Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  The composition went fluently, Waverley: Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since was published, and literary history was changed. J.G. Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, piously recorded that after Scott’s death, the desk was bequeathed to his steward, William Laidlaw, and that ‘it is now [in 1840] a treasured possession of his grandson, Mr W.L. Carruthers, of Inverness’.

  The reading public has always loved the ‘Waverley and fishing tackle’ story. Recently, however, scholars (notably in this case Peter Garside) have become wary about taking Scott’s and Lockhart’s versions of such episodes too faithfully. Some very technical, but convincing, research (involving allusions to current events and watermarks) makes it overwhelmingly probable that the old-writing-desk genesis of Waverley is a myth. But a beautiful myth.

  16 July

  J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is published. It will go on to sell 60 million copies and be translated into almost all the world’s languages

  1951 From his first slangy words of self-introduction, it’s clear that Holden Caulfield’s story is going to be different. He’ll tell us nothing about his ‘lousy’ childhood and parents. It’s not going to be another David Copperfield, he says.

  Not that there’s any risk of the reader being reminded of Dickens. Unlike David Copperfield, The Catcher in the Rye is no Bildungsroman, because the narrator/protagonist doesn’t want to grow up. What’s really being evoked here is the opening of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which another first-person narrator speaks conversationally without introducing himself, as though you already knew him, before embarking on an unconventional story, in the course of which he shows himself to be as alienated from the social norms around him as he is from the conventions of literary narrative.

  Except that Huck is naively oppositional, while Holden Caulfield knows he detests all the ‘phonies’ he meets on his winter weekend in New York after being kicked out of Pencey Prep. And Huck’s childhood really was severely disadvantaged, whereas, as we soon learn, ‘lousy’ is just one of Holden’s routine modifiers – along with ‘sort-of’, ‘old’ (used affectionately as well as not), ‘corny’, ‘goddam’, and of course ‘phony’.

  Great American fiction is supposed to resemble the romance more than the novel. ‘In American romance, it will not matter much what class people come from’, Richard Chase has written, ‘and where the novelist would arouse our interest in a character by exploring his origin, the romancer will probably do so by enveloping it in mystery’.1 In the novel character is more important than the action; in romance the action is more melodramatic, less believable, than in the novel. And so on.

  By this definition, The Catcher in the Rye barely qualifies as American romance. Despite his refusal to talk about his past, Holden is (most novelistically) fixed within the economic and social realities of his time and place. He has been brought up in an apartment with a live-in maid, on the Upper East Side of New York City, has been expensively educated, has had his clothes bought for him at Brooks Brothers.

  Unlike in so much American fiction, class is an issue here. Holden knows instantly, by a hundred details of clothing and speech, when someone is ‘corny’ – that is, poor – or (as his parents would no doubt put it) comes from a less advantaged background. What redeems his acidic observations is that he so often feels guilty for uttering them, and sorry for their victims.

  So notwithstanding objections to Holden’s colloquial profanity that have rivalled the reaction to Huck Finn’s (see 18 February), why have millions of corny Americans gone for The Catcher in the Rye, and so many English teachers set the book for required reading? Why has the book become such an iconic expression of American anxiety, not to mention an international bestseller?

  It might have something to do with the perennial appeal of stories about disruptive, naughty boys who are good at heart: Huck Finn, of course, but before that, Thomas Bailey Aldridge’s Story of a Bad Boy (1869) and Mark Twain’s other legend, Tom Sawyer (1876). But the figure isn’t absent from European literature, as the popularity of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1882) makes clear.

  But there’s also the Peter Pan appeal. Tom Sawyer grows up, after all, and Pinocchio gradually becomes more human. Huck and Holden, on the other hand, refuse accommodation to the adult world. Huck lights out for the Territory rather than get re-assimilated into the stifling pieties of St Petersburg.

  For Holden the problem is that the phonies (or, as he would say, the people who have ‘prostituted’ their talent and good intentions) include his brother, the writer D.B., who now works in Hollywood, the jazz pianist ‘Old Ernie’, who no longer knows whether he’s playing well or not, because of ‘all those dopes who clap their heads off’, and even his own father, who could be doing pro bono defences, but is a corporation lawyer instead.

  If he were a gifted piano player, says Holden, he’d play in a ‘goddam closet’. But who would hear him? There may be a clue to Salinger’s famous reclusiveness here, right up to his death in January 2010 at the age of 91. Holden’s phonies are just people who have to earn a living, grown-ups with mortgages to pay and families to support. Boring, of course, but pretty goddam important, if you really want to know.

  1 Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition, New York, 1957; reprinted Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 19.

  17 July

  Alexander Pope and his doctor

  1734 Pope’s physician, John Arbuthnot, wrote to Pope on this day, informing the poet that he (the doctor) was dying. Arbuthnot, as famous for his wit as his medical expertise (he attended Queen Anne), was a fellow member, with Pope and Swift, of the Martin Scriblerus satirists’ club. Arbuthnot is credited with inventing for it the caricature of Anglo-Saxon philistinism, ‘John Bull’.

