In ‘real life’ Beatrice married a banker in 1287, and died three years later at the age of 24. Dante’s love for her was not the sort to lead to marriage, with ‘a boy for you and a girl for me’. He had a wife and children. Beatrice was something else, even more rarefied than Petrarch’s Laura (see 6 April), a demi-goddess at the extreme, most worshipful end of the courtly love spectrum.
Which is why she takes over from Vergil as Dante’s guide in the last four Cantos of ‘Purgatorio’ and the whole of ‘Paradiso’, leading him through the nine celestial spheres of heaven in The Divine Comedy.
1 I felt awaken within my heart / A loving spirit that had slept there. / And then I saw Love coming from a distance, / So happy, who as soon as I recognised him, / Said: ‘Do you really think you can honour me?’ / And he laughed as he spoke each word. / And while my Lord stood with me a little while, / Watching the place he came from, / I saw Lady Vanna and Lady Bice [Beatrice’s nickname within the family] / Approaching the place where I stood, / One marvel surpassing another, / And as my memory keeps repeating, / Love said to me: ‘The first of these is Spring, / And the other bears the name of Love, since she resembles me.’
2 May
An unnoticed revolution in books
1966 There are many industry-transforming events in the evolution of the book. Printing (the manuscript codex book existed centuries before Gutenberg) is one. The Queen Anne copyright law of 1710 another. The papier-mâché stereotype process in the early 19th century a third. Computer typesetting and offset printing in the 1970s a fourth. One such event, however, tends to slip by unnoticed.
On this day, Professor E. Gordon Foster of the London School of Economics published a pilot study, commissioned by the Publishers’ Association, which concluded that ‘there is a clear need for the introduction of standard numbering, and substantial benefits will accrue to all parties therefrom’.
It struck a chord. As Ted Striphas records in his monograph, The Late Age of Print (2009): ‘Within a year sixteen hundred British publishers agreed to the new coding system, dubbed the Standard Book Number (SBN).’ America (led by the Library of Congress, charged with catalogue control of the national book supply and archive) ‘similarly longed for a precise universally recognized coding system’. The ISBN (international SBN) was introduced in 1967.
As Striphas explains: ‘It should be emphasised that the ISBN isn’t merely a glorified stock number. Rather, it’s a carefully conceived, highly significant, and mathematically exact code that contains detailed information about the identity of each book.’
Together with the machine-readable barcode (Universal Product Code, UPC), which allowed EPOS (electronic point-of-sale system), introduced ten years later, the ISBN rationalised the book industry globally. It represented a new lease of life for walk-in stores (which could now minimise stock-holding wastage and delivery times) and made possible electronic bookstores such as Amazon. If the traditional book has a future, it is thanks to two acronyms largely invisible to the average consumer (ISBN, UPC). There is safety, as always, in numbers.
3 May
Chekhov’s last visit to Moscow
1904 If there is an iconically Russian moment in Chekhov’s drama, it is Irina’s last, emotional utterance at the end of the second act of Three Sisters: ‘To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow!’
Dying of TB, the dramatist made his escape from Yalta (‘Siberia’, as he called it – despite the climatic clemency) on 3 May 1904. He arrived in Moscow in leafy spring. Soon after arrival, his doctors (like most of the best Russian physicians, Germans) advised a further trip, to the health resort of Badenweiler (near the less exclusive Baden-Baden) in the Black Forest. The terminally ill Chekhov was packed onto yet another train, for yet another interminable journey. He took his last farewell from Moscow on 3 June.
Chekhov and his wife arrived at the German spa on 9 June. He died three weeks later. His last letter was to his mother:
Dearest Mama,
I send you greetings. My health is improving and I should think that I will be completely better in a week. I like it here. It’s quiet and warm, there is a lot of sunshine but it’s not too hot. Olga [his wife] bows to you and sends her love. My respects to Masha, Vanya and everyone else. I bow deeply before you and kiss your hand. I wrote to Masha yesterday.
Your Anton
Rosamund Bartlett (in Chekhov: Scenes from a Life) describes the scene of his death:
Chekhov spent his last day playing patience, and died in the early hours of a warm July night, in the presence of his wife, Dr Schwoerer, and the student Leve Rabenek. It had been the first time he had actually asked for a doctor and Olga had dispatched Rabenek to run down the road to Schwoerer’s house and ask him to come. Events then moved rapidly and Chekhov died immediately after downing the glass of champagne prescribed by Schwoerer.
This was 2 July. His body was dispatched back to Moscow and buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery a week later. He was, in a sense, home.
4 May
Sherlock Holmes dies at the Reichenbach Falls
1891 Arthur Conan-Doyle (as Arthur Doyle snootily relabelled himself in later life) wanted, in 1891, to kill Holmes even more desperately than the detective’s arch-foe, Professor Moriarty. Sherlock Holmes, Doyle complained, ‘takes my mind from better things’.
Holmes originated, famously, in one of Doyle’s tutors at Edinburgh’s School of Medicine, Professor Joseph Bell. (Professor Moriarty – the virtuoso of the binomial theory – is, as critics note, Holmes’s dark self; it is significant that the two of them should eventually perish ‘locked in each other’s arms’.)
Professor Bell was famous for ‘reading’ symptoms and deducing a patient’s background as soon as he or she set foot in his surgery. Holmes does the same trick often enough at 221b Baker Street, to the amazement of an anything but Bell-like Dr Watson (‘the idiot friend’, as Julian Symons calls the detective’s dumb accomplice).
In the mid-1880s, Doyle – in his mid-twenties, and a none too successful doctor in Southsea – toyed with the idea of some stories centred on an amateur sleuth, ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’, who would employ Bell’s deductive techniques to solve crimes. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it, and it was eventually serialised in a magazine edited by Mrs Beeton’s husband (see 14 March).
Holmes attained mass popularity when the editor of George Newnes’s newly-founded Strand Magazine made Holmes a main selling item. The editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith, apprehended that ‘here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe’. These Sherlock Holmes stories were devised to correct ‘the great defect’ in current detective fiction, lack of logic. They were illustrated by Sidney Paget, who supplied the detective with his famous deerstalker and aquiline profile. A new ‘Holmes’ could double the Strand’s circulation to half a million. A franchise was born.
The formulaic stories were, Doyle came to believe, beneath him. In The Final Problem, the famous hand-to-hand fight to the death was staged on a fearful ledge by the majestic Reichenbach Falls, above Meiringen in Switzerland.
Watson does not witness the struggle, but reconstructs it from footprints, Holmes’s ‘alpine-stock’, ‘small silver cigarette case’, and a note left on the fatal grassy ledge above the ‘dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam [where] will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation’.
‘All time’ proved premature. Doyle was not allowed to kill his golden goose. It was too golden. Under the lure of cash (particularly dollars), Holmes was exhumed in 1901 and 1905 and innumerably thereafter in what became a veritable industry. Moriarty too was brought back to life in a trilogy by the 20th-century popular writer John Gardner (1926–2007).
The funicular station at the base of the mountain leading to the falls has a memorial plaque dedicated to the ‘most famous detective in the world … At this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanqui
shed Professor Moriarty, on 4 May 1891.’ Or not.
5 May
John Scopes is charged with teaching evolution in a Tennessee school
1925 Billed as ‘the trial of the century’, the Scopes trial started out as a publicity stunt. The Tennessee state legislature had passed a law prohibiting the teaching in public (state) schools of ‘any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible’. Wishing to put their town on the map, a committee of local businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee convinced John Scopes, a local teacher, to stand in a case to test the law.
Scopes was the school’s football coach, but had stood in for its science teacher while he was ill. He couldn’t remember whether he had actually covered evolution on the few days he had taught the class, but told the group: ‘If you can prove that I’ve taught evolution and that I can qualify as a defendant, then I’ll be willing to stand trial.’
In 1925 the State of Tennessee duly obliged, taking Scopes to court for having broken the law. Dubbed ‘the monkey trial’ by the Baltimore Sun’s astringent columnist H.L. Mencken, the court case astonished and amused the nation, not least because each side attracted such illustrious advocates. The prosecution was spearheaded by the fundamentalist preacher and former progressive Democratic candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan. Leading the defence was Clarence Darrow, distinguished civil libertarian and America’s most brilliant trial lawyer of the time, fresh from his successful defence of thrill killers Leopold and Loeb.
Darrow and Scopes lost their case, but not before an unprecedented legal manoeuvre in which Darrow called Bryan to the witness stand to answer a number of searching questions into the literal truth of the Bible. For instance, did Joshua really stop the sun in its tracks for a whole day? What would have been the effect on the earth, had he managed it? A year later the state repealed the law, perhaps considering that they had had enough publicity on that score.
Thirty years later the trial inspired a workmanlike, amusing and in places moving play, Inherit the Wind (1955), meant by its authors, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, to highlight the red scare then being promoted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and by Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations.
After two years on Broadway, the play was revived twice, in 1996 and 2007. In 2009 the Old Vic in London staged it to full houses and standing ovations, with Kevin Spacey and David Troughton superb as the Darrow and Bryan figures. The powerful movie (1960) starred Frederick March as Bryan and Spencer Tracy as Darrow.
In Epperson vs. Arkansas (1968) the Supreme Court ruled that bans on teaching of evolution were unconstitutional, under the Bill of Rights, which protects free speech and prohibits the establishment of religion, yet it seems that bigotry resurfaces in sufficient new (or warmed-up old) guises to keep Inherit the Wind in business.
6 May
The Washington office of the Federal Writers’ Project writes to the south-eastern region to praise their life history of ex-slave Betty Cofer
1937 Ever since Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), oral histories had been associated with the underprivileged, the relatively powerless, those whose political and cultural voices had been silenced or suppressed by the establishment. In America no group fitted this description better than African-American slaves.
The Popular Fronters and progressives of the New Deal, who had opposed lynching, promoted black voting rights and encouraged an interracial union movement, felt a kind of white collective guilt about slavery. So when the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) set out to collect American life stories (see 27 July), ex-slaves were a top priority. To add to the urgency, time was running out. By the second half of the 1930s no African-American who had once been a slave could have been under 70 years of age.
Trouble was, the progressives in Washington couldn’t collect the data themselves. For that they had to rely on fieldworkers – many in the South – who had their own biases, among which were a need to pretend that the Civil War and Emancipation hadn’t really made much difference. This is how Mary A. Hicks introduced her interview with ex-slave Betty Cofer in North Carolina:
Here, in 1856, was born a negro girl, Betty, to a slave mother. Here, today, under the friendly protection of this same Jones family, surrounded by her sons and her son’s sons, lives this same Betty in her own little weather-stained cottage. Encircling her house are lilacs, althea, and flowering trees that soften the bleak outlines of unpainted out-buildings. A varied collection of old-fashioned plants and flowers crowd the neatly swept dooryard. A friendly German-shepherd puppy rouses from his nap on the sunny porch to greet visitors enthusiastically.
That syntactical parallelism, ‘Here … Here …’ sets the frame for timeless continuity. Betty’s cottage may be ‘little’ and ‘weather-stained’, and her ‘unpainted out-buildings’ ‘bleak’ in outline, but they are redeemed by her continuing cultivation of the values with which she was imbued in her antebellum existence, as symbolised by the various ‘old-fashioned plants and flowers’ that soften the outlines of her otherwise harsh life after Emancipation.
You might expect the national office to be less than happy with this sanitised account of slavery days. Not at all. They loved it. In a letter to Edwin Björkman, state director for North Carolina, in May 1937, associate director of the FWP in Washington, George Cronyn wrote: ‘Mr Lomax and I found the story of Aunt Betty Cofer of great interest and well told. It has a rich human flavor and presents an authentic picture of the period.’
‘Mr Lomax’ was John A. Lomax, a musicologist and pioneering collector of (especially black) folk songs. Though nowhere near as liberal as his son John, he had written to state directors warning against ex-slave narratives that were nothing more than ‘a commentary on the benevolent institution of slavery’. So his approval of the Betty Cofer piece remains a mystery.
Maybe white folklorists, however racially liberal and open to disinterested inquiry into black cultural practice, could not escape their own cultural conditioning. Condescension to the African-American may simply have been too ingrained, perhaps derived from Gone With the Wind (1936) and Ulrich B. Phillips’s standard history, American Negro Slavery (1918), in which the institution was explained in terms of the African-American’s genetic and cultural backwardness.
7 May
Even though Richard Wright has broken with the Communist party, the FBI Director memoes the New York office to keep a Security Index Card on the African-American author
1945 Born on a plantation in 1908, the son of a share-cropper who abandoned the family soon after his birth, Wright went through a troubled upbringing and interrupted education in Mississippi before moving to Chicago in 1927, later finding work on the Federal Writers’ Project (see 27 July). He joined the Communist party in 1933, after attending meetings at the local John Reed Club in order to make literary contacts.
Anyone familiar with Native Son (1940), in which the novel’s protagonist gets driven around Chicago by two wealthy white communist slummers, would know that Richard Wright’s feelings towards the American Communist party were a far cry from simple adulation. In real-life Chicago (and later in New York) he found race and politics often to be at cross purposes. He often felt condescended to by the whites in the party, while the blacks denounced him as a bourgeois intellectual.
Wright left the party in 1942, but didn’t make the rift public until 1944, when he published an essay over two issues of The Atlantic Monthly, in which he argued that – both home and abroad – communist persecution of its supposed opponents was more subtle and merciless than white persecution of black in the American South.
The FBI, which had long targeted Wright as a dangerous radical, added a photostat of the Atlantic essay to his file. At first the New York office considered calling him in for interview, intending to turn him as an informer against the local party, but then they changed their minds, since (as the Special Agent in Charge wrote to J. Edgar Hoover) Wright’s decision was moti
vated by ‘the Communist Party’s failure to be sufficiently radical and militant with respect to the advancement of the Negro’.
Hoover approved New York’s decision. ‘In view of the militant attitude of the subject toward the Negro problem … you should submit a recommendation for the preparation of a Security Index Card in this case.’1 What that meant was the FBI would continue to regard Wright as an enemy of the people.
A year later, Wright left the United States for Paris. He would never return to his native country.
1 SAC (Special Agent in Charge), New York City, to Director, FBI, 26 February 1945; John Edgar Hoover to SAC, New York, 7 May 1945. http://foia.fbi.gov/rnwright/rnwright1a.pdf, 67c.
8 May
Nobbled
1962 Most novelists have their rituals. Few have been as obsessively ritual about the dates of starting, delivering, and publishing their work as Dick Francis.
Francis was born in Pembrokeshire in 1920 of semi-gentrified stock. His father was a prosperous dealer in horseflesh, and the child grew up surrounded by the beasts that would be the most important thing in his life. Infant Dick won his first race aged eight, and left school at fifteen, intending to be a jockey. A sudden growth and weight spurt in his teens meant that his chosen line would be ‘jump’, not ‘flat’ – the sport of kings and midgets. Francis may have been an unusual child in wanting to grow up but not to grow.
Of military-service age when war broke out, Francis volunteered for the cavalry but was recruited into the RAF – first as a non-commissioned engine-fitter and then, after much pestering on his part, as a pilot. He got his wings, and his pips, in 1944. In his autobiography, he says that he was actively involved in the Dambuster raid. Since that heroic event took place in 1943, he was not – unless as a civilian stowaway. In fact his war service was disappointingly uneventful.
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