Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Is the Potter Effect a good thing, unlike the Werther Effect, which led hundreds of young men to follow Goethe’s hero into copycat suicides? The Potterian memesis, it is suggested, is quite different. Life-and limb-preserving. In a witty letter to The Times Books Supplement, 28 July 2007, Edward Kelly wrote:

  For those of us who have yet to read any of J.K. Rowling’s Potter series there is little to be gained from the current reviews. I did, though, stumble across this statistic that may please some readers: on an average weekend, the emergency room at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford treats 67 children for injuries sustained in accidents. On two weekends, however, only 36 children needed treatment: June 21, 2003 and July 16, 2005 – just after the releases of Harry Potter Five and Six. It was suggested at the time that talented writers produce high-quality books for the purpose of injury prevention.

  The deduction is obvious. Pottermania is good for children. It keeps them from things that go bump against their legs. But does it? The day after Mr Kelly’s letter was printed, there were alarmed accounts about a ‘damning report’ about the ‘soaring rate of childhood obesity’. As the Observer put it, on its front page (29 July):

  The number of six- to ten-year olds who become obese will keep rising relentlessly until the late 2040s, with as many as half of all primary school-age boys and one in five girls dangerously overweight by 2050, according to the document.

  For the first time in recent history, Britain would breed a generation of children who could confidently expect to live less long, and less healthily, than their parents.

  Those 67 children who, averagely, turn up at the Radcliffe ER would, most of them, have hurt themselves playing. Reading (particularly reading a 600-page book) is the epitome of couch-potatoism. Was the Potter Effect, insidiously, helping rob young fans of their allotted span? Reading is a good thing (hence all those honorary doctorates for services to literacy for J.K. Rowling). But would it not be an even better thing for children to be outside – actively ‘doing’ something, rather than passively ‘reading’ or ‘watching’ something?

  22 July

  Robert Graves: the War Office regrets, then doesn’t

  1916 The poet Robert Graves (born Robert von Ranke) was among the first to enlist in the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the outbreak of the war to end wars, in August 1914, forgoing a scholarship at Oxford to do so.

  He was commissioned and promptly saw active service in France. Graves proved a good soldier (his military experience is recalled in his autobiographical Good-bye to All That, 1929). He was promoted captain, and company commander, in 1915.

  During this period in the trenches he befriended his fellow poet, and fellow fusilier, Siegfried Sassoon. At the Somme, on 20 July 1916 (not yet 21 years old), Graves was hit by shell shrapnel, sustaining serious internal injuries (Sassoon was wounded in the same battle). The field hospital where Graves was taken reported him dead and an obituary was printed in The Times. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Crawshay, sent his parents the standard letter of condolence, along with their son’s private possessions, on 22 July:

  I very much regret to have to write and tell you your son has died of wounds. He was very gallant, and was doing so well and is a great loss. He was hit by a shell and very badly wounded, and died on the way down to the base I believe. He was not in bad pain, and our doctor managed to get across and attend to him at once.

  We have had a very hard time, and our casualties have been large. Believe me you have all our sympathy in your loss, and we have lost a very gallant soldier. Please write to me if I can tell you or do anything.

  Graves in fact survived the wounds to see his obituary corrected (on 6 August) and his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier (1916), published (thanks largely to the indefatigable friend to poets, Edward Marsh). He wrote a poem on the subject of his death and resurrection, ‘Escape’. It records:

  … but I was dead, an hour or more.

  I woke when I’d already passed the door

  That Cerberus guards, and half-way down the road

  To Lethe, as an old Greek signpost showed.

  Although invalided out of the front line (his lungs never quite recovered), he was instrumental in getting a shell-shocked Sassoon treated at the progressive Craiglockhart War Hospital, under W.H.R. Rivers, near Edinburgh. Both Sassoon and Graves befriended Wilfred Owen (also at Craiglockhart), thus forming the most renowned nucleus of First World War poets (see also 30 July). Owen would not survive the war. Sassoon wrote little worthwhile poetry after it. Graves went on to lead a rich and fulfilling career in literature. The Craiglockhart episode is commemorated in Pat Barker’s award-winning ‘Regeneration’ trilogy of novels (1991–95).

  23 July

  Henry David Thoreau spends a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax

  1846 How to describe Thoreau? He was one of that group of American Transcendentalists who included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. They flourished around the middle of the 19th century in Concord, Massachusetts – though only Thoreau was native to the town – just west of Boston.

  But that allegiance was Thoreau’s least distinctive descriptor. He was also a surveyor, a self-taught, highly observant naturalist, an amateur builder and gardener, a thinker so original as to be taken – even by Emerson – to be contrary to the point of perverseness. But he is best summed up as a man who tested his thoughts and ideas in his everyday life.

  In one of these living experiments he built a shack out of second-hand boards on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord, living there on and off for two years, in order to test the relative merits of solitude and social interaction, to collect data on the flora and fauna of his native country, and even to try his hand at gardening. In another he chose to go to jail rather than to pay his poll tax.

  Thoreau didn’t object to the local road tax, or other levies aimed at improvements around town. But for six years he refused to pay his poll tax, because it went to a federal government, which in 1846 had just declared an unjust war on Mexico, and under which one sixth of the population were slaves. Finally the authorities lost patience and locked him up in the local hoosegow.

