Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Imagine their chagrin, then, when they opened their sealed orders on landing to find that the Company had appointed Smith to sit on the council of the plantation. So effective was he as a leader that he was elected its president the following year.

  Now he is remembered for how he wrote about the experience. Like Mourt’s Relation (see 15 November), Smith’s True Relation of the settlement (1608) was a booster’s tract, full of the natural plenty of the new country, and the tractability of the natives. Exploring the Chickahominy River, they are greeted by ‘the people in all places kindely intreating us, daunsing and feasting us with strawberries, Mulberries, Bread, Fish, and other their Countrie provisions whereof we had plenty’. It’s like the ending of a Shakespeare comedy.

  And Instead of being held captive by Powhatan and his warlike tribe, as in his later, formal history of the settlement, The General History of Virginia (1624), Smith is a guest, feasted with ‘great Platters of sundrie Victuals’, while exchanging information with the chief on the geography of their respective territories.

  Without the captivity, of course, there can be no dramatic intervention of Pocahontas (see 5 April). In the True Relation she is ‘a child of tenne yeares old’ of great ‘wit and spirit’, who rather than saving his life, had been sent by her father to plead for the release of some natives held captive at the English fort.

  15 May

  Amazon’s stream strengthens to flood force

  1997 On this day Amazon.com (AMZN) was first quoted on the NASDAQ. The firm was founded by the 30-year-old Jeff Bezos in 1994. A graduate of Princeton (Phi Beta Kappa), his background was in finance and computers, not books. Bezos started the company, as young Silicon Valley pioneers traditionally did, in his garage. Presumptuously, he called it ‘Amazon’ after the largest stream in the world.

  Spurning San Francisco, the heart of the new online industry, he went further north up the coast to Seattle. Here he set up not the first, but what would soon become the biggest, web-bookstore: Amazon. com.

  Bezos’s Amazon came on stream in 1995, at the same time that the home-based desktop computer became widely internet-connectable. Amazon soon diversified from books to a multi-product electronic-order/postal-supply retail business, combining old and new technologies. By cutting out the middleman bookshop, it allowed the purchaser to order from a millions-strong catalogue with large discounts. Efficient stock control was a further edge that the webstore had over the walk-in store.

  After some bumpy years (the dot.com bomb rocked it) in which shares dropped as low as $1.50 from the initial $18 at the NASDAQ launch, the company’s value has grown inexorably. Bezos always maintained that he was in for the very long haul and warned investors to stay away if they did not want to stick with him. By 1999, he was Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’.

  On 31 December 2008, Amazon was entered on the S&P 100 index, as one of the elite corps of American business enterprises. The following year, 2009, saw the launch of its Kindle reader – a delivery system that, it was expected, would cut out the need for physical delivery of book products. Given Bezos’s record, it would be a reasonable bet that he will succeed, making himself in the process the most influential bookman since Gutenberg.

  16 May

  Burgess reviews Burgess (favourably)

  1963 The most famous writer to review his own works behind a protective mask of anonymity was Walter Scott, who gave a lengthy and favourable notice to his first series of Tales of my Landlord in the January 1817 issue of the Quarterly Review (the Tory journal that Scott himself had set up, with John Murray, in opposition to Archibald Constable’s Edinburgh Review).

  Later in the century Walt Whitman shamelessly (and again anonymously) puffed his first volume, Leaves of Grass, in 1855. As late as 1876, in an anonymous article in the New Jersey Post (26 January), Whitman was still promoting Whitman to an insufficiently appreciative American readership and editors who mistreated his genius with, as Whitman believed, ‘determined denial, disgust and scorn’.

  In the 20th century the most flamboyant self-reviewer was Anthony Burgess. In the early stages of his literary career Burgess picked up work as a reviewer for the Yorkshire Post – a paper that then had influential literary pages. Burgess’s first novels appeared under the pseudonym ‘Joseph Kell’.

