No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.
We had drunk black wine.
I scream’d, ‘I will race you, Master!’
‘What matter,’ he shriek’d, ‘to-night
Which of us runs the faster?
There is nothing to fear to-night
In the foul moon’s light!’
Then I look’d him in the eyes
And I laugh’d full shrill at the lie he told
And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.
It was true, what I’d time and again been told:
He was old – old.
Not much has changed in the library, AD 1997, Enoch discovers, when he makes his trip into the future. It’s a bit like H.G. Wells’s far future in The Time Machine: egg-hairless people, all wearing woollen ‘sanitary’ uniforms and as indistinguishable from each other as battery chicks.
Enoch’s time-trip turns out disastrously. After a desperate scour of the catalogues, the only reference to himself he can discover is on page 234 of ‘Inglish Littracher 1890–1900 bi T.K. Nupton, publishd bi th Stait, 1992’, where he reads that:
a riter ov th time, naimed Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive in th twentith senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld ‘Enoch Soames’ – a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im! It iz a sumwot labud sattire, but not without vallu az showing hou seriusli the yung men ov th aiteen-ninetiz took themselvz.
Enoch Soames, that is, survives as a fictional character in ‘Enoch Soames’. Trapped in the text: Jacques Derrida could not invent it.
Enoch Soames Day, 3 June 1997, was celebrated in the magnificent Round Reading Room – where Karl Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and innumerable Soamesian literary forgettables had worked, but neglected to make any deal with the Prince of Darkness for their return. Soames himself was eagerly looked for, but did not appear. He would, as the story predicts, have recognised the magnificently unchanged structure: the brainpan of the nation, as Thackeray called it.
A year later, that structure ceased to exist when, in June 1998, the new St Pancras site opened and the old ‘RRR’ was converted into a tourist canteen and souvenir boutique area. Some cynics alleged (and most Soamesians would like to think) that the removal was deliberately delayed – so that the luckless Enoch would not land in a building site. There was enough disappointment awaiting him without that.
4 June
Perón becomes president. Borges becomes an inspector of chickens
1946 The 47-year-old Jorge Luis Borges was, by this date, internationally famous and widely read abroad. His own background was cosmopolitan. Born in Buenos Aires, the son of a well-off and cultivated lawyer, Jorge was educated in Switzerland and Spain. English was spoken, alongside Spanish, in his family (throughout his life, Borges had a fierce love of Anglo-Saxon literature).
Borges returned to Argentina in his early twenties. Already a published poet (of the ‘Ultraist’ modernist school), he took up day-work in Buenos Aires as a cataloguer in the national library system (an image of which would recur in his later ‘fictions’ – see, e.g., ‘The Library of Babel’, 1941). Already Borges’s eyes were failing. It was a family weakness, and had blinded his father.
On 4 June 1946 Juan Perón was elected president – effectively dictator – of Argentina. Perón established himself as the leader of the decamisados (the shirtless ones – i.e., the masses) and set in process a programme of aggressive socialism, using the tactics of 1930s fascism.
Borges, like many intellectuals, opposed ‘Perónismo’ and imprudently made his opposition known. On Perón’s assuming office he was dismissed from his library position and reappointed ‘poultry inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market’. He resigned – as was intended. For the next eight years he and his family suffered persecution and some physical threat. On Perón’s being deposed in 1955, Borges was appointed director of the National Library. It was, as he noted, a supreme irony since he was, sadly, wholly blind, and could see neither books nor chickens.
5 June
Daring novelist dies, no longer daring
1920 Rhoda Broughton, who died on this day, wrote her own wry epitaph: ‘I began my career as Zola, I finish it as Miss Yonge’ (the latter reference was to Charlotte M. Yonge, 1823–1901, the Tractarian Movement spinster novelist, the embodiment of every Anglican decency).
Broughton, a Victorian bestseller, is undeservedly forgotten and unread by posterity. Born in 1840, she was the daughter of a clergyman, the granddaughter of a baronet, and distantly the niece of the Irish novelist, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (who encouraged her career).
Much of her childhood was spent in an Elizabethan manor house in Staffordshire, which supplied the setting for much of her fiction. Its well-stocked library, and much spare time, rendered her better-read than most of the women writers of her time.
Orphaned in her early twenties, and following a disastrous disappointment in love, Broughton went to live with relatives in Oxford. Here it was she became a favourite of Mark Pattison – the original of Casaubon in Middlemarch – whom she skewered, even more neatly (and more wittily) than George Eliot, with her depiction of the goaty old academic as ‘Professor Forth’ in Belinda (1883).
By this point in her career, Broughton had made her name, and her fortune, with steamy (for the time) and daring romances such as Cometh up as a Flower (1867), Not Wisely but too Well (1867), Red as a Rose is She (1870), and Goodbye Sweetheart (1872). They are everything their titles may suggest – but they were huge favourites with the three-volume, romance-addicted patrons of Mudie’s and W.H. Smith’s circulating libraries. She was, at this period of her life, in the elite £1,000-a-title class of Victorian writer. Six weeks, she calculated, was all that was needed for her sprightly bestsellers.
