Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Typically the novels end by resolving the mysteries, but Mrs Radcliffe’s innovation was to include rational explanations for even the supernatural events as part of her dénouements. So in Udolpho, for example, the ghosts that Emily hears and sees are really pirates hiding in the castle, entering and leaving her apartments via a secret passageway, and a horrific figure behind a veil turns out to be a wax dummy. This was fiction in a period of scientific discovery, a sort of ‘let’s pretend’ in the supernatural, even though the age of reason had largely discredited it.

  For later, more ‘serious’ authors, this device of the supernatural explained led to experiments in indeterminate narratives foregrounding the process of interpretation. Henry James exploited the gothic ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw (1898), when what the governess encounters can be interpreted as either demonic possession of the children in her care or her own displaced desire and jealousy. So gothic romance became a way of talking about the unconscious before Freud gave us the vocabulary for it.

  10 July

  Poet shoots poet

  1873 Paul Verlaine’s connection with Arthur Rimbaud began when the latter (at seventeen, ten years the junior of the two poets) began a correspondence in 1871.

  Verlaine was the leader of the symbolist school and Rimbaud was ambitious to make his mark. He enclosed his strikingly precocious poem, ‘Le Dormeur du Val’ (‘The Sleeper in the Valley’). The last six lines of the poem, which pictures a sleeping soldier, read:

  Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort.

  Souriant comme Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme:

  Nature, berce-le chaudement: il a froid.

  Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine;

  Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,

  Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.1

  The last line, shockingly, reverses the reader’s expectation. The soldier is not sleeping, but dead, with two (bullet) holes in his side.

  With war memorials to the Franco-Prussian conflict being raised throughout France, the poem had a topical resonance. On reading it, and the accompanying letters, Verlaine (married to a pregnant, seventeen-year-old wife) was instantly besotted. He sent Arthur a one-way ticket to Paris, with the instruction: ‘Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you.’ We being Paris and Paul.

  Rimbaud duly came from his home in the Ardennes and the two men embarked on a violent, but from the poetic point of view, highly productive relationship. They drank absinthe to excess, experimented with hashish, made love, and wrote wildly.

  By September 1872, they were together in London, Verlaine having abandoned his family. They supported themselves by Verlaine’s teaching. Rimbaud passed many hours in the British Museum, which, he said, was warm.

  The London experiment failed. The relationship, always volatile, became violent. The final act took place in Brussels. After a bitter argument, Verlaine bought a revolver and shot Rimbaud, on 10 July 1873. Although the wound in the younger man’s wrist was slight, Verlaine was arrested for attempted murder and sentenced to two years in prison.

  Disgust at the immorality of the relationship may have been a prejudicial factor. Rimbaud returned home to write what is regarded as his finest work, Un Saison en Enfer, while his lover was suffering in a different, penal circle of hell, in Mons prison. While there he composed his great treatise, Art poétique, separated from his wife, and re-converted to Catholicism.

  1 ‘Feet in the gladioli, he sleeps. Smiling like / A sick child would smile, he takes a nap: / Nature, cradle him warmly: he is cold. / Fragrances do not make his nostrils quiver; / He sleeps in the sun, hand on his chest, / At peace. He has two red holes in his right side.’

  11 July

  To Kill a Mockingbird is published

  1960 Within a year of coming out, the novel had been translated into ten languages. A year later it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Then came the Oscar-winning movie. The story has never gone out of print. In all, it has sold over 30 million copies. Dozens of literary list-makers have voted it the best novel of the 20th century, and it’s a staple of school curricula around the world. In 2007 President George W. Bush awarded its author, Harper Lee (who had written nothing further of consequence), the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  So To Kill a Mockingbird was – is – as much a monument as it is a book. Why? To what? Set in a small Alabama town in mid-Depression, the story is built around the imaginative adventures of the tomboy Scout Finch, her older brother Jem, and their friend Dill Harris, who stays with his auntie during the summer. Atticus, the Finch children’s father, is a stern but kindly lawyer, whose conscientious decision to defend a young black man unjustly accused of rape turns the townspeople against the family, shattering the children’s innocence.

  The book has been classified as southern gothic – wrongly, since much of its apparent grotesquery is based on actual characters and events. Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend and the model for Dill, remembered the original of the mysterious Boo Radley, who lives in a boarded-up house and leaves little gifts for the children in the knothole of a tree.

  Stylistically, in other words, the narrative is much closer to realism than fantasy, told in the first person through the medium of an adult vocabulary, yet maintaining the strategic naivety of the child’s vantage point – more What Maisie Knew (1897) than The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). Thematically To Kill a Mockingbird is an open book, because Atticus preaches the lesson explicitly to his children, and enacts it in the courtroom. It is the importance of sympathy, of imagining yourself inside another’s predicament.

  This relative lucidity of both style and theme must have something to do with the book’s popularity. So must its timing – the moment of the book’s appearance, that is, not its setting. From the mid-fifties, with the Supreme Court decision against segregation in southern schools, Brown vs. the Board of Education, and the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, to the early sixties with its freedom rides and voter registration, the civil rights movement was gathering momentum.

