Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  The moment Edgecombe entered the door, Miss T. introduced Miss L. as an accomplished keyboard player, and would she oblige the two of them?

  Miss Leigh very willingly sat to the Harpsichord, upon which her Audience decamp’d to the Bed Chamber, and left her to play … to her selfe. They return’d, and made what excuses they could, but said very frankly they had not heard her performance and begg’d her to begin again, which she comply’d with, and gave them the opertunity of a second retirement.

  Again profuse apologies; again Mr Edgecombe pleaded: ‘if she would play Godi [‘Godi l’alma’, an air from Handel’s Ottone], it was a Tune he dy’d to hear, and it would be an Obligation he should never forget.’ A furious Miss L. replied that ‘she would do him a much greater Obligation by her Absence’, running down the stairs and telling the story so fast that ‘in 4 and twenty hours all the people in Town’ had heard it.

  ‘I send you a novell instead of a Letter’, she concluded, ‘but as it is in your power to shorten it when you please by reading no further than you like, I will make no Excuses for the length of it.’ Whether the unhappy countess was cheered by the anecdote has not been recorded.

  24 June

  The day before the Battle of Little Bighorn, Jack Crabb is appointed official jester to the commander of the 7th Cavalry, George Armstrong Custer

  1876 ‘Either the most neglected hero in history or a liar of insane proportion’, to quote the publicity tagline for the movie, Thomas Berger’s Jack Crabb – alias Little Big Man in the 1964 novel of that name – seems to have been present at nearly every factual (or fanciful) event in the history (or romance) of the Old West. Captured as a child when the Lakota Sioux attack his family’s wagon train, he is brought up in the native language and culture until recaptured by soldiers and adopted by a childless couple in Missouri.

  He marries a Swedish girl and starts a family, only to be ambushed again by the natives and reunited with his old Lakota family. Settling back into the tribe, he marries a native woman. On the very morning their child is born, Custer’s 7th Cavalry attacks their camp on Washita Creek. Crabb’s wife and child are killed, along with two dozen other women and children. Crabb escapes, determined to get even with George Armstrong Custer.

  After a run-in with Wyatt Earp and a spell of being taught how to gamble (and shoot) by Wild Bill Hickok, Crabb winds up in Custer’s camp on the eve of Little Bighorn, working as a teamster, still seeking revenge. But he finds Custer puzzling over a set of sand drawings and bones that the natives have left behind in their abandoned lodge, and can’t resist helping the general interpret the signs, the ‘practical combination of fact and fancy’, as he calls them, left as a warning that they are there and intend to fight this time.

  Custer is so amused by this teamster promoting himself as Indian expert that he appoints him his personal jester. Of course he disregards everything Crabb has said, and next day rides to his doom.

  Crabb’s double perspective on white and native life works to reverse many of the old clichés of western fiction. Natives turn out to be more sensitive than savage, more loyal than treacherous, while the whites are incompetent, rapacious and dishonest. Yet Little Big Man is not simply a satire on received notions. Wild Bill may never have been able to put ten shots through the dot of an ‘i’ on a sign at 200 yards, but he did get them all within the ‘O’ at 100 – and with a handgun, that’s some shooting. Custer may have been incompetent, cruel and mad, but Crabb is moved to admire his courage – even his style – in death. Little Big Man redeems even the objects of its satire, which is to say that the book accepts that the romance of the Old West can hold its own against the historical actuality.

  25 June

  T.S. Eliot writes to his lawyer, patron and friend John Quinn that he has ‘written a long poem of about 450 lines’

  1922 It was done, he explained, ‘mostly when I was at Lausanne for treatment last winter’. Together ‘with the notes that I am adding’, he thought that it ‘should make a book of thirty or forty pages. I think it is the best I have ever done, and Pound thinks so too.’ Originally titled ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, it would come out later that year as The Waste Land.

  So from its beginnings three strands were woven into this terrifying modernist poem about the decay of modern times: psychiatric distress (the reason for the ‘treatment’); footnotes to aid the reader in identifying the poem’s many literary allusions; and the support of that other great Anglo-American modernist, Ezra Pound.

  In fact, Pound had been a midwife to The Waste Land, not only in introducing Eliot to Quinn in the first place, promoting his work from the beginning, and even trying to raise money to buy him out from his demanding job at Lloyd’s Bank in London, but also in his lively editing of the poem’s manuscript. This last service has been over-emphasised in the lore that has now accumulated around the famous production. Pound’s changes were mostly minor, though well-judged.

  For one thing, he seems to have wanted to reduce the poem’s tone of provisionality. While Eliot’s typescript had ‘Mr Eugenides’, the gay Smyrna merchant, inviting the poet’s persona ‘To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel / And perhaps a weekend at the Metropole’, Pound scribbled in the margin, ‘dam per’apsey’ – and the ‘perhaps’ was duly dropped. And when the original had the blind prophet Tiresias surmising that ‘one half-formed thought may pass’ across the abandoned typist’s brain after being seduced by ‘the young man carbuncular’, Pound pulled Eliot up with: ‘You, Tiresias if you know[,] know damn well or else you don’t.’