Alas the bulk of her readers died long before she did (of cancer, aged 80), and although she wrote to the end, she was regarded at best as a charming, but somewhat dusty, Victorian literary antique. Zola and even Miss Yonge (who has two very active societies dedicated to her fiction in London) have both fared better.
6 June
Wallace Stevens writes to the editor of Poetry allowing her to change his most famous poem – for the worse
1915 ‘Dear Miss Monroe’, Stevens wrote to the already legendary founder editor of Poetry magazine, a force (usually for good) in the campaign for American modern – and modernist – poetry:
Provided your selection of the numbers of Sunday Morning is printed in the following order: I, VIII, IV, V, I see no objection to cutting down. The order is necessary to the idea.
I was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, am thirty-five years old, a lawyer, reside in New-York [sic] and have published no books.
Clearly Mr Nobody from Reading, PA didn’t need such careful handling as Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, whose work would also appear in that same issue of Poetry, Vol. 2, No. 7 (November 1915). In the event, Harriet Monroe accepted the forced arrangement, while disastrously allowing him a further stanza – VII in the canonical version – to end on. It’s the least good segment of the poem as we know it, and certainly doesn’t belong at the end, since it’s a young man’s exotic fantasy of what might take the place of conventional religion:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant an orgy on a summer morn …
‘Sunday Morning’ begins with a woman enjoying ‘Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair’, musing on the ‘holy hush of ancient sacrifice’ that Sunday commemorates in the Christian faith. The poem is a hedonist’s meditation on what lives after death, when the standard religious consolations no longer engage the imagination.
The answer, after seven stanzas – almost movements – is to relish change, the ‘Passions of rain, or moods of falling snow … Elations when the forest blooms; gusty / Emotions on wet roads on a
utumn nights; / All pleasures and all pain …’ – to take pleasure in the short-livedness of beauty.
The eighth ‘movement’ restates the predicament and its solution:
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness on extended wings.
Or rather, in stating the predicament it demonstrates the solution. With such a powerful complex of images – with modifiers like ‘spontaneous’, ‘isolation’ and ‘ambiguous’ restating the lack of a conventional ‘divine’ plan, and with the near-rhyme of ‘make’, ‘sink’, ‘wings’ reinforcing the expressive rhythm caught in those heavy stresses on ‘DOWNward’ and ‘DARKness’ – the predicament becomes a pleasurable aesthetic experience in itself, proving and enacting the consolation argued discursively earlier in the poem.
That’s why it needed to come at the end of ‘Sunday Morning’, and why it was a shame that Stevens had to put it second (after the woman in her peignoir) as a way of getting the poem into print. Fortunately it reverted to its original form in his first collection, Harmonium (1923), and has stayed like that ever since.
7 June
Washington Irving greets his native land after seventeen years living abroad
1832 Born in Manhattan in 1783, Washington Irving was to become the first American author to be read avidly on both sides of the Atlantic. He couldn’t have got there by staying at home. So he took off for Europe, where he introduced himself to Walter Scott and others, and stayed on for seventeen years. His literary speciality was turning Europe’s folklore and historiography into short stories and sketches of popular history, like The Sketch Book (1819–20), the History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and Tales of the Alhambra (1832).
By the time he returned to the US in 1832 he was an internationally bestselling author, and such a celebrity that he was given a formal banquet in New York on this day. In his thank-you speech after dinner he seemed anxious to allay any doubts about his willingness to return to, or remain in, his native land:
It has been asked, ‘Can I be content to live in this country?’ … What sacrifice of enjoyments have I to reconcile myself to? I come from gloomier climes to one of brilliant sunshine and inspiring purity. I come from countries lowering with doubt and danger, where the rich man trembles and the poor man frowns – where all repine at the present and dread the future. … I am asked how long I mean to remain here? … I answer, as long as I live.
Next day, 8 June, the speech was printed in the New York Mirror. By 11 June a copy had got as far west as Franklin, Michigan, just west of Detroit, where a hard-working English immigrant called John Fisher wrote to his brothers who had stayed behind in Suffolk: ‘I have left England and its gloomy climes for one of brilliant sunshine and inspiring purity. I have left the country cowering with doubt and danger, where the rich man trembels and the poor man frowns’ – and so on, right through Irving’s speech, virtually word for word.
Irving stayed at home and turned his attention to western lore and history, like A Tour on the Prairies (1835; see 27 January). So persuasive (and pervasive) was Irving’s rhetoric that Fisher too stuck it out, though he died soon after 1840, exhausted by clearing over 100 acres of land in eight years.
