Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  So English has a rich redundancy of vocabulary – more words than needed to get through the day – in which to express tone as well as bare content. Thanks to the Norman invasion (see 14 October), we use words derived from French for ‘cooked’ and cultivated things, Anglo- Saxon for ‘raw’ and natural. We raise pigs and cows and sheep, but eat pork and beef and mutton.

  Poets too can speak plainly of shady caves or – if they want to be posh – umbrageous grots, blue sky or the azure firmament. Chaucer was the first great English writer to exploit this double vocabulary of official French and informal vernacular. Here is the beginning of ‘The Knight’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales:

  Whilom [once], as olde stories tellen us

  Ther was a duc that highte [was called] Theseus;

  Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,

  And in his tymes swich [such] a conquerour,

  That gretter [greater] was ther noon under the sonne.

  And this is the start of ‘The Miller’s Tale’, the antimasque, or ironic companion piece, to ‘The Knight’s Tale’:

  Whilom ther was dwellynge at Oxenford

  A rich gnof [lout] that gestes [guests] held to bord,

  And of his craft he was a carpenter.

  Or even better, how about the endings of the two tales?

  And thus with alle blisse and melodye

  Hath Palamon ywedde Emelye. …

  And he hire [her] serveth so gentilly,

  That nevere was ther no word hem [them] between

  Of jalousie or any other teene [trouble].

  Thus endeth Palamon and Emelye;

  And God save all this faire compaignye!

  Amen.

  ‘The Knight’s Tale’

  Thus swyved [fucked] was this carpenteris wyf,

  For all his kepyng [caution] and his jalousie;

  And Absolon hath kist her nether ye [eye];

  And Nicholas is scalded in the towte [arse].

  This tale is doon, and God save all the rowte [crowd]!

  ‘The Miller’s Tale’

  11 June

  Owen Wister sets the scene for the western movie – literally

  1891 Great literature or not, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) is generally credited as the story that gave the movies their idea of the western – its protagonist, the soft-spoken cowboy who brings law and order to an American frontier town, the model for that universal hero played by Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Alan Ladd, Henry Fonda, Clint Eastwood and many others.

  What’s less known is that Wister may also have given Hollywood the idea for the typical frontier town – that dusty jumble of board fronts (and boardwalks) meandering between one or two more substantial stone or brick buildings like a bank.

  On his visit to Wyoming and Yellowstone Park in the summer of 1891 – the journey that decided him to write about the West – he described the town of Douglas, Wyoming. And since his journal is so often fresher, more direct and less studied than The Virginian, it’s worth quoting from the relevant entry, for 11 June:

  The Town …is a hasty litter of flat board houses standing at all angles, with the unreal look of stage scenery. … On a bottom bench of sand and sage above the town, a large brick schoolhouse that will mostly be empty as long as it lasts … The town reminds you of a card town, so aimless and insubstantial it seems … There are no mines here. Farming is impossible. … There was absolutely nothing that could possibly make Douglas a real place.

  Wister got it right: the town is now all but abandoned. Once the terminus of a railroad, Douglas stands ‘like a pillar of salt’, now that the terminus has moved 50 miles west. But following the strange logic of the western, Hollywood replicates the town’s physical appearance while repopulating it with children, schoolmarms, sheriffs, easy women and bartenders – without ever hinting at the economic underpinning of all this activity. It’s not mining. It’s not farming. It’s not even ranching, since not a blade of grass grows in the desert roundabout for the cattle to nibble on.

  12 June

  Conrad enters the Heart of Darkness

  1890 In his ‘personal record’, published in 1912, Joseph Conrad recalls ‘imagining Africa’ in his childhood (he was then Teodor Korzeniowski, living with his exiled Polish family in Russia):

  It was in 1868, when nine years or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now:

  ‘When I grow up I shall go there.’

  Conrad was 33 years grown up when he finally entered the white space of the heart-shaped ‘dark continent’. He had the year before received his only command as a (British) mariner and – while on shore – had begun writing his first novel, Almayer’s Folly. In May 1890, he made his first visit to Poland in sixteen years. It was a period of multiple transitions for him. He was between careers, between countries, in the middle years of his life.

  The circumstances that brought him to the Belgian Congo in June 1890 are explained in a letter to his uncle Aleksander:

  I am now more less under contract to the ‘Société Belge du Haut Congo’ to be master of one of its river steamers … when [they] will send me to Africa, I do not yet know; it will probably be in May [1890].

  As Zdzislaw Najder, the editor of Conrad’s Congo Diary, records:

  Conrad’s stay in Congo (12 June–4 December 1890) is one of the most important periods of his life … He left Europe full of energy and thrilling expectations, with ideas about a ‘civilizing mission’. He returned gravely ill, never to regain fully his good health, disillusioned, with memories to be used later in his most famous story, Heart of Darkness.

