Shortly before the concert I received word to come backstage, so my wife and I went half an hour before the show. And Dylan said: ‘Mr Ricks, we meet at last.’ My reply was: ‘Have you read any good books lately?’

  They went on to discuss Shakespeare’s Richard III.

  10 April

  Revolution averted – without too much trouble

  1848 Known in Europe as the ‘decade of revolution’, the British label is ‘the hungry forties’. The nearest the country came to national insurrection was the great demonstration, for the third presentation of the ‘Chartist Petition’, on 10 April 1848. The six ‘points’ of the Charter were:

  Annual general elections

  Universal manhood suffrage

  Secret ballot

  Abolition of property qualifications of MPs

  Payment of MPs

  Equal electoral districts and redistribution of seats

  (All except the first were introduced as reforms over the next hundred years.)

  The Chartists organised a ‘monster rally’ for 10 April on Kennington Common – across the river from Westminster. It was claimed that the petition contained 5,706,000 signatures. When examined by the Clerks of the House, only two million were counted – some of them, such as that of ‘Victoria Regina’, clearly fraudulent.

  Ever since their formation, nine years earlier, the Chartists had been split between ‘moral forcers’ and ‘physical forcers’. The 1848 demonstration was dedicated to moral force.

  10 April proved to be a fine sunny day. Some 50,000 were in attendance (the Chartists claimed 500,000, the government 15,000). Many were unemployed, many ‘hungry’, all desperate for reform.

  There was fiery oratory from the ‘Lion of Freedom’, Feargus O’Connor, the radical MP, demagogue, and proprietor of the Northern Star newspaper. Addressing the massed crowd as ‘My Children’, O’Connor declared:

  I have now for a quarter of a century been mixed up with the democratic movement – in Ireland since 1822, and in England from the year 1833. I have always, in and out of Parliament, contended for your rights, and I have received more than 100 letters, telling me not to come here today, or my life would be sacrificed. My answer was, that I would rather be stabbed in the heart than abstain from being in my place. And my children, for you are my children, and I am only your father and bailiff; but I am your fond father and your unpaid bailiff.

  My breath is nearly gone, and I will only say, when I desert you may desert me. You have by your conduct today more than repaid me for all I have done for you, and I will go on conquering until you have the land and the People’s Charter becomes the law of the land.

  The petition was duly taken to Parliament in three hansom cabs (stickered with slogans such as ‘the Voice of the People is the voice of God’). The authorities had banned any procession – which they expected would be the prelude to a riot (as had happened in industrial areas of the kingdom). Troops and police were astutely placed on the bridges across the Thames. Over 100,000 special constables had been recruited.

  Truncheons and muskets were not needed. The event went off peacefully – and pointlessly. The petition was contemptuously refused, and Chartism, as a political force, petered out. A couple of years later, O’Connor died of terminal syphilis – in his madness he made a fool of himself in Parliament. Nonetheless, 40
,000 mourners attended his burial.

  Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto had appeared earlier in 1848; the failure of the petition confirmed their scorn for ‘moral force’. The Kennington Common Chartist event is commemorated, centrally, in two great Victorian novels: Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850). Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ trilogy (particularly Sybil, 1845) reflects his keen interest – and some sympathy – for the Chartist programme, parts of which he incorporated into his 1867 Reform Act.

  11 April

  Frankenstein’s Volcano begins to subside

  1815 1816 is known, in European history, as ‘the year without a summer’. The missing season was caused by the eruption the previous year, far away in Indonesia, of Mount Tambora. It began on 5 April 1815 and climaxed with three massive explosions on 10 April. They hit seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index – making it the largest such event in a thousand years. Debris in the atmosphere formed a year-long dark mantle over the earth. It meant wonderful sunsets, but obstructed the daily sunlight required for crop ripening. Famine, and bread riots, swept through northern Europe. Switzerland was particularly badly affected.

  It happened that a distinguished party of literary people were holidaying in that country in June 1816, at the Villa Diodati alongside Lake Geneva. (The villa had literary associations: Milton once stayed there, which clearly impressed one of the 1816 guests.) They comprised: Lord Byron and his current mistress; Percy Bysshe Shelley and the eighteen-year-old he had left his wife and children for, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to add the surname ‘Shelley’ to that illustrious literary pedigree); and Byron’s personal doctor, John Polidori.

  The dismal weather precluded excursions. Confined to the villa, and tiring of the few German ‘tales of terror’ on the library shelves, the company resolved on a competition to see which of them could write the best spine-tingler. Shelley’s spine soon proved inadequate to the task, as an entry in Polidori’s diary, for 18 June, testifies:

  L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face, and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.

  (The relevant lines from ‘Christabel’ describe the witch Geraldine, whom the heroine has rashly invited into her castle:

  Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,

  And slowly rolled her eyes around;

  Then drawing in her breath aloud,

  Like one that shuddered, she unbound

  The cincture from beneath her breast:

  Her silken robe, and inner vest,

  Dropt to her feet, and full in view,

  Behold! her bosom, and half her side—

  A sight to dream of, not to tell!

  O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!)

  Shelley’s partner Mary, despite her youth, was made of sterner stuff and came up with Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (the tale, when published, had an epigraph from Milton, whose epic Paradise Lost was an acknowledged source). Byron, ever the narcissist, toyed with a blood-sucking, irresistibly handsome, immortal aristocrat. His sketch was picked up by Polidori and used as inspiration for his short story, The Vampyre.

