And oyl th’unused Armours rust:
Removing from the Wall
The Corslet of the Hall.
So restless Cromwell could not cease
In the inglorious Arts of Peace,
But through adventrous War
Urged his active Star.
And, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first
Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst,
Did through his own Side
His fiery way divide.
For ’tis all one to Courage high,
The Emulous or Enemy;
And with such, to inclose
Is more than to oppose.
Then burning through the Air he went,
And Pallaces and Temples rent …
Is this praise (comparing Cromwell to the spear that mortified Christ, and the destroyer of ‘Temples’)? Is it awe? Or is it subtly veiled criticism? Being literature it can, of course, be all three. Cromwell’s reaction to the poem is not recorded.
28 May
The first Hay Festival
1988 In Britain, literary festivals tended, until the late 20th century, to be both local and parochial – the kinds of things that took place in church halls. By the turn of the century, they had become big business, with between 150 and 200 major events attracting tens of thousands of visitors, commercial sponsorship, and strong interest from the book trade.
The Cheltenham Literary Festival began, in a small way, in 1949, as the offshoot of a longer-running (since 1926) arts festival. It claims to be the ‘longest running festival of its kind’ in the world. Cheltenham, a favoured spa resort, has a proud literary heritage (there are plaques to the two laureates, Tennyson and Cecil Day-Lewis, and other notables visible on the town’s fine 18th-century architecture).
Hay-on-Wye (Y Gelli Gandryll) is a much less obvious site for a major literary festival. The village is perched, uneasily, on the English–Welsh border, a universe away from the London literary world. Hay lost its railway connection in 1963, dooming it to Brigadoon status. The population is under 2,000.
Nonetheless, in the early 1970s, Hay became the world’s first ‘book town’. This was largely the initiative of the bibliophile Richard Booth, who had retired to Hay in 1961 to open a second-hand bookshop – more in the nature of a warehouse, as it turned out. Booth’s store was advertised as the largest of its kind anywhere, and attracted a stream of book-lovers to Hay. Booth’s motto was: ‘You buy books from all over the world and your customers come from all over the world.’ Some 40 other bookshops (one for every 30-odd residents) sprang up to cater for these customers.
On 1 April 1977, Booth declared Hay an ‘independent kingdom’ and appointed himself its monarch. As intended, the stunt attracted huge publicity. In 1988 two locals, Norman Florence and his son Peter Florence, launched Hay’s literary festival. They did so with the £23,000 winnings that Norman had picked up playing poker.
The first Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival ran from 28–31 May. There were 35 events. Around 1,200 people (many village people) attended. Highlights were a one-man show on Wilfred Owen by Peter Florence (then an actor) and readings by Carol Ann Duffy and Arnold Wesker. Payments at Hay, for all but stellar performers, have traditionally been in kind – usually wine, donated by some well-intentioned local merchant.
The essence of the festival from the beginning was to bring writers and their public together. Over the years, Peter Florence took over as director. Attendance had swelled to an estimated 80,000 (with 120,000 ticket sales) by the 20th anniversary festival in 2007.
It had, by this point, become a powerful engine to sell books as much as to cultivate the intimacies of literary community. At the 2007 event, Bill Clinton (no passed-on bottle of plonk for him, but a reputed £100,000) called the Hay Festival a ‘Woodstock for the mind’. He was there, tramping through the mud, to promote his (allegedly ghosted) autobiography.
Margaret Drabble – who had been one of the pioneer visitors in 1988 – complained to one of the festival sponsors, the Independent newspaper, vowing that 2007 would be her ‘last Hay’:
It’s a pity. The whole thing has become a celebrity festival, not an author’s festival. Of course there are some very fine writers there this year. But the whole thing of festivals has become about book sales and marketing, nothing to do with meeting readers. They argue that if they’re selling your book then you don’t get a fee. But I like to get a fee unless I choose to be a patron or a friend which I am to one or two small festivals. I don’t want £100K and I don’t see why Bill Clinton did, and he’s not an author.
Back to the church hall, in other words.
29 May
H.G. Wells publishes his first (timeless) ‘scientific romance’
1895 H.G. Wells’s career took its distinctive turn when, aged eighteen, he won a government scholarship to the Normal School of Science in Kensington, and was released from the dreary prospect of working as a counter-jumper in a drapery emporium (a period of his life commemorated in his cockney comedy, Kipps).
At the NSC, young Wells (‘Bertie’) came under the influence of T.H. Huxley – ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. The Origin of Species (published seven years before Wells was born) became the young Wells’s bible. Wells did not, however, excel in his classes. He was too preoccupied with writing in the student journal: notably an early version of The Time Machine called, unsexily, The Chronic Argonauts.
Had he worked at his lessons, Wells would probably have become a middlingly successful scientist. But where his genius (as opposed to his talent) lay was in absorbing the scientific discoveries currently being thrown up and imaginatively repackaging them for the unscientific masses.
