Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  while a large soprano sang lieder to warm up the audience, until Spender was introduced. He stepped up to the podium and began to speak. At once Campbell lurched into action. ‘I wish to protest on behalf of the Sergeants’ Mess of the King’s African Rifles’, he bellowed, in his best parade-ground voice, stumping down the aisle with his knotty stick. The audience, dumb, swivelled its collective head to watch his progress. Yelling curses at Spender, Campbell threw open a door which he imagined led on to the stage and limped inside to find himself in a passage leading to the lavatory.

  He finally made it on stage, and ‘leaning on his stick, swung a clumsy right-handed blow that connected lightly with Spender’s nose, which promptly began to bleed’. The hall exploded into uproar at what was, surely, the most exciting poetry reading for some time.

  When it was suggested that the police be called, Spender declined, with the mild observation: ‘He is a great poet, he is a great poet. We must try to understand.’ Writing the next day to John Hayward (T.S. Eliot’s flatmate), Spender was wryly amused:

  He came up to me and hit me in the face with an honest sergeant’s fist before he was dragged away. He went away shouting ‘What’s more, he’s a fucking lesbian’. After this I read my poems, which were well received.

  15 April

  The Dust Bowl gets its name and the Great Depression gets its dominant image

  1935 Following droughts worsening year on year, dust storms had begun to plague the American south-west from 1932, increasing in size and frequency all the time. The really big one came on ‘Black Sunday’, 14 April 1935. The storm struck Dodge City, Kansas, then moved across the high plains of Texas and New Mexico. People lost their way within feet of where they were trying to go. Livestock and wildlife became blinded and ran around in circles, finally dying from dust ingestion.

  Black Sunday gave the Dust Bowl its name. The next day Robert Geiger, an Associated Press reporter travelling through the stricken area, sent a dispatch back to the Washington Evening Star referring to ‘life in the dust bowl of the continent’.

  Soon the phrase was humming across the AP wires to papers all across the country. Within weeks, even a sober professor of agricultural economics was writing of ‘vast clouds of dust ris[ing] and roll[ing] across the Great Plains, obscuring the lives of people, blighting homes, hampering traffic, drifting eastwards to New York and westwards to California’.1

  Inspired by this account, Pare Lorentz got to work on his documentary film for F.D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), powerfully picturing the dust smothering the farmsteads of Oklahoma, and the farmers heading west to escape it. The film argued that careless ploughing had loosened the topsoil, allowing drought and wind to do the rest.

  When it came to still pictures, it was the government photographer Dorothea Lange who caught the mood, with her shots of families marooned by the sides of roads in broken-down cars, and above all in her portrait of the ‘Migrant Mother’, sheltering from the rain in a lean-to, her children cowering in around her.

  And the literary spin-off? John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), of course, the story of the Joads, forced to flee Oklahoma for California, then coming apart as one after another member of the family dies, deserts or lights out ahead of the cops.

  In truth, the so-called Okies had been heading west since shortly after the turn of the century – more of them between 1910 and 1930 than during the whole of the Depression. Hard times on south-western farms owed more to collapsing markets for wheat, corn and cotton after the First World War than to drought and dust.

  In any case, the legendary dust storms fell far short of the vast range suggested in The Plow That Broke the Plains, afflicting mainly Kansas and Colorado, brushing past Texas and Oklahoma only at the panhandles where the two states meet.

  For all that, though the Depression struck mainly at the factories and businesses of America, it’s the stories and pictures of the Okies and the Dust Bowl that came to represent the experience as a whole. In 1998 the Post Office issued a 32¢ stamp with ‘Migrant Mother’ on it. ‘America survives the depression’, it said.

  1 Paul Schuster Taylor and Dorothea Lange, ‘Again the Covered Wagon’, Survey Graphic, Vol. 24, No. 7 (July 1935), p. 348.

  16 April

  Britain’s first novelist (and first woman novelist) dies

  1689 Aphra Behn currently holds the title of Britain’s first novelist – although there remain chauvinists who would back Daniel Defoe. But had she never written a word of fiction, Behn would still have ranked as one of the most remarkable women of her century.

  ‘Eaffrey’ Johnson was born in 1640 near Canterbury. What scant evidence there is suggests that her father was a ‘barber’. Among other things, these intimate attenders to the male person were first ports of call for those with venereal problems. In return for services rendered, the Johnsons received favours from powerful local families. It was thus, one assumes, that Eaffrey’s father, the barber, was appointed in 1663/4 Lieutenant General of Surinam, a British colonial possession. The Civil War had (temporarily) disturbed the usual power, patronage and privilege circuits. And Surinam was hardly a plum posting – even for a governor with a royal commission in one hand and a shaving bowl in the other.

  The colony was located where Guyana now is, between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers (a stream, as Behn charmingly notes, ‘almost as large as the Thames’). It was not far from where Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked at exactly the same period of time that Miss Eaffrey was there – if indeed she was. Slaves from Africa worked the plantations. These ‘black cattle’ were notoriously ill-treated. It was a black man’s hell, and a white man’s grave.

