Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  When offered the laureate’s post on Pye’s death in 1813 Walter Scott was advised to turn it down by his patron, the Duke of Buccleuch, because ‘it will stick to you like court [adhesive] plaister’. Scott took the advice and nominated Robert Southey – who went on to become the most ridiculed of laureates for his poem on the death of George III, ‘A Vision of Judgment’. Its sole virtue was to inspire one the great (republican) satires, Byron’s ‘A Vision of Judgement’.

  Pye’s was – as laureateships have traditionally been – a political appointment. He was a friend to William Pitt, whose Whiggish-Toryish principles he shared. With revolution raging in France, a ‘safe’ laureate was desirable. The two greatest poets of the age – Robert Burns (radical, ‘low’, and Scottish) and William Cowper (barely sane) – were non-runners.

  It was on Pye’s retiring from Parliament, in 1790, that he was given the consolatory appointment. He had prepared himself for it, years before, with a sycophantically loyal ode ‘On the Birth of the Prince of Wales’ (the poem headed his major collection, Poems on Various Subjects, 1787). Birthday poems were the principal task of the laureate and Pye did his worst in the genre.

  Pye’s major achievement in the office of laureate was to abolish the annual ‘tierce of Canary wine’ (or ‘butt of sack’) that traditionally went with the post. He had it commuted to a cash remuneration of £27 to supplement the £100 honorarium. The payment continued well into the 20th century, although for nostalgic reasons the wine was also sometimes provided, ex gratia.

  As a poet, Pye’s major effort as laureate was an epic on the greatest of English kings, Alfred (1801). Appearing as it did at the same period as Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, it gives a fair demonstration of Pye’s merits as a poet. The following is his description of Alfred burning the cakes:

  The objects round him, like the viewless air,

  Pass o’er his mind, nor leave an image there;

  Hence oft, with flippant tongue, the busy dame

  The reckless stranger’s apathy would blame,

  Who, careless, let the flame those viands waste,

  His ready hunger ne’er refused to taste.

  Ah! little deeming that her pensive guest,

  High majesty, and higher worth, possess’d:

  Or that her voice presumptuous dared to chide

  Alfred, her country’s sovereign, and its pride.

  Pye’s Aerophorion (1794) is, it is claimed, ‘the first poem in English to celebrate hot-air ballooning’. Hot air would seem to be somehow appropriate.

  22 May

  Allen Lane launches Penguin Books

  1935 The UK’s first mass-market paperbacks were launched as Penguin Books (under the Bodley Head imprint) on this date. The first batch of ten were:

  Ariel: a Shelley Romance – André Maurois

  A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

  Poet’s Pub – Eric Linklater

  Madame Claire – Susan Ertz

  The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club – Dorothy L. Sayers

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Agatha Christie

  Twenty-Five – Beverley Nichols

  William – E.H. Young

  Gone to Earth – Mary Webb

  Carnival – Compton Mackenzie

  After a quickly aborted experiment with Woolworth’s 3d and 6d department stores, Lane’s stylish reprints (drawing on the talents of typographers and designers such as Eric Gill and Stanley Morison) established themselves in conventional bookshop outlets. Penguins were, from the first, paperbacks that sold like hardbacks, and in many cases were an even more respectable imprint. For an author to be ‘Penguined’ was a mark of high merit.

  Allen Lane learned his publishing with his uncle John Lane (whose surname he adopted), whose house put out the work of many of the most distinguished writers of the late Victorian and Edwardian period – most famously, perhaps, Oscar Wilde (who returned the compliment by naming the suave butler in The Importance of Being Earnest ‘Lane’). Allen Lane, in his early thirties at the time, claimed to have had the inspiration for his paperback pocket books while standing on the platform of Exeter station, having just visited Agatha Christie and having nothing to read.

  Lane eschewed pictorial covers throughout his long career as Britain’s leading paperback publisher. He thought them vulgar. In America the mass-market paperback pioneer was Robert de Graff, who launched his ‘Pocket Books’ in 1939. His strategy was less to embed his product in the traditional bookstore than to circumvent that outlet entirely. De Graff’s 25¢ Pocket Books were essentially ‘drugstore’ paperbacks. They had eye-catching illustrated covers, newsprint-quality paper, and, typically, slapdash typography. They were designed to retail less like books (items of civilised furniture) than short-life magazines. And not, necessarily, the more respectable kind of magazine.

  23 May

  John Banville throws a spanner in Ian McEwan’s works

  2005 There are no prizes for the most devastating review ever published. Were there one, the winner for this year (and arguably for the first decade of the 21st century) would be that published on this day.

  When Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday was released in early summer 2005, the reviewers, British and American, fell over themselves to throw superlatives at it. ‘Few literary events are today met with as much enthusiasm’, crooned the Boston Globe, ‘as the publication of a McEwan novel. Saturday, a brilliant and graceful hymn to the contented contemporary man, will be greeted with cheers.’

