Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

Above all, Ulysses is modernist in its elaborate parodies, puns and other wordplay, and in making the medium part of the message. Episode 14, ‘The Oxen of the Sun’, in which Bloom visits the maternity hospital, enacts the whole process of gestation in terms of the evolution of the English language itself, with the conjunction of Latin and Anglo-Saxon producing the embryo, developing in skilful parodies of Middle English, the prose of the King James Bible, 18th-century essays, Dickens and Carlyle, before being born in the slang and street talk of contemporary Dublin.

  17 June

  The death of Joseph Addison. Bibles and brandy

  1719 On his deathbed, literary legend has it, Joseph Addison summoned his dissolute stepson, Warwick, to witness how ‘a Christian can die’. The cause of death was asthma, complicated by dropsy. He was 47 years old. The setting was comfortable and dignified – Holland House, Kensington.

  Addison had, his biographer records, ‘studied attentively the deaths of Augustus, Socrates, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, Cato and Sir Thomas More’. In various essays he had defined the ideal exit as a dignified combination of classical stoicism and Christian humility, and like the ‘winding up of a well-written play’. Addison has the hero declare, in his excessively well-written play, Cato (1712):

  How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue!

  Who would not be that youth? What pity is it

  That we can die but once to serve our country!

  Alexander Pope professed to find Addison’s ostentatiously vaunted ‘virtue’, and his life- (and death-) long habit of gathering acolytes around him to admire that Addisonian quality, stomach-turning (nor did he much like that pompous Cato play). He duly satirised the other writer as ‘Atticus’ in the ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, as a prig on a self-erected throne, who would,

  Like Cato, give his little senate laws,

  And sit attentive to his own applause;

  It was typical that Addison would want applause as he breathed his last, expiring to the sound of sycophantic, but decently muted, clapping from his faithful claque.

  The anecdote about deathbeds and dissolute stepsons is wholly Addisonian (or Atticus-like, if one is feeling catty) but, alas, ‘of dubious authority’, as beautiful literary anecdotes most often are. According to the sardonic Horace Walpole: ‘unluckily Addison died of brandy – nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being maudlin.’

  Addison’s body, after lying in state, was interred in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

  Thomas Tickell (whose career in politics and poetry had benefited from Addison’s patronage) felt the poetic community had been somewhat remiss in not showering Addison’s passing with elegiac verse, and wrote a poem delicately censorious of his fellow versifiers:

  To the Earl of Warwick, on the Death of Mr. Addison

  If, dumb too long, the drooping Muse hath stay’d,

  And left her debt to Addison unpaid;

  Blame not her silence, Warwick, but bemoan,

  And judge, oh judge, my bosom by your own.

  What mourner ever felt poetic fires!

  Slow comes the verse that real woe inspires:

  Grief unaffected suits but ill with art,

  Or flowing numbers with a bleeding heart.

  Pope, who disliked Tickell as much as he did Addison, was not moved to elegise.

  18 June

  Crossing the country on his way to the California Gold Rush, Edward Tomkins tries to describe the buttes and pinnacles in the Platte Valley

  1850 ‘The whole country seems overspread by some of the loftiest and most magnificent pallaces that imagination of man can reach’, he wrote in his diary. ‘Here lays the ruins of a lofty Pyramid, there a splendid Castle.’ Other shapes reminded him of ‘our nations Capitol at Washington’ and the ‘City Hall at N.Y.’. It was all too much. ‘Even the ruins of Rome, Athens, Bagdad and Petria fall into perfect insignificance.’

  The Forty-Niners were not horny-handed frontiersmen. Despite the danger, dust and fatigue of the 2,000-mile, seven-month overland trek from Missouri to California – not to mention the poor light at night – a great many of them kept diaries or journals. As with Sarah Kemble Knight (see 2 October), their anxiety at being so far from civilisation prompted them to invent daydreams of artefacts, the more classical and old-world the better.