  Thus were two of the most profitable franchises in popular fiction (the McDonald’s and Burger King of Horror, one might say) established. It’s an ill wind (or volcano) that blows no literary good. Tambora is popularly known as ‘Frankenstein’s Volcano’.

  12 April

  As forces of the Confederate States of America bombard Fort Sumter, the American Civil War begins

  1861 The attack on the Union fort in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, would convulse the country in a four-year conflict that would change America profoundly and for ever. Slavery would be abolished in the South, the North pushed into rapid industrialisation. Because the technology of weaponry (like the repeating rifle) outran tactics and adequate medical care, more Americans would lose their lives in the Civil War than in all other American wars put together.

  These were events as cataclysmic – if not more so – as the Napoleonic wars that raged across Europe in the early 19th century. But where were the great works of fiction proportionate to this monumental conflict? Where was the American The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), or Les Misérables (1862), or Vanity Fair (1853)? Above all, where was America’s War and Peace (1869)? Like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark in the night, the American literary voice signified by its silence.

  It wasn’t for lack of novelists. By mid-century the American renaissance was in full swing, with Hawthorne, Melville and others producing their major work. Henry James, apparently kept out of the conflict by an ‘obscure hurt’, might nevertheless have found his imagination piqued when his brother Wilky nearly lost his life in the suicidal assault on Fort Wagner by Colonel Shaw’s black 54th Regiment – but it was not to be (see 18 July). Of course, there was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which, though it might have helped to start the war (see 20 March), wasn’t about it.

  By contrast, Ambrose Bierce went through the whole war, including the horrific Battle of Shiloh, fighting bravely and getting shot in the head, but his literary expression of the experience is limited to a few sharply observed short stories, of which ‘Incident at Owl Creek’ is now the best remembered – probably for its surprise ending. As for later work, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) survives as a poignant study in the psychology of fear on the battlefield, but hardly as a match for War and Peace, which ‘made [it] … seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war’, as Hemingway commented in A Moveable Feast (1964).

  Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place, though. Maybe big, turbulent democracies reflect their national trauma, not so much in fiction, as in more demotic prose – say, in the work of journalists like Frederick L. Olmsted, or the writings of generals Grant, Sherman and Robert E. Lee – above all, in the powerful speeches of Abraham Lincoln. How do you weigh the Gettysburg Address against War and Peace? Depends on the kind of scales you use.

  13 April

  ‘Houston, we have a problem’

  1970 Along with Neil Armstrong’s famously fumbled ‘one small step’ and Gene Kranz’s ‘failure is not an option’, this is the best-remembered quote from the 1960s Apollo moonshot expeditions.

  The dean of SF authors, Arthur C. Clarke, claimed authorship of the phrase, as co-writer on Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke it was who came up with the line in which HAL 900 breaks into a TV transmission in which Dave Bowman (Discovery’s commander) is listening to his family on earth celebrate his birthday in space with a cosy chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. There follows the exchange:

  HAL: Sorry to interrupt the festivities, Dave, but I think we’ve got a problem.

  BOWMAN: What is it, Hal?

  HAL: My F.P.C. shows an impending failure of the antenna orientation unit.

  This has been almost universally misremembered as: ‘Sorry to interrupt the festivities [Dave], but we have a problem.’ It’s a memorable understatement – ‘litotes’, as grammarians call it. Discovery’s mission is doomed.

  Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom (one of the three astronauts burned to death in their space capsule on 27 January 1967) had actually used the ‘we have a problem’ trope in a radio transmission as early as 1961. After 1968, the Apollo astronauts were clearly steeped in Kubrick’s movie, which flatteringly portrayed their quest as Homeric, heroic and quintessentially American.

  The most famous recycling of Clarke’s ‘we’ve got a problem’ occurred during the Apollo 13 (ominous number) mission, launched on 11 April 1970, under the command of James A. Lovell, to make the third moon landing. Their command module was named Odyssey, in honour of Clarke’s epic.


  Two days later, speeding towards their lunar landing, some 200,000 miles from earth, an oxygen tank exploded. The crew had just dispatched a TV broadcast that used, as its musical theme, the Also sprach Zarathustra motif that opened the film.

  Lovell then made his famous ‘Houston, we have a problem’ transmission. Except he didn’t. It was a fellow crew-member, Jack Swigert, who said: ‘OK Houston, we’ve had a problem here.’ It was followed by Lovell echoing the observation with: ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem.’

  Life, as Oscar Wilde said, imitates art. In the Oscar-winning 1995 film of the aborted mission, Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) is given the talismanic ‘Houston, we have a problem’. That’s how people will always want to remember it.

  14 April

  Roy Campbell punches Stephen Spender on the nose

  1949 The ebullient South African poet Roy Campbell was a lifelong foe to the group of 1930s writers he regarded as ‘pink pansies’. They were, in his robust view, communist sympathisers in the Spanish Civil War (Campbell had fought for Franco); scrimshankers and draft-dodgers in the Second World War (Campbell, although over-age, had joined up and served as an NCO; Auden and Isherwood had taken off for America in 1939, Day-Lewis got a cushy berth in the Ministry of Information, Spender became a fireman-poet); and – worst of all – sexual inverts.

  Campbell learned that Spender was going to give a reading of his poetry in the crypt of the Ethical Church in Bayswater on the evening of 14 April. He resolved to go along – fortifying himself with a heroic intake of beer before doing so. As his biographer, Peter Alexander, records, Campbell and his friends stood at the back of the hall