Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  1 July

  No smoking day

  2007 On this day Britain gave up cigarettes – at least in public. The event dominated the news but made little impact on literature, with one exception. In his diary (now, alas, in its fateful ‘prostrate [sic] years’) Adrian Mole, 39¼, recorded:

  A momentous day! Smoking in a public place or place of work is forbidden in England. Though if you are a lunatic, a prisoner, an MP, or a member of the Royal Family you are exempt.

  Although he himself has never indulged, Adrian records that ‘smoking has blighted my life’:

  There is a picture of me in my mother’s arms, the day I was released from the maternity hospital. She is standing in the hospital car park with me cradled in one arm, the other arm is hanging at her side and in her hand is a lit cigarette. I have been ingesting smoke since I was five days old.

  Lung cancer is the malignancy that causes most deaths among British males, and Mole’s creator, Sue Townsend, has made public that after seven volumes, and a 30-year chronicle of his sadly inadequate life, she wants to do away with her diarist. It seems, however, that it is the second most common mortal malignancy, prostate cancer, that is destined to carry Adrian Mole off. We take our leave of him in the toils of a chemotherapy which looks, alas, as unsuccessful as everything else in his life.

  2 July

  Blast deafens philistine opposition, until the blasts of war destroy it

  1914 The announcement of an anarcho-Vorticist manifesto magazine, entitled Blast, edited by Wyndham Lewis, published by John Lane (original publisher of the 1890s Yellow Book), was announced in April 1914. With its eye-catching pink cover, the first issue appeared on 2 July, at half a crown. Lewis and Lane hosted a launch dinner party at the Cave of the Golden Calf, a cabaret club for London’s bohemians.

  The first issue of Blast announced, in a fighting foreword (‘Long Live the English Vortex’), its intention to ‘deny politeness … We will convert the King if possible … A VORTICIST KING! WHY NOT?’ No response was forthcoming from the palace. More hopefully, the magazine aimed its shot against the despised Italian futurist Marinetti. Blast was, if not loyal to the crown, firmly chauvinist. It would forge an English modernism.

  The first issue (although the production never paid for itself, or its expensively unorthodox printing) was well enough received to warrant a grand dinner, on 15 July, at the Dieudonné Restaurant in Ryder Street to celebrate ‘the great MAGENTA cover’d opusculus’ (Ezra Pound’s description).

  A second Blast was published in July 1915, including among its contributors Ezra Pound (who had actually invented the term ‘vorticist’), T.S. Eliot, and the artist Gaudier Brzeska. It already represented a nucleus of home-based modernism, despite the internationalism of its contributors.

  Had world history not intervened, the ‘men of Blast’ (i.e. those featured in its pages, and promoted by the magazine) – Wyndham Lewis, Pound, T.E. Hulme, Eliot, and Joyce – would probably have cohered into something culturally dominant. The Great War extinguished the movement, with its louder blasts. Lewis himself enrolled (appropriately) in the artillery (his experience of these years is commemorated in the autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering). Hulme and Gaudier were casualties. Modernism, in Britain at least, lost its way. The country still awaits its Vorticist monarch.

  3 July

  To save face, Francis Bacon asks Robert Cecil for a knighthood

  1603 The old queen was dead. Bacon had served Elizabeth as the consummate politician – literally in that he had sat as Member of Parliament, first for Melcome in Dorset, then for Taunton, and also in the Shakespearean sense of turning against his benefactor the Earl of Essex when it seemed politic so to do. Now he was heavily in debt – not for the first or last time – and not so much out of royal favour as off the new king’s radar altogether.

  Would a letter to Robert Cecil do the trick? Cecil had been Elizabeth’s secretary of state, and having smoothed James I into the system, was being retained in that august office. In less than a month, James would make him a baron – and two years later, first Earl of Salisbury. So Bacon wrote to Cecil on this day in 1603, bemoaning his debts and suggesting that, since knighthoods were now two a penny (the king had granted over 300 of them even before reaching London), maybe he could get one too, to soothe his humiliation.

  I could without charge, by your Honour’s means, be content to have it, both because of this late disgrace, and because I have three new knights in my mess in Grey’s Inn commons, and because I have found out an alderman’s daughter, an handsome maiden, to my liking.

  It worked. He got the gong and the girl (Alice Barnham), and could hold his head up once again among his lawyer friends. But better was to follow. He was soon back at court, and in such royal favour that he aroused envy in those around him. By 1613 he was attorney general, and five years later lord chancellor. Then it all unravelled. Once again he fell into debt. In 1621 a parliamentary commission found him guilty of corruption. He was fined £40,000 (over £6.5 million today) and even locked up in the Tower for a while. This time he really was out.

  Not in posterity’s judgement, though. He had already worked out the theory of inductive reasoning (from the natural fact to the general rule, instead of the other way round) on which all modern science rests, publishing his thesis in Novum Organum (1620). Next came his seductive utopian romance, The New Atlantis (1627). His Essays (1597) had long offered valuable tips for bureaucratic infighters, and still survive as models of the plain style.