  When that project failed the credibility test, they resorted to the opposite mode of topographical description, scientific measurement. Here is Joseph Warren Wood describing Chimney Rock on 9 June 1849:

  The Chimney … stands upon a high mound of clay & is about 100 ft high the elevation of the whole mass is 250 or 300 ft high. … The chimney is about 30 ft in Diameter at the base & 20 at the top …

  But this was no flight from fantasy to hard fact. With their recourse to science they weren’t getting back to basics, but following – in Wood’s case, almost literally copying out – well known reports on the same landscape like John Charles Fremont’s Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, published under US government auspices in 1845, and Edwin Bryant’s What I saw in California (1848).

  The trail to California was already over-inscribed with geographical description. The most plotless of American landscapes had been over-plotted before the Forty-Niners arrived to see it for themselves.

  19 June

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York

  1953 A decade before President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, another public killing also prompted major paranoid fiction that played with ideas of plots both sinister and fictional. It was the trial and death of the Rosenbergs, supposedly for leaking secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians, the only time in American history when civilians were executed for espionage.

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were certainly active communists, certainly spies. Julius had worked during the Second World War in the Army Signal Corps Laboratories, developing complex electronic systems like radar and guided missile controls; Ethel seems to have recruited her brother, David Greenglass, for the Soviets. He worked as a machinist in the Manhattan Project, developing the atomic bomb in New Mexico.

  Writing later, his NKVD handler, Alexander Feklisov, claimed that Julius passed him a number of electronics secrets but knew nothing about the atomic bomb. At Los Alamos the major operator was the German-born British theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, who transmitted numerous secrets about the atomic – and later, hydrogen – bombs to Feklisov, using an intermediary called Harry Gold.

  Arrested in 1950, Gold implicated Greenglass as one of his informants, and Greenglass, in turn, testified that he gave Julius some diagrams of the bomb, while his sister typed notes on nuclear secrets in their apartment. He later recanted his testimony about the typing. That’s as close to atomic espionage as the Rosenbergs got, yet they were executed, while Gold was sentenced to 30 years, of which he served just over fifteen, Greenglass got fifteen and served ten, and Klaus Fuchs, sentenced by a British court to fourteen years, spent nine in jail before emigrating to East Germany.

  There had been sporadic red scares before the war, but America’s shock when the Russians tested their first nuclear bomb in 1949 still reverberates in this author’s memory. The communist witch-hunts, the national paranoia – the whole Cold War mentality – dated from then. Novelists like E.L. Doctorow and Robert Coover looked back on it from two decades later as the moment when America went crazy.

  Their prose followed suit. At the end of the over 500 big pages of Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), the Rosenbergs are electrocuted in a grand spectacle in Times Square, New York. Popular values are turned upside down in a riot of excessive plotting. America’s mascot, Uncle Sam, who tells part of the story, has become a foul-mouthed, garrulous old bigot, while the principal narrator, the (then) vice-president Richard Nixon, though awkward, mawkish and self-involved, emerges as not half bad. Here, at least, his cynicism is needed, to undeceive.

  Where Coover uses re
al names for fictional characters (Jack Benny, Betty Crocker, Charlie McCarthy and the Marx Brothers are just some of the others who pop up), Doctorow does the opposite. In The Book of Daniel (1971) Greenglass is (substantially) Selig Mindish, the Rosenbergs are the Isaacsons, and their two children (a boy and a girl instead of two boys) are the protagonist Daniel and his disturbed New- Left sister Susan, who commits suicide at the end of the sixties. In his search for answers to why his parents died and others more guilty didn’t, Daniel discovers that the law has its own reasons more to do with the logic of cause and effect than the truth – that bad things happen because plots (apocalyptically, as in the biblical book of the same name) work to complete themselves, regardless. Don DeLillo would later explore the same idea in Libra (see 29 November).

  Doctorow’s book ends with book-ends in the plot’s time scheme: a horrific description of the electrocution itself, and the (anti-) climax of Daniel’s search for reasons why it happened. He tracks Mindish down to conservative, suburban Orange County, California, and finally confronts him, senile and unable to explain anything, endlessly riding toy cars in Disneyland. It’s the perfect irony – the failure of memory in the setting that obliterates history in sound-stage nostalgia.