  As for those footnotes, we need them, Eliot thought, because we are part of that modern decline that no longer knows Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Webster’s The White Devil – or dozens of other texts including the Upanishads – as part of an integral culture.

  Yet in the comparison between traditional and modern, the irony can be read both ways. Take courtship, for example.

  Elizabeth and Leicester

  Beating oars

  The stern was formed

  A gilded shell

  Red and gold

  The brisk swell

  Rippled both shores

  Southwest wind

  Carried down stream

  The peal of bells

  White towers

  This vignette is inset into a modern Thames, one that ‘sweats / Oil and tar … Down Greenwich reach / Past the Isle of Dogs’, and on which a less glamorous encounter took place:

  ‘Trams and dusty trees.

  Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

  Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

  Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’

  But then, what were Elizabeth and Leicester up to, if not an adulterous dalliance of their own? Is their affair morally superior to the modern one in a boat rented by the hour, on a stagnant, colourless, polluted river – or just classier? Or is Eliot’s idea that the modern decline all started with the Tudors, who came to power through a violent interruption of the ‘natural’ succession, and made Protestantism the national faith?

  26 June

  The writers’ writer dies at Deauville

  1939 He produced nearly 80 works of poetry, criticism, literary and cultural history, biography, travel and mould-breaking novels. He founded The English Review and The Transatlantic Review. He befriended and supported everyone from Henry James and Joseph Conrad, through Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, to William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and Robert Lowell. Yet though his novels have seldom been out of print, he’s a stranger to university English courses, not to mention A-level syllabuses.

  His name? It evolved, during the course of his long and eventful life, from Ford Hermann Hueffer and H. Ford Hueffer through Ford Madox Hueffer, finally settling (at the outbreak of the First World War, when the Saxe-Coburg and Gothas became the Windsors) on Ford Madox Ford. His life? A kaleidoscope of marriages and other alliances, two bout
s of bruising service in the Great War, residence in London, Paris, Provence and Sussex – even a spell in New York – and writing, writing, writing. According to Max Saunders in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he used to get up early and write ‘a thousand words or two’.

  Pound made him the subject of a famous essay in Poetry, ‘The Prose Tradition in Verse’ (1914), because he thought that Hueffer’s (as he then was) poetry was grounded on ‘an instinct for prose’, or an ear for everyday language. He gives for example the start of Hueffer’s poem, ‘Finchley Road’:

  As we come up Baker Street

  Where tubes and trains and ’buses meet

  There’s a touch of fog and a touch of sleet;

  As we go on up Hampstead way

  Toward the closing of the day …

  Today Ford is better known for his novels, especially The Good Soldier (1916), the one that opens with the most arresting line since ‘Call me Ishmael’ – ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’. Thus John Dowell introducing the novel, but it soon becomes clear that he didn’t hear the story – he was part of it, as one half of one of the two seemingly perfect couples whose lives are laid waste during the course of the action.

  Dowell is not just both narrator and participant; he is unreliable in other ways too, jumping around the story (as Julian Barnes has put it) ‘backwards, forwards, sideways, switching times and tenses’ and even coming up with ‘an “impossible tense”, beginning a sentence like this: “Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together …” – as if such a coming-upon were still possible.’1 These were radical departures for 1914, surpassing even Henry James in slippery narration and predating Joyce by six years.

  1 Julian Barnes, ‘The Saddest Story’, Guardian, 7 June 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/07/fiction.julianbarnes

  27 June

  John Fowles despairs too early

  1969 John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was published on 12 June of this year by Jonathan Cape. Fowles had not yet made his name and had a lot riding on the work. He was buoyed up, however, by the confidence that his charismatic editor at Cape, Tom Maschler, had in the work. ‘Magnificent’ was Maschler’s telegraphed verdict on reading the manuscript.

  The British reviewers were less enthused. The Times was curtly negative. The Guardian reviewer objected that ‘symbols and allegory stain every page of this long, puzzling book’. Fowles found the pervasive lack of sympathy with the new things that he was trying to do in the novel ‘mean’.

  As his biographer Eileen Warburton records:

  Fowles drifted in a blue mood for weeks after the publication of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, complaining of malaise, aches and pains, nicotine addiction, and morbid apathy … He had a persistent sense of failure. He began, on June 27, 1969 a novel with the working title Futility.

  It would never see the light of print. The autumn publication of the novel in the USA by Little, Brown was an unqualified triumph. Fowles was, to his astonishment, described as ‘the most brilliant of stars, better than Bellow, Roth, and Updike’. On an author’s tour in the US, he discovered, on campus visits, that his book was wildly popular: it had replaced Lord of the Flies and The Catcher in the Rye (novels of the 1950s) as the novel of the sixties. Along with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, his earlier novel The Magus (universally scorned by British reviewers) achieved cult status.

  No longer haunted by a sense of futility, the jubilant Fowles even contrived to give up smoking.