  4 July

  Two American founding fathers die on the 50th anniversary of the United States they did so much to establish

  1826 It is one of the most remarkable coincidences in history, surpassing Shakespeare’s birth and death on St George’s day (see 23 April). John Adams, the Massachusetts lawyer, and Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia planter – respectively the second and third American presidents – died within hours of each other, nearly 500 miles apart, on the country’s national day. They had worked together for American independence from Great Britain, Adams arguing strenuously for the measure, Jefferson writing its Declaration.

  They didn’t always get on, representing as they did the two opposing parties, the Federalists (urban and mercantilist) and the Democratic Republicans (rural and agrarian) – not to mention such diverse strands of the continent’s cultural geography. When the Federalist Adams narrowly lost to Jefferson in the presidential election of 1800, he refused to attend the latter’s inauguration.

  But in due course they were reconciled, and when both men were well into retirement, they began to correspond. ‘You and I differ;’ Jefferson wrote to Adams in October 1813, ‘but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason.’ What followed was a series of 158 letters in which they discussed everything from politics and diplomacy at home and abroad, via the question of ‘natural’ versus man-made aristocracy, to religion and philosophy – many of their arguments referenced in classical authors, from whose Greek and Latin they could freely translate.

  Ezra Pound thought the Jefferson–Adams letters a ‘shrine and monument to American culture’ – not so much a monument, he added, as ‘a still workable dynamo’. They wrote well. Their ‘sanity and civilisation … stems from the Encyclopaedists. You find in their letters a varied culture, and an omnivorous … Curiosity.’ They belong in the American literary curriculum (Pound argued), which was presently ‘restricted to mostly second-rate fiction’.1

  1 Ezra Pound, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’, in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson, London: Faber & Faber, 1973, pp. 117–28, 124, 117.

  5 July

  Rebecca Butterworth writes to her father from ‘The Back Woods of America’ asking him to pay her way back to England

  1846 Pessimistic or defeatist letters home written by emigrants to North America are extremely rare. Most are full of the New World’s promise – the natural bounty or the low prices, the political free
dom, the absence of taxes. That’s because people are more likely to write if they make it, and their families at home more likely to keep their letters as proof of their relatives’ success.

  But just occasionally an expression of despair or cry for help survives this filtering. Rebecca Butterworth and her husband had emigrated from Rochdale, Lancashire to a country settlement in Arkansas sometime before 1843. Being city folk, they found it hard to cope in the country, and by 1846 things hadn’t got much better. ‘What little corn we had the cattle [h]as jumped the fence and eaten it’, she wrote. ‘John can milk one cow which makes us a little butter, but the other won’t let him.’

  As city people too they placed their faith in doctors rather than self-dosing with botanic remedies. So when Rebecca fell ill with ‘bilious intermittent fever’, she was treated with mustard plasters, ‘steamed bricks’ and ‘60 grains of calomel’ (mercurous chloride, used as a powerful ‘anti-bilious’ laxative) – the last of which eroded her mouth so that ‘I had one of my cheeks cut half way through’.

  When the fever struck, Rebecca was pregnant with her fourth child. The first three had died in infancy. Either the illness (or more likely the bizarre treatment for it) brought on premature labour. Her brother-in-law ‘did not like to help me as he had not studied midwifery much’, so they had to wait two hours for the doctor to come. When the baby was born, ‘he cried like a child at full time’, but lived for only ten minutes, before taking ‘his flight to heaven to join my other 3 little angels’.

  ‘I felt when I heard him crying so if I could have him in my arms and put him to his breast I would be glad’, she added, ‘but the lords will be done and not ours.’

  6 July

  The first Nobel laureate blogs his principles

  2009 José Saramago (b. 1922) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, the first Portuguese writer to do so. A proclaimed communist and atheist (his The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1991, caused uproar in his native country), Saramago is not merely adversarial, but outspoken. His award of the Nobel was probably more warmly received in Stockholm than in Lisbon.

  In September 2008, Saramago found a new way of speaking out when, during Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign, he began writing a blog – the first Nobel laureate so to expose himself to the cyber-public. On 6 July 2009, Saramago was stung by a criticism that he was ‘not a real blogger’. He took the opportunity to state his reason for using this new form of literary address, and his personal faith as a writer:

  If he is a person of his time, if he is not chained to the past, a writer must know the problems of the age in which he happens to live. And what are these problems today? That we do not live in an acceptable world; on the contrary, we live in a world that is going from bad to worse and that does not function humanely. But please note – do not confuse my complaints with any kind of moralizing; I am not saying that the purpose of literature is to tell people how they ought to behave. I am talking about something else, about the need for ethical content without the least trace of demagoguery. And – this is fundamental – a literature that never holds itself aloof when a critical point of view is needed.

  It may not be ‘real blogging’. But the role of the engaged writer in the modern world has rarely been more nobly expressed.

  7 July

  Ida L. Moore interviews the Haithcocks of West Durham, North Carolina

  1938 The most comprehensive literary project undertaken by the Federal Writers’ Project (see 27 July) was the life histories of ordinary Americans. Almost 3,000 of these were filed in the Library of Congress, and several thousands more in state collections. Typically the writers would approach the subjects, interview them, then write up the encounter from memory. Few had shorthand and none had recording devices.