8 June
Mr Higginson gets a letter from Miss Dickinson
1862 He was the militant abolitionist and champion of women’s rights, the soldier-scholar about to lead the first regiment of freed slaves to fight in the Union army. She was developing into the greatest lyric poet of the 19th century – some would say of any century.
In April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had published a ‘Letter to a Young Contributor’ in The Atlantic Monthly, offering encouragements that even then must have been wildly optimistic. ‘The real interests of editor and writer are absolutely the same’, he wrote, and ‘the supposed editorial prejudice against new or obscure contributors’ is quite without foundation in reality. ‘On the contrary, every editor is always hungering and thirsting after novelties.’
Utopian or not, such blandishments were enough to encourage the 32-year-old Emily Dickinson to write to their author, enclosing four of her poems, prefaced by the shy question: ‘Are you too occupied to say if my verse is alive?’ Among the enclosures was one of her best, of which this is the first of two stanzas. The poem’s negation of the departed townsfolk’s pious hopes is devastating:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone.
Struck by (as he would later write) this ‘wholly new and original poetic genius’, Higginson encouraged, offered some technical suggestions and asked for more. She wrote again, with more samples of her work, and he responded with increasing enthusiasm. On 8 June he received a third letter, this one ‘in a different mood’:
DEAR FRIEND, – your letter gave no drunkenness, because I tasted rum before. Domingo comes but once, yet I have had few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue.
It ended: ‘will you be my preceptor, Mr Higginson?’ Yes, he would – military and moral campaigns allowing – and his friendship would underpin her confidence until his death.
9 June
Dickens’s heroism at the Staplehurst rail accident
1865 On 9 June 1865, the 2.38 pm ‘tidal’ train, carrying ferry passengers from France, thundered through the Kent countryside towards London. Charles Dickens, incognito, was in a private first-class carriage with his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother (strange, but true). In the rack above the antimacassars was Dickens’s surtout (a frock coat – he was a renowned dandy). Stuffed into its pocket was the manuscript of the next instalment of Our Mutual Friend, currently being serialised. All England was agog for what was written on those pages (the breakfast scene between the Boffins and the Lammles, as it happened).
It was touch and go as to whether Our Mutual Friend would go the way of Edwin Drood, into eternal incompleteness. At 50mph the train hurtled into an unrepaired viaduct at Staplehurst and flew off the rails. Warning signs had not been erected. All the first-class carriages, except Dickens’s, fell to the river bed far below, killing the passengers. His was suspended, precariously, between life and death. Dickens, ingeniously using workmen’s planks, rescued his two Ternan ladies. Once they were safe, he returned to the dangling carriage to rescue – at the risk of his life – his coat and, most importantly, the manuscript. Greater love hath no author.
Having taken care of his own, Dickens walked among the corpses, helping the injured. Biographers assume, plausibly, that he never quite recovered from this event. His son recalls him turning pale during later journeys. At the time, his main concern was that the press should not report who his travelling companions were: which they did not.
Dickens wrote a whimsical ‘postscript in lieu of a preface’ to Our Mutual Friend, commemorating his brush with the grim reaper:
On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year, Mr and Mrs Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage – nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn – to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella Wilfer on her wedding day, and Mr Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone’s red neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written agai
nst my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book:—THE END. September 2nd, 1865.
10 June
Registering a new word every 98 minutes, the vocabulary of English reaches one million words, more than the sum of Italian, French, Spanish and German combined
2009 At least that’s according to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), a website managed by a group of computer scientists using what they call an ‘algorithm’ to ‘crawl the web’ in search of new words. And the millionth English word? It was a close-run thing, with ‘Web 2.0’ beating ‘slumdog’ by a whisker.
Interviewed on BBC TV’s Newsnight on the evening of 10 June, the English-usage expert Professor David Crystal called the GLM’s ‘English Language World Clock’ ‘the biggest pile of chicken droppings ever’. Crystal estimates that English already has around 1.5 million words, 70 per cent of them scientific or technical.
At least 1.5 billion people speak the language, whether in its standard form or one of its local dialects. This is a bit like the Latin spoken in the Roman empire, with a formal level on top and a number of variants at the spoken level, which later diverged into Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish and so on.
Why so many words, though? Crystal says because of England’s and Scotland’s early lead in science. Language follows power, he says, and English was the language of an empire. That’s the imperial model. But the strength of English lies also in its openness to new influences. There is no cultural resistance to neologisms – no ‘academy’, as in France, to rule for or against new words.
This may have as much to do with weakness as imperial might. Contrary to the mythology of an island fortress, Britain has been invaded again and again, by peoples laying down linguistic layers from the Celtic languages, through Latin, Anglo-Saxon (a form of German) and Danish, to French, which came in with the Norman conquest and quickly became the language spoken at court, while ordinary people carried on in Anglo-Saxon.
Love, Sex, Death and Words Page 27