  Thus it proved for Aphra’s father, who evidently died there. Did his daughter accompany him to Surinam? The question vexes readers of Behn’s primal novel Oroonoko. It seems, from the ostentatious accuracy of her local description and the introduction of actual historical figures, that she indeed knew the place first-hand. Sceptics argue that she was no more there than Defoe was eye-witness to the Plague Year.

  It seems (again, the details are hazy) that in her mid-twenties Aphra Johnson married a trader – possibly in slaves – called Hans Behn. He was Dutch or German and apparently died (in the plague?) or absconded, shortly after their marriage. Aphra may even have invented him to render herself a ‘respectable’ widow.

  Whether or not the shady European spouse existed, Mrs Behn (as she hereafter inscribed herself) knew Europe at first hand. In 1666 war broke out between England and Holland. Now in her late twenties, Aphra (codename ‘Aphora’) served as a spy, for the newly returned Charles II, in Antwerp. The ‘she spy’ did good work. Legend, apocryphal alas, has it she warned her country of the Dutch navy’s incursion up the Thames in 1667. But Aphora did not profit from her service to the nation: 1668 found her in debtor’s prison. From 17th-century 007 to Moll Flanders.

  She came in from the cold with her first play, The Forced Marriage, in 1670. Actresses (‘Mrs Bracegirdle’, et al.) had broken the old ‘boys only’ convention – so why not go a step higher and write the things? Particularly if you could do it as wittily – and king-pleasingly – as Mrs Behn. One of her comedies, The Feign’d Courtezans, is dedicated to Nell Gwynn. Behn would market more profitable fare than oranges to her monarch and his retinue.

  Late in what would be a short life, Aphra Behn turned to fiction, of which Oroonoko, published in 1688, is judged her masterpiece. The London theatre, with the monarchy again in bloody dispute, was in recession. And Behn, it is known, was hard up: and, in her forties, ‘friends’ may have been harder to come by.

  In the ‘True Story’ as the title proclaims itself (the term ‘novel’ was yet to be invented), an African prince, Oroonoko, along with his wife Imoinda, has been transported to Surinam from West Africa to labour in the plantations. His history is ‘set down’ by this anonymous young Englishwoman, the daughter of the newly appointed deputy governor, who has just died.

&n
bsp; The narrator is struck by the couple’s native dignity. Their beauty is anything but native. Oroonoko (renamed ‘Caesar’ by his captors) has straight hair and ‘Roman’, not negroid, features. He is less a noble savage, a hundred years avant la lettre, than a noble, tout court. Oroonoko is no common slave. He kills two tigers and has a closely described battle with an electric (‘benumbing’) eel. When Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko is determined that his son shall not be born into slavery. He organises an uprising, and is cheated into surrendering on the point of victory.

  Realising it is the end, Oroonoko cuts off Imoinda’s face, after he has cut her throat, so no one will see her beauty again. He disembowels himself, but is sewn up by surgeons to be executed, sadistically, for the delectation of a white rabble. Behn’s Royal Slave, calmly puffing away at his pipe as his genitals are cut off, is even more stoic, at the moment of regicide, than the Royal Captive, Charles I.

  As Virginia Woolf instructs, the enlightened of her gender should ‘let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds’.

  17 April

  ‘Holy Thursday’, William Blake’s ‘Song of Experience’

  1794 ‘Holy Thursday’, or Maundy Thursday, which fell on this date in 1794, commemorates the day of the Last Supper. Throughout the history of the church it has been marked by archbishops and monarchs giving alms to the poor – even washing their feet, as Jesus did those of his disciples on that night.

  The short poems collected in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) juxtapose (as he put it) ‘two contrary states of the human soul’. So the ‘Introduction’ to the first is largely innocent of declarative verbs, using gerunds and imperatives like ‘Piping’, ‘pipe’, ‘Sing’ and ‘write’. The message moves only gradually into articulacy, from the wordless tune, through ‘songs of happy cheer’, only finally to writing – and even that ‘stain[s] the water clear’.

  By contrast the ‘Introduction’ to the latter is the ‘voice of the bard! / Who Present, Past & Future sees, whose ears have heard / The Holy Word / That walk’d among the ancient trees’ – and so on down through three further levels of relative clause. It’s a voice that speaks of wisdom, but also authority: subordination in politics as well as syntax.

  There’s a ‘Holy Thursday’ in both Innocence and Experience, both about the orphans of the foundling hospital making their annual procession to St Paul’s Cathedral. The first is seen through innocent eyes, the verse child-like, the scene rendered through surface phenomena only:

  ’Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,

  The children walking two and two in red and blue and green,

  Grey headed beadles walk’d before with wands as white as snow;

  Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow.

  By contrast, the second ‘Holy Thursday’ is analytical, introducing the contexts of economics, politics and morality:

  Is this a holy thing to see

  In a rich and fruitful land,

  Babes reduced to misery,

  Fed with cold and usurous hand?

  And whereas the children in the first poem ‘raise to heaven the voice of song’ like a ‘mighty wind’, those in Experience utter only a ‘trembling cry’:

  Can it be a song of joy?

  And so many children poor?

  It is a land of poverty!

  And that poverty is not just the absence of riches, but poverty of intellect and wit, hope and aspiration too.

