One of the dignitaries in question turned out to be King James I, who was so impressed with the rhetorical flourishes in Herbert’s Latin that he encouraged him to frequent the court and stand as Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire, his home county. When the king died in 1625 and his royal patronage evaporated, Herbert returned to a long-standing intention to study divinity and enter the church.
At Bemerton he was a model parish priest, raising money to repair the church, bringing the sacraments to the infirm, providing clothing for the poor. In his ‘Life of George Herbert’ Izaak Walton recalls how, while walking to Salisbury, Herbert came across ‘a poor man with a poorer horse’ that had fallen over with its load. The good parson immediately threw off his ‘canonical coat’ to help the man to unload the horse, get it up, then reload it, leaving the man with the injunction, ‘that if he loved himself, he should be merciful to his beast’.
Herbert lived just three years as rector of Bemerton, until he was carried off by tuberculosis. In that same year, 1633, his collection The Temple was published. Only then did it become clear just how much sacred verse he had written in his short tenure in the parish, and how good it was. Take ‘The Agonie’, a meditation on Sin and Love as emblematised in the Crucifixion:
Who knows not love, let him assay,
And taste that juice which, on the crosse, a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud, but I as wine.
It could take paragraphs to analyse the subtle poetics here: the run-on between lines 2 and 3; the meaningful rhymes between ‘assay’ and ‘say’, ‘divine’ and ‘wine’; and the clever interweaving of Christ’s blood and the sacrament of the Eucharist. But the real marvel is how English the stanza is – and this from the great Latin rhetorician in another, more secular life. Clearly, for Herbert, leaving the court for his core faith meant dispensing with the Latinism brought in with Norman-conquest French and going back to the roots of his native language – its Anglo-Saxon origins.
27 April
Encounter’s CIA connection revealed
1966 On 27 April the New York Times, in the course of a series of articles on American intelligence, reported (without any mincing of words) that ‘the CIA has supported anti-communist but liberal organisations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and some of their newspapers and magazines. Encounter magazine was for a long time, though it is not now, one of the indirect beneficiaries of CIA funds.’
The revelation triggered the biggest scandal in higher journalism of the post-war era. Encounter had been founded in 1953 as a joint Anglo-American initiative. It was devised, from the first, as an attempt to capture the intellectual high ground from Marxist thinkers (Sartre, Gramsci, et al.).
The magazine was published in the UK, although from the outset it had a dual British–American editorship. The first editorial coupling was the English poet Stephen Spender (who had recently renounced his youthful communism in the book The God that Failed) and the American political commentator (later the father of neo-conservatism) Irving Kristol. Kristol was succeeded, five years later, by his compatriot (and fellow neo-con) Melvin Lasky.
Funding for Encounter (never profitable) was from the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), based in Paris and Geneva. The cash, allegedly, came from a philanthropic source, the Fairfield Foundation, funded by the millionaire Julius (‘Junkie’) Fleischmann – enriched by the manufacture of margarine. In point of fact, the CIA was secretly the paymaster.
From the first there were suspicions. Despite being on friendly relations with Spender, E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and William Empson declined to contribute to the literary pages for which Spender was principally responsible. It was, as Eliot said, the American ‘auspices’ that made them reluctant. Empson came right out with it and accused Spender of being a lackey of American imperialism, which led to glasses of wine being thrown at parties (his suit was so stained, Empson said, that it would not show).
Spender, co-editor for fourteen years, maintained plausibly that he did not know about the CIA connection. Letters indicate that he was consistently lied to on the question of who was paying the piper. Kristol also claimed that he did not know, and in later life threatened to sue anyone who said he did. The question was raised again, after lawsuits were no longer a risk, with his death in 2009. Melvin Lasky was widely believed to be a CIA agent in place, although it has never been proved.
When the New York Times story broke, Spender was merely a ‘corresponding editor’, teaching at the time in America. His editorial position on Encounter had been taken over by Frank Kermode. Surviving correspondence proves that Kermode knew absolutely nothing about the CIA connection and had been lied to (notably by Lasky).
A terrific row ensued, in which much dirty washing relating to the American and British secret services was made public. The magazine carried on, in sadly damaged form, under the sole editorship of Lasky. The CCF was disbanded. In a sense they had won their battle.
Argument continues as to whether Encounter, which published some of the most distinguished higher journalism of its time, was – when all is considered – a good or bad thing. Was that journalism soiled by its remote connection with America’s spooks?
28 April
The British bestseller list arrives (belatedly)
1974 It was on this date, and in the Sunday Times ‘Review’ section, as it then was, that the UK’s first ‘definitive weekly bestseller list’ was published. Keeping a finger in this way on the nation’s reading pulse had been routine in the United States since the 1890s. Americans loved their bestseller lists.
The UK loathed them. Why? Because they were, as Dickens’s Mr Podsnap would say, ‘un-English’. Foreign even. The ‘trade’ wanted nothing to do with them. Books, traditionalists believed, did not compete against each other. There were no winners and losers in the world of print. Judging a book not by its quality, but by the quantity it happened to sell, was sheer Yankee philistinism. Un-English!