  Then there’s the trial. Although (or maybe because) only 5 per cent of criminal cases are heard before a jury, Americans love courtroom drama, because it gives them back the pure image of the country’s founding ideals. ‘Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal’, Atticus tells the jury in his summing-up. Maybe not born with equal opportunities, or equal in wealth or talent, he allows. ‘But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal. … In this country the courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.’

  The American Film Institute ranked the movie number one on their list of courtroom dramas, and Atticus Finch, as played by Gregory Peck, the top screen hero of the past 100 years. Even the Monroe County courtroom has achieved iconic status. Though never used in the film, it was minutely copied and reproduced on a Hollywood sound stage. Now the original building is a museum – devoted to the book, the movie, to Harper Lee and the historical people behind her fictional characters.

  12 July

  The end of blasphemy

  1977 As an instrument of literary persecution the English laws of blasphemy have traditionally pilloried the crazy. (The first blasphemy offender was John Taylor, in 1676. He claimed, inter alia, to be the younger brother of the whoremaster Christ.) Blasphemy prosecutions thereafter were invoked against a series of martyrs to free thought (e.g. Paine and Shelley). Free thinkers have always loathed, and resisted, theocratic laws and (after 1776) point to America where persecution on grounds of religious deviance is unconstitutional.

  With the Sexual Offences Act in the UK in 1967, homosexual acts between consenting adults ceased to be criminal. They remained, however, offensive to many Britons – not least those associated with Mrs Mary Whitehouse’s pressure groups and moral crusades: VALA (the Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association); the Festival of Light; the Responsible Society, etc.

  In June 1977 a copy of the weekly newspa
per Gay News, issue 96, was referred to Mrs Whitehouse (by an affronted probation officer, it was later reported, a member of the Responsible Society).

  The paper contained a full-page poem by James Kirkup, entitled ‘The Love that Dares to Speak its Name’, illustrated by Tony Reeves. The illustration shows a conventional Deposition, with the difference that the body of Christ is being lowered by a Roman soldier and features what Philip Larkin, in another poem, called ‘a tuberous cock and balls’. The soldier, as the poem narrates, enjoys himself with some Roman sodomy on the corpse, justifying the act by reference to Christ’s sexual preferences:

  I knew he’d had it off with other men –

  with Herod’s guards, with Pontius Pilate,

  With John the Baptist, with Paul of Tarsus,

  with foxy Judas, a great kisser, with

  the rest of the Twelve, together and apart.

  He loved all men, body, soul and spirit – even me.

  Kirkup was a well known and respected poet. He made no comment in the furore subsequently whipped up by Mrs Whitehouse other than to say that he, personally, found Christians’ versions of the Crucifixion ‘deeply disgusting’. Whitehouse, under the aegis of VALA, ingeniously brought a private prosecution against Gay News, its editor Denis Lemon, and the paper’s distributors not on grounds of obscenity, but blasphemy.

  The offence was, most of the legal profession thought, a dead letter in the mid-1970s. Nonetheless, a trial took place at the Central Criminal Court in London, 4–12 July 1977.

  Bernard Levin and Margaret Drabble were called in by the defence as expert witnesses, to testify to the literary worth of the poem. John Mortimer was the counsel for Gay News. The prosecution line was that the poem was self-evidently ‘filthy’ and its blasphemy ‘too obvious for words’. Mortimer wondered whether they had, somehow, been transported back into the Middle Ages.

  The jury, by a majority verdict of ten to two, agreed with Whitehouse. The judge, in passing his verdict, was not sympathetic:

  I have no doubt whatever that this poem is quite appalling and is the most scurrilous profanity. It is past my comprehension that a man like James Kirkup can express himself in this way and that the paper should publish it in reckless disregard for the feelings of Christians.

  It was ‘touch and go’ as to whether Lemon should go to prison. He was instead fined £500, with a nine-month suspended sentence. On appeal the Law Lords sided, five to three, with the court’s verdict.

  Despite an attempt to revive it during the Satanic Verses controversy fifteen years later (on the grounds that Rushdie’s novel blasphemed against Islam), this was the last prosecution for literary blasphemy in the UK, although no government has taken the risk (a certain vote-loser) of revoking the law.

  13 July

  William Carlos Williams writes to James Laughlin at New Directions: ‘Working like hell on Paterson. It’s coming too. … You’ll see, it’ll be a book’

  1942 Laughlin had founded New Directions with family money. Since 1936 the press had brought out work by Williams, Pound, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, among others, and as the leading publisher of modern American poetry, it was the obvious first choice for Williams’s new project. ‘Thrilling material I’m digging up every day’, he added. ‘It’s a theme for everything I’ve got and more. Wish I had more.’

  In the event, the poet needn’t have worried about his material. He had plenty of it, which – along with his full-time medical practice – delayed the book until 1946. And that was just Paterson, Book One. Four further volumes would follow – in 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958 – and there were even notes for a sixth. Paterson was destined to be another of those American open-ended compositions, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855–92) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1922–69) that end only when their authors do.