  Life stories of the south-eastern region often had the flavour of case studies, as if interrogating an underlying social problem. As assistant field supervisor for the region, Ida Moore had formulated many of the questions that the writers were to ask.

  The Haithcocks, interviewed on this day in 1938, live with another family in ‘a small four-room house’. The two men work in the cotton mill; the wives stay at home sewing tags on Bull-Durham tobacco sacks, and the children amuse themselves. Here is how Moore sets the scene:

  Monkey Bottoms begins with a washed-out, hilly road, flanked on one side by closely-placed and disorderly-looking houses and on the other by a jumbled growth of hedge, scrubby trees and briars. … Freida Haithcock and Hulda Foster sit in this room hours at a time, both fortified by a generous quantity of snuff, tagging the tiny sacks and dreaming of the day when they will again have a job in the mill. Together they share a tin can spittoon which is obligingly shifted from one to the other as the need arises. Flies swarm thickly about the poorly screened house and hunt out the bread crumbs scattered by the three oldest children.

  The women’s avid snuff-taking could come right out of Erskine Caldwell. In this panoramic moral view of the Haithcocks’ case, the decrepit landscape of Monkey Bottoms slides imperceptibly into the physical and social disorder within the house. As Freida and Hulda dream idly of a steady job, the flies are already exploiting the poorly maintained household defences and the children’s slovenliness, moving in to undermine the family’s health.

  It’s not clear how even the most independent and vigorous life story could surface through this heavy imputation of universal degeneration.

  8 July

  Ralph Waldo Emerson prepares to deny the miracles of Christ – sort of

  1838 ‘We shun to say that which shocks the religious ear of the people’, Emerson warned himself in his journal on this day in 1838, only a week before he was due to deliver the commencement address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School. ‘But this fear is an impotency to commend the moral sentiment.’

  Until now Emerson had been a Unitarian, the son of a Unitarian minister. This was already a pretty radical break from the rest of Christianity – whether Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Protestant, or even Puritan – in that it refused to insist on the divinity of Christ. Jesus was a good man and prophet whose works and teachings were there for all to read in the New Testament. His life and example in the world were ‘divinity’ enough.

  Now, though, Emerson was preparing to demystify the works themselves, and to deconstruct the titles traditionally applied to Christ, like our ‘lord’ and ‘king’. ‘The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth’, he would say in the address, ‘and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.’

  Where does that leave the miracles? Christ ‘spoke of miracles’, Emerson would admit, but that was because ‘he felt that man’s life was a miracle’. What Emerson hinted at, but didn’t say, was that to treat the miracles as the magical interventions of a supernatural being was to denature Christ’s work, to divorce it from ‘the blowing clover and the falling rain’. ‘Let me admonish you’, he would urge the young graduates about to embark on their ministry, ‘to go alone, to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.’

  Records differ on how many divinity students were graduating that year. Some say six, others seven. Yet so portentous were the Sage of Concord’s cogitations that the Boston papers the next morning were full of alarm and denunciation. Among the Unitarians themselves opinion was divided. A few, like William Ellery Channing, welcomed the address, but most agreed with Andrews Norton, who called it ‘irreverent’ and ‘atheistic’, then published his response, On the Latest Form of Infidelity, a year later. It would take two decades for Emerson to be asked back to lecture at Harvard.

  Though radical, however, the address was a logical enough development of New England Puritanism, which rejected the formalism and episcopacy of Anglicanism – not to mention its ‘tropes’ – as so many ‘veils’ between worshippers and their god. But would a philosophical shift of position cause su
ch a stir today, however eminent its mouthpiece? Unlikely, though we still ‘shun to say that which shocks the religious ear of the people’.

  9 July

  Mrs Gothic is born

  1764 Although Horace Walpole invented the gothic novel (see 28 January), Anne Radcliffe was by far its most successful practitioner. Born Anne Ward in Holborn, London on this day, and married at 22 to the editor of the English Chronicle, Mrs Radcliffe started to write at just the point when the new circulating libraries in London and fashionable watering places like Bath were crying out for high-class romance. So once her fiction had found its audience, it attracted the highest fees in the business. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) netted her £500, and The Italian (1797) £800 (£300,000 and £480,000 in today’s money, using book prices as the index of relative value.) At the same time £80 was the average price for a copyright.

  The main elements of Radcliffe romance were exotic mountain locations that the author and most of her readers had never seen, like the Alps or the Apennines, virtuous heroines captured by scheming men – as often after their money as their bodies – castles with secret passageways and hidden rooms, supernatural apparitions or sounds of sighing and groaning, and a general air of mystery, not just in the immediate atmosphere but also in the fate and identity of the characters, some of whom go missing, while others prosper following a revelation of their true identity and the fortune attaching to it. Jane Austen would satirise the genre in Northanger Abbey (written 1798–99) while striking a blow for realism, when she showed Catherine Morland to be intrigued by the fanciful mysteries of the old country house, only to discover that the real horrors emanated from the vile snobbery of its present-day owner.