  18 April

  Paul Revere gallops through the night from Boston to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn patriots that the British are coming

  1775 Paul Revere was a Boston engraver and silversmith (his work is so highly prized now that it’s found mainly in museums and very wealthy families) who had been involved in revolutionary politics from the 1760s. After the British closed the port of Boston in 1774 and quartered large numbers of their troops there, he began to work as an intelligencer and messenger for the patriot cause.

  In April 1775, it became clear that the British were planning a move, probably to seize a cache of rebel arms in Concord. If so, the colonial militias and irregulars would have to be warned. When the British marched westwards, how would they go – directly across the Charles River or via the longer land route south, then west? When it was clear that they were going via the river, Revere and William Dawes rode off at speed for Lexington and (if possible) Concord. In case they were captured, Revere had instructed the sexton of the Old North Church, Boston to hang one lantern in the steeple if the occupying army were going by land, two if over the water.

  Thus alerted, patriot militias from Charlestown westwards were ready for the British regulars, ambushing them at Lexington and finally repulsing them at the old North Bridge, Concord, where the ‘shot heard round the world’ began the Revolutionary War.

  Though overtaken by the urgent events of the revolution, Revere’s adventure came back into prominence 60 years later, when America’s most popular poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of ‘Evangeline’ and The Song of Hiawatha – not to mention reams of translations and shorter occasional lyrics – made it the subject of his ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’:

  Listen my children and you shall hear

  Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

  On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;

  Hardly a man is now alive

  Who remembers that famous day and year.

  Generations of American schoolchildren had to learn these lines by heart. Although they could almost have been a source for William McGonagall’s immortal tribute to the Tay Bridge disaster nineteen years later (see 28 December), the poem improves after this, even if it credits Revere alone with the midnight gallop and has him getting all the way to Concord, which he didn’t reach because the British caught him at Lexington and took away his horse.

  19 April

  Samuel Johnson publishes Rasselas, his conte philosophique, written in one week to pay for his mother’s funeral

  1759 Samuel Johnson – the ‘Great Cham’ – was, in one of his minor parts, a novelist. In 1759 his 90-year-old mother was dying. His father had gone to his reward in 1731. To cover the expense of his mother’s last days, Johnson wrote, in the evenings of one week, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.

  The ingénu hero leaves the comfort of his palace in Ethiopia to range the world, seeking the secret of a happy life. He is accompanied by his sister and a philosopher, Imlac (alias Samuel Johnson). There is, Rasselas discovers, no happiness to be found. Life is, as Johnson said elsewhere, a condition in which much is to be endured and little enjoyed. ‘Patience is all’ with Christian patience.

  Few novelists, one imagines, could produce the statutory happy-ever-after with the Dead March from Saul playing, incessantly, in their ears and their mother’s corpse genteelly decomposing at the undertaker’s.

  Rasselas is no page-turner – sermons on the human condition seldom are. But it is a valuably informative novel about novels. It brought Johnson £100 and £25 for a prompt second edition. In terms of hourly rate, for a week’s scribbling, it was the best money of his writing career.

  None but a blockhead, Johnson said, writes for anything but money. Fifty such tales a year (giving himself a fortnight’s annual holiday) would have yielded the total of £6,250: a princely sum.

  But having no more parents to inter he wrote no more fiction. The fact was, Johnson regarded such work as unworthy. He registered the existence and popularity of the genre in his 1750 essay, ‘The Modern Novel’ (Johnson coined that compound). But his personal view is summed up in his uncompromising dismissal of Sterne’s great novel: ‘Nothing odd will last – Tristram Shandy did not last.’ He was wrong, of course. Rasselas, too, has lasted.

  20 April

  Amiel comes home in triumph

  1848 One of the books on Tolstoy’s bedside table, frequently
consulted, was the Intimate Journal of Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–81). A favourite book among late Victorians, selections of the journal were translated from the French and published by Mrs Humphry Ward in 1882. For her, Amiel was primarily a poet. It was the lyricism of his thought that distinguished the journal. For Tolstoy, it was ‘sincerity’ that marked the author of the Intimate Journal.

  A Swiss, Amiel studied philosophy in Berlin and Paris. In April 1848 he returned to Geneva, just 28 years old, where he was regarded as a prodigy of intellect and sagacity. He was appointed professor of aesthetics at the University of Geneva and a few years later took up the chair of moral philosophy.

  Amiel jubilated, lyrically, in his journal entry for the day of his triumphant homecoming to Switzerland:

  GENEVA, April 20, 1848. It is six years to-day since I last left Geneva. How many journeys, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many forms of men and things have since then passed before me and in me! The last seven years have been the most important of my life: they have been the novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being.

  Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach-trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!

  Amiel’s doctrine found little sympathy with some of the sterner British critics – notably Matthew Arnold, Mrs Ward’s uncle, who reviewed her translation, and its laudatory introduction, harshly. It was Amiel’s ‘Buddhist’ passivity that principally offended Arnold. It was not manly stoicism, but ‘feminine’ spinelessness. Amiel expresses the passivity that offended Arnold clearly enough, in an early entry of 3 May 1849: