Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Not, it must be said, from any lack of personal pluck. The career he chose on leaving the service in 1947 meant at least one bone-breaking fall a season and bruises all the way. On his marriage, in the same year, 1947, the groom’s right arm was in a sling. Francis would break his collar bone nine times in his riding career – a recurrent injury that eventually drove him out of the sport.

  His wife Mary was a graduate in modern languages, a teacher and a woman of extraordinary energy (even after a bout of polio in 1949) and of volubly right-wing views. There would be two children to the marriage. 1947 was a good year in every way for Francis, with sixteen wins and the woman of his life.

  Francis was always reckoned in the top ten of his profession, and as champion jockey in 1953–4 he rode for the Queen Mother. But a year later Francis’s life, as he liked to say, ‘ended’. Everything else would be afterlife. It was a dramatic final act. In the 1955 Grand National, riding for the QM and leading the field by many lengths, Francis’s horse, Devon, mysteriously collapsed only yards short of the finishing line. Francis had never won the National, the peak of a jump-jockey’s career. His disappointment was bitter.

  Was Devon nobbled? Perhaps; it’s a recurrent theme in Francis’s thrillers. But the most likely explanation seems to have been a gigantic fart that was so explosive as to prostrate the unluckily flatulent beast.

  Francis retired, having ridden 2,305 races and 345 winners. In his retirement he turned to authorship. His first racing-world thriller, Dead Cert, came out in 1962. He would thereafter, until 2001, produce one a year.

  According to the novelist himself, he was no Henry James: ‘I start at Chapter 1, page 1, and plod on to THE END.’ Starting gates and finishing lines made him comfortable. His invariable practice was to begin a new book on New Year’s Day, and deliver the MS to Michael Joseph on 8 May for publication in September.

  According to Julian Symons (the critic who made crime fiction critically respectable), ‘Francis has been overpraised’. One of the more famous overpraisers is Philip Larkin, who declared Francis ‘always 20 times more readable than the average Booker entry’. Francis was also a favourite with Kingsley Amis, Queen Elizabeth II, and, of course, his employer, her mum.

  Dick and Mary Francis, both broken in body, retired to Florida in their last years. Graham Lord’s flagrantly ‘unauthorised’ biography, published in 1999, alleged outright that Mary ghosted every one of the ‘Dick Francis’ novels. According to Lord, she confirmed his thesis, telling him that her authorship was suppressed in order to preserve the ‘taut … masculine’ feel of the works.

  9 May

  Everyman’s publisher dies; Everyman books live on

  1926 Joseph Mallaby Dent was born in 1849 in Darlington, the tenth child of a house-painter. Having been apprenticed as a printer – in which trade he showed little skill – young Joseph went to London in 1867, where he set up shop in the book business (principally bookbinding, at which he had much skill).

  Dent was moderately prosperous, but in 1887 his property burned down and, in his rebuilt premises, he launched Dent & Co. in 1888. In the 1890s, he established himself as one of the more energetic of the new generation of British publishers. By this stage he had already raised the standards of the binding and illustration of popular books. In this decade, Dent put out the 40-volume ‘Temple Shakespeare’, edited by Israel Gollancz, with title-pages illustrated by Walter Crane, at one shilling a volume. As Jonathan Rose records in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography essay on Dent, ‘the series was to sell 5 million copies over the next forty years’.

  Always passionate about cheap series reprints (especially of fiction – he was, from childhood, a passionate lover of Scott), Dent, in collaboration with Ernest Rhys, established the Everyman Library in 1906. The first volume was Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, which Dent had first come across, aged 15, in a chapel mutual improvement society.

  The Universal Education Act of 1870 had brought into play a whole new constituency of readers – most of them unable to afford the high price of new books or of commercial library subscription. The initial aim of the Everyman project was to put, and keep, in print 1,000 of the classic works of world literature, at one shilling a volume (150 were published in the first year; the thousandth title did not see the light of print until 1956). It was Rhys who proposed the epigraph, published on the flyleaf of every volume (from the medieval morality play, Everyman):

  Everyman, I will go with thee

  and be thy guide,

  In thy most need to go

  by thy side.

  Particular attention was paid to the bindings and endpapers of J.M. Dent books – he was among the first London publishers to have an instantly recognisable ‘house style’. Despite the superior production, and the low cost, the series was phenomenally successful. Dent was obliged to build a new printing house (the Temple Press) to meet demand.

  As Rose records:

  Dent has been criticized for his over-reverent, conservative, petit bourgeois tastes in literature. (He always pronounced it litter-chah, his employee Frank Swinnerton recalled.) Since the early Everyman volumes were reprints of out-of-copyright texts, they inevitably represented the standard canon of Greek, Roman, English, American, and western European classics. By 1956 the firm’s editorial director admitted that many of the Victorian war-horses had already become anachronisms. With puritanical fastidiousness, Dent blocked the admission of Tobias Smollett and Moll Flanders to Everyman’s Library. Yet in other respects the series was remarkably inclusive, embracing the Russian classics, the great books of India, and an impressive range of female novelists. (Dent himself wrote the introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, one of his personal favourites.) A Liberal nonconformist, Dent was inspired by an almost religious mission to bring culture to the masses.