  Unaware of the relationship, the Post’s literary editor gave Burgess Kell’s Inside Mr Enderby to review. Burgess, who loved literary mischief, duly produced a sagacious review, published on 16 May 1963. Mr Kell, he blandly informed his readers (with a double meaning that only he appreciated), was ‘a quiet and cunning novelist’. Readers, however, should be warned:

  Inside Mr Enderby is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals … and halitosis … those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to leave it alone.

  In the context of post-Chatterley ‘liberation’ such warnings were, of course, an incitement to buy. Dirty books were in vogue.

  Burgess’s editor was not amused by the jape and Burgess–Kell was sacked. In a 1992 essay, ‘Confessions of the Hack Trade’, and in late-life interviews, Burgess justified his deceit with allusions to Walter Scott, Swift’s self-lacerating ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’, and the persuasive argument that the author of a novel ‘knows its faults better than any casual reader’.

  It is suspected that the so-called ‘reviews’ invited on Amazon.com have revived, to epidemic proportions, the practice of self-puffery – the vast bulk of it infinitely less witty than Burgess on Kell.

  17 May

  Héloise is buried alongside Abelard in the cemetery at the nunnery that he had built for her

  1164 It is Europe’s oldest tale of romantic love. The theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142) had set up a school of philosophy on the Left Bank of the Seine, opposite the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris. One of his students, over twenty years his junior, was the gifted, beautiful Héloise (1101–64), whose care and education had been supervised by her doting uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral.

  Of course they fell in love. She got pregnant. As so often with academic couples, their child naming was eccentric. They called their baby Astrolabe, after the last word in astronomical technology, recently introduced from Spain. When her guardian found out, he was furious, but after Abelard begged his forgiveness, and his permission to marry Héloise, Uncle Fulbert relented.

  They did marry, but entirely against Héloise’s wishes. She argued that the publicity that the marriage would give to their affair would deprive Abelard of his job, and the world of a great teacher and philosopher. Leaving Astrolabe with Abelard’s sister, she went to stay in the convent at Argenteuil, north-west of Paris.

  Then things took a really nasty turn. Suspecting that Abelard had abandoned his niece, Fulbert conspired with his kinsmen to break into Abelard’s lodgings and (as the victim himself put it circumspectly) ‘cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow’. Now Abelard too retired from the world, taking refuge in the Abbey of Saint Denis, where he became a monk. Later he would return to teaching (and intense theological controversy), but that’s another story.

  These events entered literature in a remarkable series of five long letters they exchanged after their separation, in which she reiterates her passionate longing for him while chafing at the cloisters, and he admits his inability to forget her, though imploring her to turn to God in her distress.

  The narrative of their affair started nothing less than a whole new literary fashion, the convention of romantic love. The second part of The Romance of the Rose (Jean de Meun, 1275), that classic of courtly love, picks up her objections to marriage, radically altering them to the accusation that the institution forces sex on the wife through the ‘mastership’ of the husband, rather than through spontaneous mutual passion, thus giving Chaucer the idea for his Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales (some time after 1380).

  François Villon wo
rked Héloise into his ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear’ lament, his ‘Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis’ (1533; see 8 January):

  Où est la très sage Helloïs,

  Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne

  Pierre Esbaillart [Abelard] à Saint-Denis? …

  Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?1

  Their story caught the imagination even of such an austere moralist as Alexander Pope. His ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1716) picks up Jean de Meun’s theme, allocating over twenty (out of 366) decasyllabic lines to her complaint against marriage: rather than wife, she says, ‘make me mistress to the man I love’.

  Meanwhile, back in real life, Abelard’s only further contact with Héloise had been when he managed to establish her as Prioress of the Oratory of the Paraclete, which he had founded north-west of Troyes. On his death his remains were carried there, to be watched over by his lover until she too joined him in the tomb.

  1 ‘Where is the very wise Héloise, / For whom was castrated and then made a monk / Pierre Esbaillart [Abelard] in Saint Denis? … / But where are the snows of yesteryear?’