  Quick to join in the cheering was the Daily Telegraph (‘This is a rich book, sensuous and thoughtful’), the New York Times (‘it’s clear that with this volume, Mr McEwan has not only produced one of the most powerful pieces of post-9/11 fiction yet published, but also fulfilled that very primal mission of the novel: to show how we – a privileged few of us, anyway – live today’), the Guardian (‘One of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature, it succeeds in ridiculing on every page the view of its hero that fiction is useless to the modern world’), and the Spectator (‘Saturday is an exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained. It is undoubtedly McEwan’s best’). Even the normally crusty London Review of Books, like the ranks of Tuscany, could scarce forbear to cheer (if somewhat sniffily):

  The customarily firm forward march of the narrative works surprisingly well with the more spaced-out requirements of a day-in-the-life story, and at its best the combination of precision and lyricism is very effective.

  Praise indeed.

  Saturday is, as the above reviewer notes, a circadian novel – like Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses. The Day in Question is 15 February 2003. On that day, across the world, there were demonstrations in protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq. That in London, organised by the Stop the War Coalition, was massive. Estimates of protestor attendance (overwhelmingly peaceful) ranged as high as two million.

  McEwan’s narrative follows 24 hours in the life of a brain surgeon, Henry Perowne, who lives in Fitzroy Square and carries out his operations at University College Hospital, 200 yards away across Tottenham Court Road. On Saturdays he plays squash in a gym at adjoining Huntley Street, and on this day he intends to pick up some smoked salmon in nearby Marylebone High Street, for a dinner party in the evening. His day is interrupted by the mustering of the demonstrators in Gower Street (by the hospital) and by a street accident that leads to home invasion. The hero is ambivalent about the rights and wrongs of the coming war.

  Saturday looked set to win the Man-Booker prize for 2005. There was not a bad word to be found against it in the opinion-forming prints. Its progress to triumph in October (when the Prize is awarded) was, however, stalled (at least in popular opinion) by a devastating review of the book by fellow novelist John Banville, in the New York Review of Books, in May. After a devastatingly sarcastic summary of the narrative, Banville concluded:

  Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces – brain operations, s
quash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. – are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy.

  There were protests (not least from the chair of the Man-Booker committee, who wrote a letter contradicting Banville’s estimate). Ironically, Saturday did not win the Man-Booker that year. John Banville’s The Sea did.

  24 May

  Guy Burgess tries to telephone W.H. Auden just before defecting to Moscow

  1951 Auden was passing through London on his way from New York to Ischia, where he and his lover, the American poet and librettist Chester Kallman, shared a house. While staying with Natasha and Stephen Spender in St John’s Wood, he was called on the phone by Guy Burgess, ex-Eton, ex-Cambridge, ex-MI6 and (just about to be) ex-Foreign Office. Auden was out.

  The next day Burgess called again. Once again, Auden was out. On returning, having ‘evidently dined well’, according to Spender’s biographer (and one of this book’s authors), he was asked if he would return the call. ‘“Do I have to?” Auden drawled: “he’s always drunk”.’1 By this time Burgess was on his way out of the country. Having telegraphed a message to his mother that he was off on a Mediterranean holiday, he and Donald Maclean boarded a cross-channel steamer at Southampton. Both men were defecting to the Soviet Union.

  As a younger man, Auden had liked to think of himself as a sort of spy – poetry itself, he thought, was like espionage, transporting ideas across borders – but why would the cleverest and most dangerous real-life spy of the Cold War era try twice to reach him before leaving the country for good?

  Richard Davenport-Hines, who tells this story in his biography of Auden, conjectures that because of ‘his dislike of English liberalism’, Auden ‘apparently had the same emblematic importance to Burgess as for thousands of other men of their generation’. Sexual orientation came into the equation too. ‘This affair provoked fears that national security was threatened by “crypto homosexuals”’, writes Davenport-Hines, ‘and the Home Secretary and other officials instituted a campaign of arrests … which amounted to a sexual witch-hunt and ruined many lives in the 1950s.’

  Auden and the Spenders didn’t escape so neatly. Both were plagued by the press, once the story of Burgess’s phone calls had got out – Spender claiming (as late as 10 June) that he found it ‘very difficult’ to believe Burgess a Soviet spy, and Auden investigated, even back in Ischia, by the local carabinieri.2

  1 John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography, London and New York: Viking, 2004, p. 360.

  2 Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden, London: Minerva, 1995, p. 276.

  25 May

  Oscar Wilde is convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour

  1895 The downfall of Oscar Wilde began with a spelling mistake. On 18 February 1895 the Marquess of Queensberry – boxing legislator, bully, and near-madman – left a calling card at the writer’s club, addressed to him as a ‘posing somdomite’. Wilde had been conducting a flagrantly public affair with the Marquess’s son, Bosie.

  The card was, technically, a public declaration. Wilde, disastrously, chose to take offence and – idealistically – to strike a blow for the love that dared not speak its name (but could spell it correctly). He brought a charge against the Marquess for criminal libel.