  No poet was ever less like the beefy British stereotype than Alexander Pope. He was severely disabled from early childhood by bone disease that left him ‘hunchbacked’ (as the cruel description was) and a virtual dwarf at 4 feet 6 inches tall. Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, describes Pope in ‘middle life’:

  He was then so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female attendance; extremely sensible of cold, so that he wore a kind of fur doublet, under a shirt of a very coarse warm linen with fine sleeves. When he rose, he was invested in bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarcely able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender, that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid, for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean.

  Pope was of necessity physically closer to his physician than any other human being. The news of his friend’s impending death (from asthmatic and kidney problems) provoked one of the poet’s ‘Horatian Epistles’.

  In his ‘Advertisement’ to the poem (published 2 January 1735) Pope makes clear that it is conceived as (1) an apologia pro vita sua, and (2) a response to the many attacks ‘not only on my writings … but my person, morals, and family’.

  The ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot’ is famous for its satirical portraiture of ‘Sporus’ (Lord John Hervey) and ‘Atticus’ (Addison). As remarkable are the poet’s candid depiction of his own ‘person’. He candidly holds the mirror up to his own disfigurement:

  There are, who to my person pay their court:

  I cough like Horace, and, though lean, am short.

  According to Johnson, the caricatures of Pope (which habitually pictured him as a monkey, or a dwarfish monster) caused him great pain. But in the Epistle, while frankly anatomising himself, he revolves the central question of how deformation has formed the writer:

  Why did I write? what sin to me unknown

  Dipp’d me in ink, my parents’, or my own?

  As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

  I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.

  I left no calling for this idle t
rade,

  No duty broke, no father disobey’d.

  The Muse but serv’d to ease some friend, not wife,

  To help me through this long disease, my life,

  To second, Arbuthnot! thy art and care,

  And teach the being you preserv’d, to bear.

  His disease may have been long. His life, alas, was not. He died aged 66, some nine years after Arbuthnot.

  18 July

  Led by white officers, including Henry James’s brother, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of black soldiers attack Fort Wagner with courage and terrible loss of life

  1863 It was one of the most poignant engagements of the American Civil War. ‘Fort’ Wagner was really just a battery on a sandy, flea-infested island at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. After it had been bombarded from land and sea, General Quincey Gilmore ordered the Union infantry to attack it, with bayonets fixed, along a narrow strip of beach, mined and stockaded and bounded by marshes on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. The outcome was inevitable. The bombardment had done little to weaken the battery, and there were still five cannons and over a thousand Confederate troops able to sweep the field with shells and massed musket fire. In all, over 1,500 Union troops were killed, wounded or captured, as compared to 174 Confederate casualties.

  What redeems the event from the long catalogue of military blunders is the role played by the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of free African-Americans, commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, with Garth Wilkinson (‘Wilky’) James as his adjutant. The 54th led the assault and after bloody hand-to-hand combat actually gained a temporary foothold on the battery, where they planted the Union flag, but Shaw was killed and Wilky wounded in the side and foot. After a long convalescence in the James household, he survived, but limped and was in pain for the rest of his not very long life.

  There was at least one good outcome of the fiasco. No one with any knowledge of the situation would ever doubt the fighting spirit of African-American troops again. As one of the black soldiers put it afterwards: ‘It is not for us to blow our horn; but when a regiment of white men gave us three cheers as we were passing them, it shows that we did our duty as men should.’1 The 54th had been ‘the pride of the Massachusetts abolitionists’, according to Henry James’s biographer, Fred Kaplan. Old Henry James Senior had watched the regiment’s proud march out of Boston, accompanied by ‘great reverberations of music, of fluttering banners’. Henry Junior was ‘helplessly absent’.2

  Not far from the old man’s vantage point now stands an arresting bronze bas-relief by the Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, showing Colonel Shaw in profile alongside his proud regiment. Or as Robert Lowell put it in ‘For the Union Dead’ (1960):

  Two months after marching through Boston,

  Half the regiment was dead;

  At the dedication,

  William James [another brother] could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

  Their monument sticks like a fishbone

  In the city’s throat.

  The Colonel is as lean

  As a compass needle.

  1 Private James Henry Gooding; see: http://www.awod.com/gallery/probono/cwchas/fedwag.html

  2 Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992, p. 50.

  19 July

  Jeffrey Archer goes down

  2000 Unlike politicians, art collectors or policemen, British novelists – even crime novelists – are a law-abiding lot. How many have gone down? Defoe, the father of the English novel, heads the list of fiction’s malefactors. He was fined, imprisoned and pilloried in 1703 for sedition (see 31 July). John Cleland served some easy time in debtors’ prison, and he rewarded posterity with Fanny Hill, the onanist’s bible. Has any work of fiction stimulated the expenditure of more honest English seed? Oscar Wilde got two years’ hard labour for ‘unnatural practices’ with his seed in 1895. Erskine Childers, the author of The Riddle of the Sands (one of the progenitors of Jeffrey Archer’s thrillers), was shot by an Irish Free State firing squad in 1922.