The Sunday Times resolved to change things. It was the right time to do so. The early 1970s was an era of change – much of it painful. The IRA were blowing up everything that didn’t have a shamrock painted on it. ‘Who governs Britain?’ asked Ted Heath, plaintively, from his bunker in Downing Street. No answer was forthcoming. There was a three-day week, rolling energy cuts, double-digit inflation. Times Newspapers, which had dared to embrace technological processes marginally more advanced than William Caxton’s, was at war with the print unions.
Amid this turmoil, the Sunday Times bestseller list was born. Harold Evans (an arrant Americanophile) had been appointed editor with a new-broom remit. Photo-composition (as it was then called) was one swish of the broom. With another swish, Evans appointed computer whiz Peter Harland as his right-hand man in charge of ‘New Technology’. On appointment in 1973, Harland was charged with setting up a books bestseller list.
Publishers were implacably hostile. Harland was obliged to work from the retail end, laboriously monitoring weekly sales in some 300 bookshops, with elaborate checks to prevent the corrupt practices that infected the music industry’s pop charts. Crunching the numbers, in the few hours available weekly, was a formidable challenge.
The Observer got wind of what Harland was up to, and in an attempt to spike its rival’s guns, promptly bought rights to the impressionistic fortnightly listing distributed with Gee’s Booksellers’ Newsletter. So as not to be pipped at the post, Harland and Evans rushed their first list out on 28 April 1974. The pros and cons of bestsellerism were argued, furiously, for weeks thereafter.
The Observer (which to this day remains cool about lists) dropped its fortnightly charts in January 1975, citing ‘lack of variety’ and the banality of ‘all those television based books’. The Sunday Times list, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. Harland, on leaving the paper a few years later, founded
Bookwatch, one of today’s most trusted data-gatherers.
In fiction, the top-selling hardback titles in 1974, as the Sunday Times recorded, were Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War and Agatha Christie’s Poirot’s Early Cases. In paperback fiction, the runaway bestseller was Richard Adams’s Watership Down. In the April 1974 list, Iris Murdoch made an appearance, for a week or two, with The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (one suspects that book-buyers confused it Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine: a very different kettle of fish).
29 April
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is published: fact or fiction?
1789 Olaudah Equiano, the ‘black Ben Franklin’, is the first notable author of African extraction in Western literature. The moot point is whether it is English or American (or – arguably – ‘colonial’) literature.
Equiano, later known as Gustavus Vassa, was, he claimed, born around 1745 in what is now the Ibo (‘Essaka’, as he calls it) region of Nigeria. It was then a part of the Abyssinian empire. Equiano’s father was, he records, a village elder. He was also a slave-owner, but, his son hastens to add, a very humane slave-owner.
By his own account, Equiano was brought up in a condition of Edenic simplicity, a world away from the invasions, wars and revolutions that were upheaving Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and North America during the second half the 18th century.
Aged around eleven, his African paradise was lost. Equiano was kidnapped while playing innocently with his sister, and carried off to slavery. Initially, like his father’s slaves, his masters were African. But he was sold on to the traders at the coast. Here it was that he first came into contact with white people. It inspires one of the more vivid sections in his autobiography. They strike him as monsters. These pale devils, with their ‘red faces and loose hair’ must be cannibals, he assumes: they will eat him.
The description of the middle passage of his life is the most affecting, and horrifying, in Equiano’s published memoirs. His later career, vivid as it is on the page, can be briefly summarised. Sold on a number of times, he was transported to Barbados, where he was judged too physically slight for labour in the sugar plantations. He eventually found himself in the colony of Virginia, where he was bought by a Royal Navy officer, renamed Gustavus Vassa, and – as a personal valet – humanely treated.
Equiano endeared himself by loyal service both to his master and, as a sailor on board ship, to the Crown. In England he was, still a teenager, sent to school to learn how to read and write. Equiano also became a devout Christian, persuading his master to let him be baptised in 1759 – so that he might go to heaven.
He might be free up there. But not, for a few years yet, down here. Poor ‘Gustavus’ was sold on again. He was now a valuable property – a literate, numerate, well-spoken slave. As such he was eventually bought by a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia and put to work as an inventory clerk, on a tiny salary. Equiano eventually saved up the £40 required to buy his freedom.
The great day in his life was 10 July 1766, when he became a free man.
After manumission, he prudently took up residence in England and went into trade himself for a few years (including black gold, or slaves) before allying himself with the British abolitionist movement, whose figurehead he became. He gave heart-rending speeches, preached, and married an Englishwoman in 1795. In 1789, with the help of noble patrons, he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
The last phase of Equiano’s life was, evidently, happy but is largely unrecorded. There were two daughters to his marriage, his wife died in 1796 and he followed her a year later, aged (probably) 52. It’s not known where he was buried – although he left a sizeable amount to his daughters.