  Conrad put it more trenchantly. Before he went to the Congo he was, he said, an ‘animal’. The experience made him a human being – and, one might speculate, the novelist he later became.

  Conrad’s Congo experience is, thinly veiled (with careful anonymities as to employers and employees of the Société Belge du Haut Congo), transmuted into Charlie Marlow’s experiences in Heart of Darkness, published (serially) in Blackwood’s Magazine nine years later.

  The work is, as Najder says, his most ‘famous’. Arguably concentration on it has siphoned off attention to other, full-length works (such as Nostromo) which, literary criticism would aver, are even worthier of attention than this novella. Over the last 30 years, however, Heart of Darkness has become notorious as well as famous. For decades in the 20th century the work was prescribed as an exemplary text on the iniquities of racism, as filtered through Conrad’s liberal sensitivity. This comfortable view was contradicted, violently, by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, initially in a lecture at Amherst College on 18 February 1975, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’. ‘Conrad’, Achebe observed:

  was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Anglican missionaries were arriving among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrad’s attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing:

  A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.

  Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers.

  Conrad, Achebe concluded, was, on the evidence of Heart of Darkness, a ‘bloody racist’.

  Achebe’s revisionist verdict provoked critical disagreement, fierce defences of Conrad’s integrity, and, for the novel itself, an ambiguous place in the standard ‘Great Books’ courses in Britain
and America. In one of the periodic outbursts of student rebellion at Stanford University in the 1980s, one placard read: ‘Read Heart of Darkness; Get your Racist Education here.’

  13 June

  Charles A. Lindbergh receives a ticker-tape reception as he parades down 5th Avenue, New York

  1927 He had become the most famous man in the world overnight, this former airmail pilot who had flown solo and non-stop from Long Island to Paris. Now he was getting the city’s traditional welcome for conquering heroes. Fame had its dangers, though. In 1932 the Lindberghs’ infant son was kidnapped and never returned alive. The enormous publicity surrounding the crime and trial drove them to Europe.

  While there, Lindbergh was asked by the US military to assess the strength of the Luftwaffe. He visited German aircraft factories and airfields, flew planes, met Göring, and generally concluded that the Nazis were well ahead of the US in both design and production. On Hitler’s orders, Göring presented him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, a white cross adorned with four little swastikas.

  Back in the States, Lindbergh, convinced that Jewish financiers and the Jewish media were tricking America into a European war, became a prominent spokesman for the America First movement. After Pearl Harbor he worked as a private citizen, advising aircraft manufacturers on design, and later flew over 50 combat missions in the Pacific.

  This mixture of heroism and absurdity gave Philip Roth the idea for a stunning what if novel. What if Lindbergh had campaigned for the presidency, and won in 1940, instead of Roosevelt securing his third term? Above all, how would a Lindbergh government play in the predominantly Jewish Weequahic district of Newark, New Jersey, where Roth was brought up? The Plot Against America (2004) interweaves public events with the fortunes of the Roth family, and so manages to be a touching memoir of childhood as much as a political thriller.

  At first the anti-Semitism is just petty and personal, however painful. The family visit Washington, where a local calls them ‘loud-mouth Jews’ for defending Roosevelt, and they are turned out of their hotel. Then the ‘Office of American Absorption’ revives the 1862 Homestead Act to disperse Jewish families from ‘ghettos’ like the Weequahic district to wholesome towns in Wyoming and Kentucky.

  Things begin to hot up elsewhere, finally in Newark and the family home. The legendary anti-fascist radio commentator Walter Winchell decides to run for president. His speeches cause riots all over the country. Finally he is shot in the head by an American Nazi. But when Mayor Fiorella La Guardia speaks his eulogy at Temple Emanu-El, New York, the tide begins to turn. To tell how and why would spoil the suspense for the first-time reader. Let’s just say that however farfetched, the fiction is underpinned by Roth’s grasp on family memories and national history.

  14 June

  William Brazel comes across a ‘large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks’ while working on the Foster homestead, near Roswell, New Mexico

  1947 Shortly after the Second World War, many Americans began to see things in the sky that accelerated to greater speeds, and changed direction more suddenly, than any known aircraft could manage. By day these were silver and disc-shaped; by night they appeared as lights, often flying in formation. The majority of sightings were in the southwest of the country, but the unidentified flying objects, or UFOs for short, were seen almost everywhere, including Washington DC, where a group of lights was photographed and tracked on radar, supposedly accelerating from 100 to 7,200 miles per hour.

  Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, it’s now clear that at least some of these mystery sightings came from the US military testing advanced airframes and systems, some based on designs developed in Germany during the war. But at the time, the government’s reluctance to come clean bred a whole new branch of the entertainment industry feeding, and feeding on, paranoid fantasies that the authorities were covering up news of invasions from outer space.