  20 June

  After one of Anne Bradstreet’s many grandchildren dies at three years and seven months, her grandmother writes a poem on the brittleness of life

  1669 Was ever stable joy found below?

  Or perfect bliss, without mixture of woe? …

  Farewell dear child, thou ne’er shalt come to me,

  But yet a while, and I shall go to thee.

  The poem is not about the child or even her grandmother’s love for her. Instead it draws the stern Puritan lesson about the fickleness of this world’s pleasures. By this, her 57th year, Bradstreet might be excused for feeling the strain, having settled a frontier farm in the New World, borne eight children, suffered recurrent bouts of illness and had her house burn down, devouring her library. Three years later she did, indeed, join her granddaughter in heaven.

  Born into an impeccably Puritan family in England and married at sixteen to a graduate of Cambridge’s most Puritan college, Anne and her family joined the Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay (Boston) in 1630. Though both her father and husband would become governors of the colony in time, Anne still had the arduous practical work of settling and running a frontier farm near Andover.

  She also wrote poetry – lots of it. In bulk, her major output was a series of ‘quaternians’ – like ‘The Four Seasons of the Yeare’, and ‘Of the foure Humours’, inspired by the Huguenot poet Du Bartas. In 1650 her brother-in-law carried these manuscripts back to London, where they were published as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, the first volume of American poetry to be published.

  But it is her shorter, more personal lyrics that people read now – possibly because they can more easily be studied in practical-criticism classes. And they were not all gloomy. Many were intimate expressions of love – like ‘To my Dear and loving Husband’ – of thanksgiving (‘For Deliverance from a Fever’) and even praise for God’s work in nature – as in this leaf-peeper’s joy at a New England autumn:

  Their leaves & fruits seem’d painted, but was true

  Of green, of red, of yellow, mixéd hue,

  Rapt were my senses at this delectable view.

  21 June

  Isaac Asimov submits his first SF story, ‘The Cosmic Corkscrew’, to John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction

  1938 Asimov was born (the exact date is uncertain) in Petrovichi in the USSR, in a period when it was unlucky to be a Russian Jew. His family emigrated to the USA, where the infant Isaac was naturalised in 1928. Asimov Sr. ran a candy store in Brooklyn. Isaac grew up a brilliant, over-achieving high-school pupil, going on to take degrees in chemistry at Columbia University, culminating in a PhD in 1948. A brilliant academic career was in prospect.

  An early fan of pulp SF (much to his father’s disgust, although the Asimov candy stores had a profitable sideline in the product), Isaac – a young man imbued with a strong sense of his intellectual omnipotence – tried his hand with a short story in the genre. The 9,000-word ‘The Cosmic Corkscrew’ was written between May 1937 and June 1938. It draws, clearly, on the last chapter of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Asimov’s ‘traveller’ (or ‘chronic argonaut’, as Wells called his hero) travels into the far future to find earth deserted. He cannot, due to the corkscrew nature of time, return to find out what went wrong.

  Asimov submitted the story on 21 June 1938 to John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. At that time he was the most powerful arbiter of taste in the genre. Asimov’s tale was not to Campbell’s taste. Ferociously right-wing, he perhaps found it too glum. It was rejected, the manuscript was lost, and the story has never seen the light of print.

  Much else did appear with Asimov’s name on it. His first science-fiction novel, A Pebble in the Sky (earth becomes radioactive following nuclear war), was published in 1950 – a period when nuclear war was imminently expected and middle-class America was investing in fallout shelters. In that same year, 1950, there appeared Asimov’s most famous volume, I, Robot, a collection of short stories published over previous years, expounding the author’s ‘three laws of Robotics’.