  18 May

  Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev sit down to the modernist dinner from hell

  1922 It was modernism’s annus mirabilis – Ulysses, The Waste Land and Jacob’s Room published; À la recherche du temps perdu finally brought to its conclusion. Minor tremors included the first night of Stravinsky’s ballet Le Renard, performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, and the ambitious dinner party that followed.

  It was the brainchild of Sydney and Violet Schiff, a wealthy British couple living in Paris at the time. The idea was to celebrate the ballet, but also to bring together the notables of modernist writing and painting who had yet to meet. This meant Stravinsky and Diaghilev, of course, but also Erik Satie, Picasso, the shy James Joyce and the (by now) extremely retiring Marcel Proust, together with a back-up cast of assorted aristocrats, writers, painters, musicians and Bloomsbury’s own Clive Bell.1

  Anxious anticipation of the grand occasion seems to have prompted some over-preparation: Joyce arrived drunk and later slumped over the dinner table asleep. Proust had been so daunted at the thought of the dinner that he downed a dose of adrenalin that scorched his throat and kept him complaining about pain in his stomach for most of the evening.

  Conversation between the greats didn’t go as planned. Proust told Stravinsky how much he admired Beethoven. Stravinsky, anxiously anticipating the first reviews of his ballet, retorted, ‘I detest Beethoven’, and turned away. Later in the evening Proust asked a now-revived Joyce, ‘Do you like truffles?’ Joyce answered, ‘Yes I do.’

  But what else did the Schiffs expect? What do geniuses ‘say’ anyway, outside their work? Even now, literary festivals are premised on the belief that if you kidnap authors for an hour or two, you’ll capture some of the magic of their creativity. But the audience’s curiosity (and hence the author’s answers) is usually limited to issues of mechanics and scheduling, like ‘What time of day do you start writing, and for how long?’ When artists talk not to their public but to other artists, competitiveness makes them defensive, and talk strays even further from the works themselves.

  1 Richard Davenport Hines, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party, London: Faber & Faber, 2006.

  19 May

  Mounted settlers from surrounding towns attack the natives at Peskeompskut; language poet Susan Howe scrambles the history

  1676 The Indians had gathered at Peskeompskut, at the falls on the Connecticut River, near present-day Montague, Massachusetts, to fish, trade and plan raids against the surrounding English settlements. At dawn on 19 May Captain William Turner led 160 English soldiers to attack the camp, killing over 200 natives (mainly women and children, though earlier histories omit this fact) and setting fire to their wigwams.

  But when a native band from a nearby camp got to hear of the massacre, they moved in on the English to cut off their escape route, killing 37 soldiers and wounding others. Eventually the rest got back to safety, apart from the Reverend Hope Atherton and seven or eight others. These men got lost, holding out for three or four days in the woods until hunger forced them to surrender to the Indians. But the natives tied straw around them, set it alight and made them run until consumed by fire. Only Atherton was spared, because (as a contemporary report put it) when ‘a little man with a black coat and without a hat came toward [the natives] they were afraid and ran away, thinking it was the Englishman’s God’.

  This is the ‘background’, much of it provided by Susan Howe herself, to her postmodern treatment of the events in ‘Hope Atherton’s Wanderings’, in her Singularities (1990). Here is how the ‘poem’ goes in part:

  Prest try to set after grandmother

  Revived by and laid down left by …

  Clog nutmeg abt noon

  Scraping cano muzzell

  Foot path sand and so

  Gravel rubbish vandal

  Horse flesh ryal table

  Sand enemys flood sun

  Danielle Warnare Servt

  Turner Dalls Fight us

  Next wearer April One

  In fact many of these words – though not in this order – are taken from a 19th-century history of the frontier settlement of Deerfield by George Sheldon, and describe the flight of another fugitive from the Falls Fight, one Jonathan Wells. Here is part of it with the relevant words italicised:

  J.W. was glad to leave him, lest he shd be a clog or hindrance to him. Mr W. grew faint, & once when ye Indians prest him, he was near fainting away, but by eating a nutmeg (which his grandmother gave him on going out) he was revived.