What form should that package take? Wells was initially unsure. The Time Machine began as a series of plodding explanatory essays. But he soon realised that audiences prefer stories to lectures. Thus his career, and its hundred books, began.
Time travel had been a favourite motif of imaginative literature long before the youthful Wells’s chronic fantasies. The weak point in the scenario, however, was how you actually get into the future, or the past. A favourite technique was that of Bunyan, in The Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘I dreamed a Dream’. Two imaginative works that influenced The Time Machine use this device: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Both have protagonists who fall asleep and, like Rip van Winkle, mysteriously wake up in the far future.
Morris and Bellamy were proto-socialists, and congenial to young Wells. But there was something fundamentally lame in the dream-vision gimmick. Another early title for his story was ‘The Time Traveller’. But finally he settled on The Time Machine. The mechanics of the story were all-important.
What, precisely, is the machine? Wells does not give a detailed description, other than that it has a saddle and a triangular frame, and some mysterious crystals propelling it. Clearly it is a version of the bicycle.
A bicycle capable of whizzing along the fourth dimension is as implausible as Doc Brown’s flux-capacitor-boosted De Lorean DMC-12 in the Back to the Future movie series (one of the innumerable offspring of The Time Machine). But Wells’s bejewelled roadster makes the point that, if we ever do cross the time-barrier, technology – not slumber – will get us there. On his journey into the future, the traveller has adventures in 702581, at which point in time humanity has bifurcated (as some feared it had in the 1890s) into ultra-aesthetic, Wildean-decadent Eloi, and fearsomely proletarian Morlocks. The traveller makes two trips even further into the future, and witnesses the imminent heat death of the solar system.
The two direct inspirations for The Time Machine were, firstly, an article by Simon Newcomb (which the traveller mentions in his initial exposition to his friends) published in Nature, 1894. Newcomb, one of the country’s leading mathematicians, argued that, ‘as a perfectly legitimate exercise of thought’, we should admit the possibility of objects existing in a fourth dimension – time. Wells undertook just such an exercise.
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The other scientific validation of his story for Wells was a lecture by T.H. Huxley in the same year, 1894, in which the author’s mentor made the supremely pessimistic point that ‘our globe has been in a state of fusion, and, like the sun, is gradually cooling down … the time will come when evolution will mean an adaptation to universal winter, and all forms of life will die out … if for millions of years our globe has taken the upward road, yet some time the summit will be reached and the downward road will be commenced.’
After serialisation, The Time Machine was published by Heinemann on 29 May 1895 (around the period that Wilde was being martyrised by the Morlock-philistines). The book has been in print ever since.
30 May
Dramatist Christopher Marlowe is murdered in Deptford, London: assassination or drunken brawl?
1595 He was stabbed through the eye in a tavern. Was he killed for his outrageous lifestyle? Assassinated as a state spy gone rogue? Or, more prosaically, was he just the victim of a drunken brawl over a ‘trull’? The issue is still undecided to this day. He was 29.
Seen by many as Shakespeare’s closest rival, Christopher Marlowe may be said to have invented the English history play with Edward II (first performed some time before 1594), which examined the conflict between private favour and the public responsibilities of kingship. Before that, his Tamburlaine the Great (first performed, 1587) had explored the amorality of power, while The Jew of Malta (1592) dramatised the struggle between a vengeful Jew and greedy, hypocritical Christians, and Dr Faustus (1594) questioned how far a man could go to reinvent himself beyond the confines of good and evil as conventionally understood.
Which is to say that Marlowe’s plays tested the boundaries of conventional moral thinking, especially about the pleasures of winning and wielding power, and the relative weakness of those who would redress its wrongs.
But the notoriety of his plays was nothing compared to the scandal of Marlowe’s life. Encouraged by his own outrageous self-advertising, his contemporaries invented him as a bad-boy in the convention of the Romantics, long before that literary and philosophical movement was dreamt of. Rumour had it that he was an atheist. He was almost certainly homosexual. ‘All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’, he is famously supposed to have said.
Today no one really knows what to believe about his life, so literary theory has taken over, assigning Marlowe’s notoriety to that tradition of licensed misrule allowed on the South Bank, safely across the river from London, and site of the city’s theatres, brothels and bear-baiting arenas.
Licensed misrule serves, by contrast, to define the social and political norms of the establishment. To add to the mystery, recent scholarship suggests that Marlowe may have been borrowed from his studies at Cambridge to act as a spy posing as a Catholic to entrap other Catholics plotting against the Elizabethan settlement1. If this is correct, we may never know ‘what side of the law he was on’, whether his death was plotted or merely chaotic.
1 See Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
31 May
Evelyn Waugh looks on as No. 3 Commando blow up a tree for Lord Glasgow
1942 Did the serio-comedy of Apthorpe’s exploding thunder-box in Waugh’s Men at Arms (1952) have any source in reality? A letter the author wrote to his wife Laura on this day offers a clue. Waugh was stationed at Largs, Ayrshire, near Lord Glasgow’s estate, with No. 3 Commando, commanded by John Durnford-Slater. Some of them (not Waugh) had just returned from a raid on the Lofoten Islands. Now they were cooling their heels.