  Cack-handed military public relations tended to ratchet up the tension. Take Brazel’s discovery, for example. At first intelligence officers from the Air Force base at Roswell allowed that they might be the wreck of a UFO, then quickly changed their minds to identify the remains of a weather balloon with a hexagonal radar reflector attached – which (judging by the materials) it almost certainly was.

  Changing the story was a mistake. Whatever could ‘they’ be hiding? Before long the story got around that a complete flying saucer had been retrieved from the desert site, and even that bodies of aliens had been dug out of the wreckage, one of which was taken away for an autopsy. The government responded that they had conducted a number of high-altitude experiments using dummies to test the effect of falls and decompression. The darkest version of this theory, as set out in Nick Redfern’s Body Snatchers in the Desert, is that the ‘dummies’ had been Japanese prisoners of war being used to assess the effects of radiation and decompression.1

  The Roswell story was kept alive by a more-or-less unbroken stream of books, as well as documentary reports and other coverage on cable channels like Sci-Fi and Discovery. Fictional spin-offs included TV series like Dark Skies (1996–97) and Roswell (1999–2003), in which alien survivors of the crash take human form and live as teenagers in Roswell, and the evergreen The X-Files, which ran for just under a decade from 1993 to 2002.

  1 Nick Redfern, Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, New York: Paraview, 2005.

  15 June

  The ball before the cannon balls flew

  1815 The most famous ball in literature was that thrown (historically) in Brussels, on this day, the eve of what would be the Battle of Waterloo. It was given by the Duchess of Richmond for her son. The event was first immortalised in Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

  There was a sound of revelry by night,

  And Belgium’s capital had gathered then

  Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright

  The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

  A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

  Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

  Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again,

  And all went merry as a marriage-bell;

  But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

  What is the deep sound? Not the wind, but the cannon’s roar.

  In his 1843 novel, Charles O’Malley, the Irish novelist Charles Lever made the ball the centre-piece of his picaresque hero’s career (in which, preposterously, he ends up advising both Wellington and Napoleon on how to conduct their battle). More temperately (and deliberately aiming his account against Lever, with whom he had differences), Thackeray makes the ball (the most glamorous such event ‘since the days of Darius’) central to his ‘Waterloo Novel’, Vanity Fair (1847–8). Other novelists (Georgette Heyer, Bernard Cornwell, creator of ‘Sharpe’) have featured it.

  These commemorations are well known and much cited. Less well known is the career of the young man for whom the duchess threw the ball – who was also a novelist. Lord William Lennox (1799–1881) was the fourth son of the fourth Duke of Richmond. His godfather was William Pitt and one of his cousins was Charles James Fox.

  While still a thirteen-year-old boy at Westminster School, William was gazetted to a cornetcy. He then joined Wellington’s staff as an aide-de-camp, remaining in that post until three years after Waterloo. He missed the battle itself, although he made the ball.

  Lennox sold his commission in 1829 and served as a Whig MP over the Reform years. He was always more interested in horses than Parliament. He went on to write extensively for the journals of the day and turned out a number of fashionable novels. There was a taste for what was called ‘silver forkery’ – particularly if penned by actual bluebloods. None was bluer than that of the author of Compton Audley (1841), The Tuft Hunter (1864), The Adventures of a Man of Family (1864) and ten other effusions lying, undisturbed, in the vaults of the British copyrigh
t libraries. In his later life, a sadly broken-down figure, Lennox hired himself out for lectures on the theme of ‘Celebrities I have known’. They, alas, no longer knew him as they had on that glorious night in June 1815.

  16 June

  James Joyce goes out on his first date with his future wife, Norah Barnacle

  1904 The author later memorialised this day by turning it into Bloomsday, when the action of Ulysses (1922) takes place. Ulysses spends its 265,000 words elaborating the ordinary events and thoughts during the day of Stephen Dedalus, a struggling young writer who has to teach bored children for a living, Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, and Bloom’s wife, Molly.

  Bloom’s peregrinations through Dublin take him to the post office, where he receives a clandestine letter from his lover, to a funeral, to the office of a newspaper to sell advertisements, the National Museum to gaze at the beautiful rear end on a statue of Venus, the National Library, and a maternity hospital. From time to time his path intersects with that of Dedalus, but they never really interact.

  Along with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the first of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which also came out in that same annus mirabilis of modernism, 1922, Ulysses remains one of the paradigms of modernist literature in English. Like those other works, the novel reinvents the classics for a contemporary readership. It is revolutionary in technique – for example, in the stream of consciousness in Episode 3 and in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end, and in its range of tone and reference, powered by the contrast between its classical register and its vernacular events and their expression, including sexual explicitness.