  Among his other career achievements (as politician, art collector and policeman), Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare is the most famous British novelist – certainly the biggest bestselling British novelist – to have been convicted of a major felony.

  The trail runs thus: on 8 or 9 September 1986, Archer was alleged to have slept with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. A sting was set up by the News of the World in which a friend of Archer’s, Michael Stacpoole, was induced to offer Coghlan £2,000 to leave the country.

  When the News of the World and the Star published their allegations that Archer had consorted with Coghlan (the Star added the detail of ‘perverted sex’), Archer issued libel suits. Crucial to his defence was the testimony of another of Archer’s friends, Ted Francis, that he had dined with Archer on the night he was alleged to have had his dealings, perverted or not, with Coghlan. A new diary was secretly procured, and entries made to cover the relevant dates.

  In a sensational trial – in which Mary Archer gave key evidence, and was complimented in his summing-up by the judge on her ‘fragrance’ – Archer was awarded half a million pounds compensation by the jury for the gross libel on his character.

  Thirteen years later, in October 1999, Ted Francis contacted the publicist, Max Clifford, to reveal that the alibi he had provided for Archer was false. The News of the World, still stinging, set up a telephone conversation between the men that seemed to confirm Francis’ revised version of events in September 1986.

  At the time, Archer was a front-runner for the Mayor of London election (subsequently won by Ken Livingstone). On 20 November he withdrew from the mayoral race, and he was expelled (prejudicially) from the Conservative party in February 2000. After a second sensational trial, in which his wife’s fragrance was ineffective, Archer was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for perjury, on 19 July.

  He wrote a Dantean trilogy, recounting his time inside: Hell: Belmarsh (2002), Purgatory: Wayland (2003), Heaven: North Sea Camp (2004). They are regarded by discerning critics as his finest work of fiction, along with the A4 diary that was his main defence evidence in 1986.

  20 July

  The Modern Library proclaims the 20th century’s 100 best novels in English

  1998 News of the ‘100 Best’ first broke on this day in the New York Times. First and third was James Joyce, with Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist. Nabokov’s Lolita came in fourth, followed by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Of the top ten, probably only two would have been much favoured – or even read – by the general literate public: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (in second place), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (seventh).

  Publishers of affordable literary classics since 1917, the Modern Library is now a subsidiary of Random House. To re-focus attention on the venerable imprint – and incidentally sell a few more of its titles – the parent company dreamed up the ‘100 Best’ stunt, drafting in a panel of nine historians and novelists including Daniel Boorstin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Gore Vidal and (the only woman) A.S. Byatt, to make the hard choices.

  Lists are meant to provoke, and this one produced plenty of reactions – both in the public prints and on the Random House website. Only nine women’s novels make it – eight if you reckon that Edith Wharton is down for two. Where were Toni Morrison, Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing – not to mention the doyenne of all the other list-makers in the nation (see 11 July), Harper Lee? And where were the inventive, narratalogically experimental Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo? Or, to venture a personal opinion: welcome, Philip Roth, but where is your namesake Henry, author of Call It Sleep, the most imaginative novel of immigration and assimilation in English?

  Regrets for those included? There were a few. Why the wordy On the Road? Was it any more than the talisman of a movement? Did Brave New World really belong at number five – or at all? And how had John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra snuck in at number 22? O’H
ara had long been disparaged by both academic and metropolitan critical opinion because, as a social realist, he ran counter to what the ideology taught that ‘American literature’ ought to do – that is to engage with the abstract universals of (as de Tocqueville put it) ‘human destiny, man himself, … face to face with nature and with God’.

  Still, left to itself the general public didn’t do all that much better. Invited by the Modern Library panel to produce their own list, they came up with a ‘100 Best’ whose top ten featured three novels by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, and four by Ayn Rand – nothing short of her entire fictional oeuvre.

  21 July

  Pottermania is good for you – or is it?

  2007 Literary manias, and concurrent sales bonanzas, are regular events; as regular nowadays as the ocean tides. The only change, it would seem, is that they get even more maniacal with the passing of centuries. At the witching hour – midnight – on 20/21 July 2007, the seventh (mystic number) and final instalment of the Harry Potter series (the ‘Potteriad’) was released.

  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had been kept under the kind of security usually reserved for high-grade plutonium. For up to three days, among the wettest on meteorological record, expectant Potter fans camped outside London bookshops. Many were wearing wizard regalia. The town of Colchester converted its town centre into a Hogwarts theme park. J.K. Rowling was the biggest thing since Boadicea laid the place waste in AD 60.

  When the stores opened at the anti-social hour, it was the literary equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush. And as chaotic. Three million copies were sold in 24 hours: a record, outstripping by at least a million the sales of the book’s predecessor, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.