  Wounded in the leg, he crosses a stream using his musket as a crutch, but for fear of wetting the lock, puts the muzzell end into the water instead, which, filled with so much gravel and sand, renders the gun useless when the natives come at him across the river in a cano. And so on.

  So Howe offers one ‘background’ narrative to contextualise her poem, but actually raids another, hidden source that she doesn’t want her readers to know about – unlike Pound or Williams, for example (see 19 February, 4 and 13 July), who wanted their fragments like these to tease the reader into looking up their sources. But Howe’s sources have none of that exemplary status. They are not ‘a shrine and a monument’ but time-bound, patriarchal texts resting on the assumption that it was the ‘manifest destiny’ of white Europeans to bring order to the wilderness. They cry out for deconstruction. Howe goes one better by dismantling them as well, concentrating on the sounds and rhythms of the words while preventing them from forming any coherent narrative at all.

  They named the falls after Captain Turner, who led the murderous, incompetent raid in the first place.

  20 May

  W.H. Auden becomes an American citizen

  1946 Despite the false promise of the Munich Agreement, many British people sensed towards the end of 1938 that war with Germany was on its way. So when in the New Year of 1939 W.H. Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood sailed for New York on board the steamer Champlain, it looked to many as though they were fleeing their threatened homeland for a (then) neutral country where they’d be safe.

  Evelyn Waugh’s reaction that Auden fled to the US ‘at the first squeak of an air-raid warning’ was typical of the poet’s enemies.1 Even friends like Stephen Spender reproached him for giving up the ‘struggle’.2 Spender, part-Jewish and therefore with more to fear from a successful German invasion, would stay behind and fight the Blitz as a fireman.

  Auden thought England was provincial, that its political and aesthetic culture had declined along with its industry. America was no promised land for him, but at least New York, where he planned to settle, was cosmopolitan, in touch with the rest of the world. ‘An artist ought either to live where he has live roots or where he has no roots at all’, he told Louis MacNeice in 1940.3

  Of course he was welcomed by the New York literary community. Befo
re long he was giving lectures and writing for the New Yorker. In the autumn of 1939 he had moved to Brooklyn, begun to attend services at the local Episcopal church, and taken up with a Brooklyn boy, Chester Kallman.4

  By the end of the war it was clear that Auden’s work had changed direction. He himself had repudiated much of his earlier work – particularly the communist invocations of history like ‘Spain 1937’ – and had re-established his Christian faith. But back in England all signs of an increasing conservatism were put down to his formal change of citizenship. Now the line of attack wasn’t his cowardice and treachery. What preoccupied a younger generation of English critics was the depletion of energy and loss of focus in the poet’s work following his emigration.

  So John Wain claimed that the characteristically trenchant ‘Auden line’ had been smashed by his ‘renunciation of English nationalism’, while Philip Larkin lamented the loss of Auden’s ‘dominant and ubiquitous unease’ when he absconded to America. ‘At one stroke’, Larkin proclaimed, ‘he lost his key subject and emotion – Europe and the fear of war – and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.’5

  1 Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden, London: Minerva, 1996, p. 180.

  2 Stan Smith, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 6.

  3 Cited in Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 180.

  4 Brad Lockwood, ‘Remembering W. H. Auden’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 29 September 2009.

  5 Cited in Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.

  21 May

  Henry Pye is appointed Poet Laureate

  1790 Henry James Pye (1745–1813) was made the king’s poet on the death of his predecessor in the post, Thomas Warton. Neither is memorable. But of all the 22 poets who have held the post, Pye is routinely cited as the prime example of the mediocrity associated with the laureateship – versifying flunkey to the monarch. He is, along with Thomas Shadwell and William McGonagall, famous for his sublime badness. A sad kind of immortality.