Let the author himself take over the narrative. The precision of his diction and syntax (the punctuation alone rewards close scrutiny), his comic timing and his skill at saving the best for last, as in a good joke, make it clear why Waugh has qualified as the 20th century’s best English stylist:
So No. 3 Cmdo were very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and he said dont spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so that it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion. So Col. Durnford-Slater, D.S.O. said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree. Yes, sir, 75 lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir. …
So soon the[y] let the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole of the young plantation.
And the subaltern said Sir I made a mistake, it should have been 7½ pounds not 75.
Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.
So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry & ran to hide his emotion in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.
1 June
Sydney Smith defends his style as the model English clergyman
1820 ‘The Chancellor is quite right about political sermons’, he wrote to his friend, the Whig peer Lord Holland, ‘and in this I have erred; but I have a right to preach on general principles of toleration and the fault is not mine if the congregation apply my doctrines to passing events.’ These ‘passing events’ included the abolition of the slave trade and the issue of Catholic emancipation. He was for both.
Thus the Reverend Sydney Smith, the essayist, reformer, farmer and popular lecturer on moral philosophy, the man who thought up the Edinburgh Review, and the man who asked: ‘In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?’ Here, though, he was holding his fire; he loathed the reactionary chancellor, John Scott (later Earl of Eldon), whom he would later describe as ‘a cunning canting old Rogue’.
Smith loved London, where his best (and best-connected) friends lived – loved its gossip and good conversation – but when the Residence Act of 1808 made his living in Foston-le-Clay, in Yorkshire, conditional on his actually living there (instead of sending a curate to fill his place), he made the best of it, spending £4,000 on refurbishing the house and farm buildings where there had been no resident clergyman for 150 years, and (as he wrote in this same letter) playing ‘my part in the usual manner, as doctor, justice, road-maker, pacifist, preacher, farmer, neighbor, and diner-out’.
‘If I can mend my fortunes’, he added, ‘I shall be very glad; if I cannot, I shall be not be very sorry.’ Later he would go through the same process at the other end of the country, in Combe Florey, Somerset: doctoring, preaching, farming and rebuilding the rectory, just 200 yards away from the house in which Evelyn Waugh was later to spend the last decade of his life.
2 June
Thomas Hardy is born, dies, and is reborn
1840 Thomas Hardy, the chronicler of Wessex, was born on this day, the son of a stonemason, Thomas Hardy Sr., in a thatched artisan’s cottage (commemorated in Hardy’s teenage poem, ‘Domicilium’) some three miles from Dorchester (‘Casterbridge’ in the later novels). He was the first child, born five months after his parents’ wedding – ‘prematurely’, as the polite fiction was.
He may well have been legitimately premature. On its birth the puny infant was observed to be still-born. The body was put aside for Christian disposal. It was the quick-witted midwife, Lizzie Downton (clearly not a nurse of the Sairey Gamp school), who detected a noise from the child and rescued it from premature burial.
Hardy was struck by the ‘irony’ of his birth, death, rebirth. Premature, still-born babies feature in his fiction (notably Tess’s offspring ‘Sorrow’) and in one of the most bitter of his poems, ‘In the Cemetery’:
‘You see those mothers squabbling there?’
Remarks
the man of the cemetery.
‘One says in tears, “’Tis mine lies here!”
Another, “Nay, mine, you Pharisee!”
Another, “How dare you move my flowers
And put your own on this grave of ours!”
But all their children were laid therein
At different times, like sprats in a tin.
‘And then the main drain had to cross,
And we moved the lot some nights ago,
And packed them away in the general foss
With hundreds more. But their folks don’t know,
And as well cry over a new-laid drain
As anything else, to ease your pain!’
Hardy is commemorated by a tablet in Westminster Abbey (where his bodily ashes were interred) and in his local churchyard at Stinsford (where his heart is interred).
There is, alas, no memorial to the midwife Lizzie Downton – one of the great forgotten donors to Victorian literature.
3 June
Enoch’s melancholy return
1997 The wittiest fantasia on the ‘decadent’ fin de siècle is Max Beerbohm’s short story, ‘Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties’. A doomed poet (doomed less by genius and debauchery than utter mediocrity), steeped in absinthe and feeble depravity, Enoch sells his soul to the devil. He does so in return for a diabolic passport that will enable him to visit the Round Reading Room of the British Museum, 100 years after his death, to relish what he is confident will be posthumous fame, on the basis of his slim volumes Negations and Fungoids. His soul is a small price to pay. The narrator (Beerbohm himself) gives a sample of Enoch’s verse, commemorating his Faustian pact:
NOCTURNE
Round and round the shutter’d Square
I strolled with the Devil’s arm in mine.
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