Equiano’s interesting narrative was widely circulated in the abolition movement, as eyewitness evidence of the realities of slavery. So it was accepted for centuries. But a few years ago, scholars – notably Vincent Carretta – found convincing evidence (specifically a baptismal certificate and a ship’s muster roll) that Equiano had been born in South Carolina. He was American.
This, if true (and it seems currently incontrovertible), means that the most vivid African and slave-ship sections of the book – its heart – must be invention. Fictional.
30 April
The United States buys the entire Middle West from the French for $15 million, more than doubling the size of the country. Fenimore Cooper has his doubts
1803 ‘The letter that bought a continent’, as they called the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, was signed on this day in Paris – and it did turn the United States into a continental power with the stroke of a pen. Oddly enough, though, territorial aggrandisement was the least of President Thomas Jefferson’s motives in doing the deal. He was more interested in securing the port of New Orleans. All that ideology about the ‘manifest destiny’ of the Americans to expand to the Pacific would come later.
Later, even, than James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Leatherstocking Tales’, a series of five prose fictions tracing the European settlement of America, the equivalent of those medieval romance sequences involving Roland, or King Arthur or Sir Gawain. ‘Leatherstocking’ is one of several epithets that his Native American admirers apply to Nathaniel (Natty) Bumppo, the transcendent figure in all five of the tales, because of his deerskin leggings. Natty appears in other books of the series under different sobriquets, like ‘Deerslayer’, ‘Pathfinder’ and ‘Hawkeye’, depending on his age and the story’s setting.
The five books were written and published in the order: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). Their order in the overriding plot of the series is: Deerslayer, Mohicans, Pathfinder, Pioneers, and Prairie. The grand survey runs from the 1740s through to 1804, just a year after the Louisiana Purchase. So the sequence takes its readers from the disorderly struggles between European powers – and between shifting groups of ‘white’ man and ‘red’ – over the still unsettled frontier lying just west of New York and New England, through to the settlement of Templeton, where in The Pioneers the old aristocratic (and Indian) use of the land is confronted by the claims of the new townspeople – finally to run out in The Prairie.
The Prairie is far from optimistic about the coming expansion into the new territory. The story opens in an atmosphere of death and degeneration. ‘The harvest of our first year of possession had long been passed’, says the narrator in Chapter 1, ‘and the fading foliage of a few scattered trees was already beginning to exhibit the hues and tints of autumn’. Now the American landscape has passed through its spring and summer, and the hunters of bear and deer have become hunters of bees. Natty still has his faithful carbine by his side, but he now traps beaver. He will die, aged 90, at the end of the book.
This time the Natives are not defeated by brave men in close combat, but sold by foreign governments 6,000 miles away. ‘“And where were the chiefs of the Pawnee Loups when this bargain was made?” suddenly demanded the youthful warrior. … “Is a nation to be sold like a skin of beaver?” “Right enough, right enough [answers Natty helplessly], and where were truth and honesty also. But might is right according to the fashions of the ’arth; and what the strong choose to do, the weak must call justice.”’
And as the settlers stream onto the prairie, he says to Paul Hover and Captain Duncan Middleton: ‘“What the world of America is coming to and where the machinations and inventions of its people are to have an end, the Lord only knows. How much has the beauty of the wilderness been deformed in two short lives! … and I, miserable and worn out as I seem, have lived to see it all.”’
1 May
The nine-year-old Dante Alighieri first meets the eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari when his father takes him to their family home for a May Day party
1274 As Dante tells the story in chapter XXIV of La Vita Nuova (1295), his autobiographical quest for spiritual perfection through his i
dealised love of Beatrice, they met only once again. While out walking in Florence, the poet feels the dormant spirit of love suddenly wake in his heart. Then he sees Love himself afar off, who approaches and says laughing, ‘Try to show me some respect’. At that point he sees Beatrice approaching, accompanied by the Lady Vanna, of whom Love says: ‘She is the spring, but the other must be called Love, since she resembles me so much’:
Io mi senti’ svegliar dentro a lo core
Un spirito amoroso che dormia:
E poi vidi venir da lungi Amore
Allegro sì, che appena il conoscia,
Dicendo: ‘Or pensa pur di farmi onore’;
E ’n ciascuna parola sua ridia.
E poco stando meco il mio segnore,
Guardando in quella parte onde venia,
Io vidi monna Vanna e monna Bice
Venire inver lo loco là ’v’io era,
L’una appresso de l’altra maraviglia;
E sì come la mente mi ridice,
Amor mi disse: ‘Quell’è Primavera,
E quell’ha nome Amor, sì mi somiglia.’1
The scene would be painted by Henry Holiday (1839–1927), the English Pre-Raphaelite. Three women stroll along the banks of the Arno. Of the two in front, Vanna is in red and Beatrice in white, while Dante stands astonished at the corner of a bridge, clutching his heart. But whereas the artist presents the poet as stricken by the sight of Beatrice, Dante’s point is that the emotion precedes the object. His imagination wouldn’t have invoked the god of love had not his own ‘loving spirit’ come awake within him, and he doesn’t see Beatrice until having already agreed to honour Love as his feudal lord.
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