  The most prolific of writers, Asimov published some 60 works of SF, fifteen crime mysteries (which he began writing in 1956), a hundred or more popularising works of ‘science fact’, and scholarly treatises on Shakespeare, the Bible, and quantum mechanics – 600 titles in all. His collected papers, donated to his Boston University alma mater, occupy 71 metres of shelf space. Elsewhere in the library there are printed volumes by Isaac Asimov in nine out of the ten Dewey Decimal classification categories.

  22 June

  The Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives publishes its ‘Red Channels’ blacklist

  1950 The American right-wing media have never liked movie actors who get involved in politics, whether it’s radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh attacking Parkinson’s sufferer Michael J. Fox for exaggerating his tremors to get sympathy for a campaign for stem cell research, or Fox TV’s Bill O’Reilly laying into Martin Sheen for backing Jesse Jackson for president. These days the actors don’t mind; they can use the publicity.

  But back when the red scare followed Russia’s first test nuclear bomb test (see 19 June), actors, producers and writers had the whole establishment against them – from the federal government right down to their own employers. From 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), originally formed in 1938 to gather information on communists, fascists and other threats to the American way of life, turned its attentions exclusively leftwards, with the Hollywood film industry squarely in its sights.

  At first the committee subpoenaed screenwriters like Alvah Bessie, Ring Lardner, Jr., Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo. Asked if they were, or ever had been, members of the Communist party, ten of the witnesses refused to answer, invoking the First Amendment in defence of free speech and the freedom of association. As a result they were formally charged with contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison. These became known as the ‘Hollywood Ten’. Instead of backing their workers, the studio bosses announced that the Ten would be fired without compensation, and would never work in Hollywood again.

  Three years later, on this day, the HUAC published its ‘Red Channels’ blacklist, prelude to a second, more comprehensive wave of hearings. This time the victims were chosen to enhance the committee’s press coverage. Now actors figured alongside writers and producers – among them José Ferrer, Sam Jaffe, Zero Mostel and Orson Welles – and in place of screenwriters of whom no one had ever heard, celebrity playwrights like Arthur Miller (see 24 January) were subpoenaed.

  Ironically, when right-wing actors go into politics, no one seems to notice. Charlton Heston was president of the very political National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003. As president of the S
creen Actors’ Guild, Ronald Reagan double-crossed his own members by supporting moves to blacklist them. Thirteen years later, in a notorious letter to Playboy editor Hugh Hefner, he either denied – or more likely forgot – that there had ever been a blacklist. Yet he served two terms each as Governor of California and President of the United States.

  23 June

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes a novelette of London gossip to her clinically depressed sister in Paris

  1727 ‘I’m always pleased to hear from You (Dear Sister)’, she wrote to the Countess of Mar, ‘particularly when you tell me you are well … Air, Exercise and Company are the best med’cines, and Physic and Retirement good for nothing but to break Hearts and spoil Constitutions’.

  Even from this shortest of extracts, it’s clear that Lady Mary was a practised prose stylist, somewhat brisk in the expression of her sympathies. In fact she was the epistolary champion of her age. Her letters from Turkey, to which her husband had been posted as ambassador, offered a classic account of Muslim manners and customs. She was also skilled at portraits in paint, and an early advocate of inoculation against the smallpox, a disease that had marred her own legendary beauty.

  Alexander Pope clearly adored, then loathed her, libelling her as ‘Sappho’ in his various verse satires – probably because he suspected she had mocked his affliction, Pott’s disease or TB spine – behind his hunchback. ‘Sapho enrag’d crys out your Back is round’, and ‘Poxed by her Love, or libell’d by her Hate’, were his complaint and his revenge.

  But this was a letter to cheer her sister up, and how better to do that than by relating ‘the most diverting Story about Town at present’. It seems that ‘a Tall, musical, silly, ugly thing … called Miss Leigh’ paid an unexpected and unwelcome call on Betty Titchburne, Lady Sunderland’s sister. Not long after she arrived they heard ‘a violent rap at the door, and someone vehemently run up stairs’. Miss Titchburne ‘seem’d much surprised and said she believ’d it was Mr Edgecombe, and was quite amaz’d how he took it into his Head to visit her’.