  By the time of Dent’s death, on 9 May 1926, 20 million Everyman volumes had been sold. The series, after many mutations, survives.

  10 May

  Bibliocaust

  1933 Just six weeks after the Nazis achieved a majority in the parliament and Hitler assumed the chancellorship, loyal student associations combined to organise the first public book-burnings of what would become the Third Reich, in the Opernplatz in Berlin’s Unter den Linden Strasse. The aim of the exercise was symbolic rather than in any way methodically censorious.

  The SA (Ernst Röhm’s brown-shirted stormtroopers) supplied a guard of honour; brass bands played. It was night, and the students entered as a torchlit parade. The event was choreographed and photographed by the newly formed Ministry of Propaganda. A large scaffold was erected for the incineration itself, which was ritually performed. Representative students would advance towards the flame to intone their Feuersprüche – fire oath – before casting the anathematised ‘un-German’ volume into the flames. The whole event was presided over by Josef Goebbels (himself a novelist).

  After the burning of the Reichstag (27 February 1933), the May book-burning was imitated in university cities over the whole of Germany. It demonstrated, forcibly, the control over the mind of the country that the new government (still for the moment nominally democratic – the Nazis had been voted into power) would enforce. Works regarded as Marxist or decadent (‘Asphaltliteratur’) or by Jewish writers were methodically targeted. Heine was everywhere burned. Even statues to him were pulled down.

  The images of what the book historian Matthew Fishburn calls the ‘Bibliocaust’ were publicised in newspapers and newscasts across the world. In Britain, protest solidified as the ‘Library of the Burned Books’, an association under the international presidency of H.G. Wells, Romain Rolland, Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger (all notable ‘burnees’). An exhibition of the ‘Burned Books’ was put on display in Paris in May 1934. As their literature proclaimed:

  Among the books which were burned or suppressed in Germany were such classics as the entire works of Heinrich Heine, and various writings by Lessing, Voltaire, Einstein and Freud. Further the novels
of such modern authors as Heinrich Mann, E.M. Remarque, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Jacob Wassermann and the historical works of Emil Ludwig and Mehring were also destroyed.

  In the longer term the Nazi Bibliocaust had the perverse (for the book-burners) effect of liberalising the British and American book world – as a demonstration of democratic liberty. Judge Woolsey’s ruling in the US in 1934 that Joyce’s Ulysses was not obscene and the uninhibited publication of the work by The Bodley Head in the UK in 1936 can plausibly be seen as responses to Nazi censorship.

  More dramatic was the ostentatious display and wide circulation of James Murphy’s translation of Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in the mid-to late 1930s. Hitler’s book received a sales boost in the UK after the outbreak of war and was at one point, in 1941, listed as a bestseller. Its production was halted not by any action of the authorities but by a Luftwaffe raid on the publisher, Hutchinson, in early 1942, which destroyed the stereo plates. It is not recorded whether the bombs in question were high explosive or incendiary.

  11 May

  Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is published

  1942 Originally appearing as Go Down, Moses, and other Stories, the book would be described more accurately as a novel in seven movements. Spanning roughly 70 years from just before the Civil War to 1940, the stories trace the life of Isaac (Ike) McCaslin. A central narrative strand is Ike’s initiation into the mysteries of hunting by Sam Fathers, son of a Native American father and slave mother. In the two chapters, ‘The Old People’ and ‘The Bear’ (often read and studied apart as Faulkner’s most admired short story), Ike learns not just how to hunt, but to respect the wilderness as a spiritual as well as physical place.

  The book’s title comes from another kind of spiritual:

  Go down, Moses,

  Way down in Egypt land,

  Tell old Pharaoh,

  Let my people go.

  So a crucial element in the book’s historical register is the blacks’ emancipation from slavery, while remaining in effect captive to that form of indentured servitude called share-cropping. The whites are similarly resistant to change in their attitude to the blacks. They no longer treat them as animals, but maintain a paternalistic stance towards them, amounting almost to condescension.

  The irony underlying all this superiority is that Lucius Quintus Carothers, the original McCaslin, had an alliance with a slave woman that produced an alternative offspring to his white family. Yet not even Lucius’s great, great, great grandson (and Ike’s cousin) Roth Edmunds can escape the fateful legacy of racial bias. Until he is seven, he plays, eats and even sleeps with his black relative Henry Beauchamp:

  Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him.

  12 May

  As Kenneth Tynan lauds Look Back in Anger in the Sunday Observer, a ‘small miracle in British culture’ ensues

  1956 The first performance of John Osborne’s play took place at the Royal Court theatre, Sloane Square, under the auspices of the newly formed English Stage Society. Their inaugural plays were, like Osborne’s, aggressively anti-English.

  Look Back in Anger is a foundation text (along with Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim) of the so-called ‘Angry Young Man’ movement (the phrase is attributed to Harold Hobson, then theatre critic on the Sunday Times).

  The play’s core is a savage denunciation of middle-class England – principally via the dissident, twenty-something hero, Jimmy Porter. Osborne anatomises him in the opening stage direction:

  He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike.