  Like Pound’s Cantos, Paterson is a great compendium of verse and prose, dialogue and description and above all quotation. Both poems are open to chance encounter. The difference is that while Pound’s references are both widely scattered as between the Classics, Renaissance history and biography, Chinese philosophy and the 17th-century English jurist Edward Coke’s commentary on Magna Carta, they were also highly personal to Pound, put down more or less as he turned the pages of a recently discovered authority. Paterson’s quotations are mainly of the vicinity – not personal to the author but selected to pique the curiosity in local history.

  ‘Paterson’ is both a man and a city – Paterson, New Jersey, six miles from where Williams lived. It was here that Alexander Hamilton established the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures in 1791, a private, state-sponsored corporation to promote industrial development that would use the water power provided by the Great Falls of the Passaic River. This was a highly political act. As a Federalist, Hamilton stood for the manipulation of credit and the concentration of capital to fund large enterprises polarising society into owners and proletariat – as against Thomas Jefferson’s Anti-Federalists, who championed agrarian interests and the rights of the states over central government.

  As one of the oldest industrial cities in the United States, Paterson was correspondingly old in the evils of industrialism. It had the first strike and first lock-out in American history, and when its old industries, like silk-weaving and railroad locomotive manufacture, became uneconomic, the city was left with the classic ills of high unemployment and a low tax base. By exploring this story from a hundred oblique angles, Williams makes Paterson a more radical analysis of history than Pound ever achieved in The Cantos.

  14 July

  La Marseillaise – to sing, or not to sing?

  1795 The song, destined (after many vicissitudes) to become France’s national anthem was originally written and composed in 1792, by the royalist Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in Strasbourg, under the title ‘War Song for the Army of the Rhine’. It was adopted as a call to arms by regicidal street revolutionaries, particularly those fiery provincials who poured into Paris from Marseilles. Hence the second name by which it became generally known. Largely at the urging of François Mireur (later a general under Napoleon) it was adopted, by decree, as the country’s national anthem on 14 July 1795. Thereafter it was banned under the regimes of Napoleon I, Louis XVIII, and Napoleon III. It became the country’s permanent anthem after 1879.

  In the late 20th century, however – with France now a central member of the EU – there was growing uneasiness at the ‘sanguinary’ nature of the lyrics, e.g.:

  Allons enfants de la Patrie,

  Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

  Contre nous de la tyrannie,

  L’étendard sanglant est levé,

  Entendez-vous dans les campagnes

  Mugir ces féroces soldats?

  Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras

  Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!1

  The uneasiness was focused by the bicentenary celebrations in 1992, when a ten-year-old girl, Severine Dupelloux, clad in white, was chosen to warble the anthem, as virtually the whole country watched on TV.

  A subsequent poll revealed that 40 per cent of the population thought the Marseillaise ‘too bloodthirsty’, and that it should be toned down. The protest was resisted by traditionalists. The no-change camp strengthened itself further on 12 September 2005 when it was legislated that La Marseillaise should be compulsory learning for young children – this was to be particularly enforced in areas of high immigrant population, in the interest of promoting assimilation.

  1 Come, children of the Fatherland, / The day of glory has arrived! / Against us, tyranny’s / Bloody banner is raised, / Do you hear in the countryside / Those ferocious soldiers roaring? / They come up to your arms / To slit the throats of your sons and wives!

  15 July

  The fictional origins of Scott’s great work of fiction

  1814 It is a moot point as to whether the publication of Scott’s Waverley on 15 July 1814, or Dickens’s first instalment of The Pickwick Papers on 1 April
1836, was the more formative on 19th-century fiction.

  Both works had accidental origins. The young Boz would not have become the Great Inimitable had not his senior collaborator on the Papers committed suicide. Scott outlined the accidents that led to the publication of his epochal historical work in the introduction to the ‘Magnum Opus’ editions (itself an epochal venture) in 1829.

  The 1829 introduction is a remarkable document, if only for its fantastic modesty. As he tells it, Scott is the Inspector Clouseau of fiction. Some ten years before 1814, he ‘threw together’ seven chapters of a historical romance based on the 1745 uprising, which he showed to a ‘critical friend’ who was discouraging. Scott flung the project aside. It would have been his first novel, but that clearly was not his metier. He would stick to verse.

  The chapters were thrown into an ‘old writing desk’ which was itself stored in an attic when, in May 1812, Scott moved in to his baronial mansion, Abbotsford – a pile built to his own Romantic specifications. Scott forgot all about them.

  Then came Byron (see 10 March), whose Childe Harold wholly eclipsed Scott’s efforts in poetry. ‘He beat me’, the Scot candidly admitted. But what to do next? In autumn 1813, fate intervened. Abbotsford lay alongside the River Tweed, and Scott loved to fish. As Scott recalled:

  I happened to want some fishing tackle … when it occurred to me to search the old writing desk already mentioned, in which I used to keep articles of that nature. I got access to it with some difficulty; and in looking for lines and flies, the long-lost manuscript presented itself. I immediately set to work to complete it, according to my original purpose.