  28 June

  Lawrence fails an examination, disgustedly

  1916 D.H. Lawrence and his wife (née Frieda von Richthofen) had an unhappy First World War. Her origins, and his bohemianism, meant that they were constantly suspected of being German spies. Lawrence’s anxieties were heightened when he was summoned to a medical examination, 27–29 June, under the terms of the Conscription Act. If unfit for frontline service (C1), they might well find him serviceable for clerk’s duties (C2)

  On arrival at Bodmin railway station, the novelist (currently wrestling with Women in Love) was marched with 30 other men (all ‘decent’ men, Lawrence later recalled) to the centre where they spent much of the next two days trouserless, with only their shirts covering their embarrassment.

  Lawrence informed the examining physicians that he was suffering from TB. So obvious was it that he was unfit, they did not require the certificate he had ready from Ernest Jones (a doctor, but better known as Sigmund Freud’s biographer). He was exempted.

  Lawrence elaborated his disgust at the medical examination – particularly the physical intrusion into his body by a ‘chemist assistant puppy’ – in Chapter 12, ‘Nightmare’, of his post-war novel, Kangaroo.

  He put his hand between Somers’ legs, and pressed upwards, under the genitals. Somers felt his eyes going black.

  ‘Cough,’ said the puppy. He coughed.

  ‘Again,’ said the puppy. He made a noise in his throat, then turned aside in disgust.

  ‘Turn round,’ said the puppy. ‘Face the other way.’

  Somers turned and faced the shameful monkey-faces at the long table. So, he had his back to the tall window: and the puppy stood plumb behind him.

  ‘Put your feet apart.’

  He put his feet apart.

  ‘Bend forward—further—further—.’

  Somers bent forward, lower, and realised that the puppy was standing aloof behind him to look into his anus. And that this was the source of the wonderful jesting that went on all the time.

  After the war, Lawrence left England, never to return.

  29 June

  Theodore Roosevelt writes to Brander Matthews, professor of literature at Columbia: ‘What a miserable little snob Henry James is! His polished, pointless, uninteresting stories about the upper classes in England make one blush to think that he was once an American’

  1894 The irony behind this contempt is that both men started out much the same. Both were born in New York City, sons of wealthy parents. Both attended Harvard, though James only briefly, while Roosevelt graduated with distinction. And as Philip Horne, editor of James’s letters, points out, both young men were affected by ill health, but ‘James came East to Europe for his cure, while Roosevelt worked out with weights and went West’.1

  It is true that Roosevelt, like Francis Parkman, saw the West as a test of American manhood, and that he approved mightily of Owen Wister’s The Virginian (see 15 February, 11 June and 4 August). What is not so true – at least not in the sense that Roosevelt expressed it – is that James had somehow ceased to be American. First of all, technically, he had retained his American citizenship, and wouldn’t give it up until 1915, one year from his death, in protest at America’s refusal to join the war in Europe.

  Secondly, though James was sufficiently defensive on the issue to insist that he could write an American novel (see 8 April), in a sense nearly all his novels were American – that is, about Americans in Europe, or (in rare cases, like The Europeans) Europeans in America. He was forever posing the question of what it was to be an American, by exploring the borders between American and European social behaviour and emotional responses.

  And when James wanted to get inside the consciousness of his protagonists, it was more often than not the American characters he chose – from Christopher Newman in The American (1877), through Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl (1904).

  1 Philip Horne, ‘Henry James and “the forces of violence”: on the track of “big game” in “The Jolly Corner”’, Henry James Review, 27 (2006), pp. 237–48, p. 1.

  30 June

  The United States passes the Pure Food and Drug Act

  1906 So what has that got to do with literature? Simply that the legislation was the direct result of pressure following revelations of life and conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906).

  Sinclair was a journalist, one of the so-called ‘
muckrakers’, like Lincoln Steffans, Ira Traubel and Jacob Riis, who flourished during the progressive presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. They believed that the public needed to know about the hidden lawlessness of American industry and politics, and about the foul living and employment conditions of many American workers.

  Funded by the socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason, Sinclair went to work in the Chicago stockyards for seven weeks. What emerged was a searing Tendenzroman that followed the misfortunes of a family newly arrived from Lithuania in the illusory hope of well-paid work. After a number of financial disasters, including (a modern touch, this) being conned into a sub-prime loan on a house they can’t afford, the whole family – men, women, children and even an ill old father – have to go to work for the meat-packers.

  The world of their work is one in which the ordinary operative is underpaid, bullied, blacklisted. As an index of the company’s indifference to its workforce, Sinclair included a typical practice in the industry, in which men in the rendering room regularly fell into the cooking vats, and ‘would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!’

  Public outrage was immediate. Overseas sales of American meat fell by a half. The packers too recognised the danger, and lobbied the government for extra meat inspectors – to be funded by the taxpayer, of course. Within the year, the Pure Food and Drug Act was signed into law.

  Sinclair, who went on to a long career as author and left-wing political campaigner, was always disappointed that The Jungle hadn’t aroused the same degree of outrage over the workers’ exploitation. ‘I aimed at the public’s heart’, he said ruefully, ‘and by accident I hit it in the stomach’.