  Jimmy is searingly intelligent, the (drop-out) product of a ‘university which is not even redbrick, but white tile’. Proletarian by self-assertion, he is something of a cultural snob – liking only traditional jazz, 9d Sunday newspapers (i.e. the Observer) and good books. Less ‘disconcerting’ than – in the preferred American phrase (as immortalised in James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause (1955)) – ‘crazy mixed up’.

  The challenging task of capturing Osborne’s explosive ingredients was entrusted, on the first run, to Kenneth Haigh; two years later Richard Burton played Jimmy on film, to an audience of millions.

  Literary movements typically require a helpful push from the critical establishment to give them shape and impetus. The critical reception of Look Back in Anger was largely confused and nervous. Waiting for Godot, produced the year before, had earlier rattled the London theatrical press out of its comfortable stock responses.

  Typical was Philip Hope-Wallace in the Manchester Guardian who labelled Look Back in Anger ‘a strongly felt but rather muddled first drama’, and Patrick Gibbs in the Daily Telegraph who thought it ‘a work of some power, uncertainly directed’. The uncertainty (and, arguably, the muddle) was among the critics. The Times (grandly anonymous) thundered negatively: ‘his first play has passages of good violent writing, but its total gesture is altogether inadequate.’

  Osborne’s gesture, of course, was two fingers to everything The Times stood for.

  One critic – in the same twenties age group as Porter and Osborne – had no uncertainty. Already hailed as the most powerful theatre critic since George Bernard Shaw, Kenneth Tynan lauded the play uncompromisingly in the Observer (12 May). Astor’s paper was Porter’s Sunday reading. In 1956 – virtually alone in Fleet Street – it condemned Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure; indifferent to the circulation loss that its lack of ‘patriotism’ incurred.

  Tynan began by recalling Somerset Maugham’s comment on the dramatis personae of Amis’s Lucky Jim: ‘they are scum.’ He then went on to assert: ‘Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is.’ More importantly, Tynan saw in Porter not just a ‘character’ but a portent. Porterism was a movement on the move:

  The Porters of our time deplore the tyranny of ‘good taste’ and refuse to accept ‘emotional’ as a term of abuse; they are classless, and they are also leaderless. Mr Osborne is their first spokesman in the English theatre.

  There were, Tynan calculated with mocking pseudo-precision, some 6,733,000 Porters in Britain: ‘that is the number of people in this country between twenty and thirty.’ Tynan himself was in that army: ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of the decade.’

  13 May

  De Quincey writes to Wordsworth

  1803 If there were an award for the most successful fan letter in English literature, it should go to Thomas de Quincey, later famous as the author of the classic Romantic memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).

  Born in 1785, De Quincey’s upbringing was chaotic and wholly unpromising. Precocious but neurotic, he ran away from school and, at the age of eighteen, near starvation in London, he penned a letter to Wordsworth – a writer whom, on the strength of the Lyrical Ballads, he regarded as a god. On 13 May 1803, he drafted the letter to Wordsworth in his diary. It began:

  What I am going to say, I know, would seem strange to most men: and to most men therefore I would not say it; but to you I will, because your feelings do not follow the current of the world. From the time when I first saw the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ I made a resolution to obtain (if I could) the friendship of their author.

  It was an extraordinarily brash letter from a young nobody to a great somebody. De Quincey probably thought so himself, and did not dispatch the letter for some weeks. ‘Gradually’, as De Quincey’s biographer, Robert Morrison, records:

  he rewrote it, and finally, on the afternoon of 31 May, he completed an augmented and, in parts, thoroughly revised version. Copied and sealed by twenty minutes before 4 o’clock, Thomas took it straight to the post office and mailed it to Wordsworth care of his publisher Longman in Paterno
ster Row, London.

  ‘What claim’, he wrote, ‘can I urge to a fellowship such as yours … beaming (as it does) with genius so wild and so magnificent? I dare not say that I too have some spark of that heavenly fire which blazes there.’

  There was no reply for two months. The familiar fate of all such letters. But it had been held up in the publisher’s office. Wordsworth did not receive it until 27 July and wrote back almost the same day, saying: ‘I am already kindly disposed to you.’

  It was the foundation of the most important relationship in De Quincey’s life. A few years later he, too, would settle in Dove Cottage, Grasmere (the other poet’s home), living and writing there for a decade. It was here, in the heart of the literary Lake District, that he addicted himself to the drug that he describes so lyrically (and at times so gothically) in his most famous work.

  14 May

  John Smith lands in Virginia

  1607 Other English adventurers had tried to gain a foothold in the New World, but none had succeeded. Now three shiploads of settlers dropped anchor around 40 miles up the James River, Virginia. This time the English had come for good.

  With them was a former pirate and mercenary soldier who had arrived with his spoils back in London just in the nick of time to sign up for the Virginia adventure. He was John Smith, whose experience, love of action, and independent means recommended him to the London backers of the Virginia Company. Less fond of him were his social betters on the voyage. They took his strong-minded decisiveness for mutiny, and had him confined below decks for much of the trip.