  The trial began on 3 April 1895. Wilde fenced brilliantly with the leading defence lawyer of the day, Edward Carson. It was as witty a performance as in his current West End comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest. But wit, paradox and epigram can wilt in the heavy atmosphere of court. Asked if he had kissed a certain young male servant, Wilde retorted that he had not, adding: ‘He was a particularly plain boy.’ He got his laugh, and lost his case.

  A warrant was issued for Wilde’s arrest immediately after the collapse of the criminal libel trial. He was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel. It inspired Betjeman’s comic-pathetic poem:

  A thump, and a murmur of voices—

  (‘Oh why must they make such a din?’)

  As the door of the bedroom swung open

  And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

  ‘Mr Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew

  Where felons and criminals dwell:

  We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly

  For this is the Cadogan Hotel.’

  On 25 May, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for ‘gross indecency’ (sex with rent boys, principally). The provision in the law under which he was convicted had been passed through Parliament in 1885 by Henry Labouchère, an admirer of the playwright.

  26 May

  Born: iconographer of the Great Depression

  1895 When Dorothea Lange abandoned studio photography for documentary work, she became the most literary of photographers – in both her method and her influence. In 1935 she teamed up with – then married – the Berkeley agricultural economist Paul Schuster Taylor. Their reports on the miserable living conditions of farm migrants in California during the Depression would prompt the government to provide ‘sanitary camps’ for the Okies, give Pare Lorentz the idea for The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), involve John Steinbeck in their campaign (see 5 October), and inspire The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

  For Lange, the caption was almost as important as the photo. Once asked whether a picture should be left to speak for itself, she denied wanting to tell the viewer what to look for, but saw no reason not to offer relevant background. The caption ‘Winter in New England’ would be redundant to a winter scene in New England, ‘but you could say, “this part of the country is … losing its population”, or “People are leaving this part of the United States which was really the cradle of democratic principles”’. In other words ‘background’ was alright so long as it supplied a pessimistic historical generalisation.

  Lange’s photo captions in her and Taylor’s field reports were highly evocative, almost poetic at times. In fact the narrow margins of her notebook break the lines up so that they look like an early poem by William Carlos Williams. To her question, ‘Are you making a living?’, one migrant in a Marysville, California, shanty town answered:

  Oh, we’re getting along

  As good as us draggin’

  Around people can expect

  If you call it a livin’—

  And following her inset description, ‘Rag houses / Split open garbage cans’, another added:

  ‘ex service man raised decent like I was

  raised by my father, No rag

  houses then. I can’t make it’—

  This was powerful stuff, even without the pictures, but it had the force of portraying her subjects as victims of natural forces. This bias was strongest in her photograph of a Madonna-like woman cradling three children in a makeshift tent – the so-called ‘Migrant Mother’ – since reproduced over 10,000 times, and now an icon of the Depression as a whole.

  This time she didn’t wait for a quote, but used a succession of captions to sketch in her own ‘background’. This was a mother of ‘seven hungry children’, she wrote, ‘destitute in a pea pickers camp’ after the crop failed in Nipomo, California. One caption affirmed that ‘These people had just sold their tent to buy food’, another that they had sold the tyres from their car.

  None of this was true. Recent research has uncovered that, far from being a passive victim, the mother was a local organiser for the radical Cannery and Agricultural Industrial Workers’ Union. On the day the picture was taken, her husband and two older boys had taken the radiator off their Hudson car to get it repaired at a local garage. So they hadn’t had to sell the car tyres, and they hadn’t sold their tent, and they weren’t stuck in Nipomo. The next morning the family took off for Watsonville, 140 miles to the north along Highway 101, to work in the lettuce fields.

  27 May

  Cromwell returns
, bloodily, from Ireland to be greeted, ironically, by Andrew Marvell

  1650 Few war criminals have inspired great poems. Adolf Hitler, for example, inspired what must surely be the worst song lyrics ever: ‘Adolf Hitlers Lieblingsblume ist das schlichte Edelweiss’ (‘Adolf Hitler’s favourite flower is the simple Edelweiss’ – Julie Andrews’s as well, ironically, in the anti-Hitlerian Sound of Music).

  After winning the Civil War in England, Cromwell – now Lord Protector – embarked on a campaign of conquest in Ireland, using his victorious, battled-trained army and its fearsomely advanced artillery.

  The aim was to reduce Ireland to the status of a docile colony, dominated in course of time by a transplanted ruler class (the Ascendancy). For centuries after, Ireland would be what Gladstone called it, ‘the thorn in England’s side’.

  Over 600,000 people – some 40 per cent of the Irish population – are estimated to have perished as a result of the three-year conflict. Notably brutal was the massacre of civilians at Drogheda in 1649. With Ireland subdued, Cromwell returned to England, making land on 27 May 1650. In honour of the event, the poet Andrew Marvell penned ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return From Ireland’. Marvell’s loyalty had switched from the king to the Commonwealth, and the poem is supremely ambiguous. It opens:

  The forward Youth that would appear

  Must now forsake his Muses dear,

  Nor in the Shadows sing

  His Numbers languishing.

  ’Tis time to leave the Books in dust,