  That was alright by Thoreau, who would later write, in ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ (1849), that ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison’. That essay set out his thesis that consent in government must be based on the individual conscience of the citizen. ‘I think that we should be men first and subjects afterwards’, he wrote. ‘Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.’ To be fair to Thoreau, these ideas were hard-won. To be fair to his fellow Americans, they would also be pretty hard to put into practice.

  The prisoner spent the night chatting with his cell-mate (‘a first-rate fellow and clever man’, according to the jailer), hearing all about the history of former jailbreaks, and looking out of the window. The next morning he was let out because, as he put it, ‘someone interfered, and paid that tax’. That was an ungenerous judgement, but then Thoreau wasn’t known for his graciousness.

  24 July

  Sailing the Atlantic, Francis Higginson shows why there will be no room for blasphemers and sodomites in the ‘new paradise of New England’

  1629 The Puritan minister Francis Higginson was one of the most strenuous and ingenious boosters of settlement in the New World. Educated at Cambridge, he took up a ministry in Leicestershire before deciding to join the Massachusetts Bay Company’s emigration to New England, leading an advance group, a year ahead of John Winthrop’s Great Migration of 1630 (see 11 November). Higginson’s account of the crossing was kept as a journal, then – dated this day – turned into a letter to be sent home. A later letter describing the country for ‘his friends in Leicester’ was published as New-Englands Plantation (1680), some time after his death.

  Hoisting sail at Gravesend on 25 April 1629, the fleet made its way slowly around the south coast of England in
to the Atlantic. At sea one of Higginson’s eight children, a little girl, died of smallpox. But since she had long been ill, he recuperated the tragedy as an expression of God’s mercy, ‘a blessing from the Lord to shorten her misery’.

  Apart from the Puritan saints, there were labourers on board, hired to build log houses and plant crops for the larger migration still to come. One of these was a ‘notorious wicked fellow that was given to swearing and boasting … that he had got a wench with child … railing and jesting against puritans’. He too ‘fell sick of the pox and died’, but this time it was God’s justice operating, not his mercy. Meanwhile, the saints ‘sounded and found thirty-eight fathom’, showing that they were now close to land. They celebrated by pausing briefly ‘to take codfish and feast … merrily’.

  Most challenging of all were ‘five beastly sodomitical boys’, whose

  … wickedness not to be named … was so foul we reserved them to be punished by the governor when we came to New England, who afterward sent them back … to be punished in Old England, as the crime deserved.

  Just two days further on, the sea was wreathed in flowers, ‘which we supposed to be brought from the low meadows by the tide.… Now fine woods and green trees by land and these yellow flowers painting the sea, made us all desirous to see our new paradise of New England.’

  The argument is clear. New England is for God’s elect, not for the wicked, whom God punishes either with death or the ignominious punishment fitting the crime: a passage back for those who live by the back passage. Those who pass the test of the Atlantic crossing find their ground, feast on nature’s bounty and thrive. ‘Whereas I have for divers years been very sickly and ready to cast up what I have eaten’, Higginson claimed, ‘yet from the time I came on shipboard to this day I have been strangely healthful.’

  Within a year of writing this he was dead.

  25 July

  At the height of the Potsdam Conference, Tyrone Slothrop, disguised as Rocketman and cradling a twelve-pound bag of hashish, sees Mickey Rooney leaning over the balcony of no. 2 Kaiserstrasse

  1945 Did this really happen or was it just a hilarious imaginative construct in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)? If it did, Mickey Rooney immediately suppressed the memory of the event as too improbable, the narrator assures us. Did giant industries really influence the bombing in the Second World War so as to obliterate their outdated plant, while sparing factories making the most advanced weapons for use against their ‘own’ side?

  Or to take another Pynchon fiction (but is it fiction?), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), is Oedipa Maas really the victim of a secret, elaborate, electronic assault on her integrity, or does she just think she is? Does a secret, alternative postal system really exist, with a long history extending back into Renaissance Europe? Plausible references to actual historical events (albeit up to now given a more innocent interpretation), reinforced by scholarly footnotes, support the hypothesis. And what about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)? Was an American Nazi dressed up as Captain America really allowed to visit prisoners of war in Dresden, trying to recruit them to the Wehrmacht?

  This is the fiction of paranoia, very fashionable in the sixties because it paralleled events in both political and critical history. On one level it was an appropriate response to covert operations in real life, like the plot to kill Kennedy (see 29 November) and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which showed that the US had been waging a top-secret war in Vietnam from as early as 1945. On another it deconstructed distinctions between fact and fiction, posing both as plots to control the world.

  As for the ‘truth’ behind the allegations, a popular paradigm is the so-called urban myth. Do giant albino alligators really roam the New York sewers? Remember all those baby alligators given children as toys during the 1950s? What did your mother do with yours when you got tired of it? Exactly. But lacking proof, the truth remains elusive. Who wants to go down into the sewers to find out? Well, in the case of Pynchon studies, the resourceful Tim Ware does. He runs the Thomas Pynchon Wiki (http://pynchonwiki.com/). According to him, Mickey Rooney wasn’t really at Potsdam, though he came close. He was in Germany attached to an army entertainment at the time of the conference, but was unable to get away.

  26 July

  John Muir spends ‘a day that will never end’ among the trees and crystals at the top of Mount Hoffman

  1869 Travellers and adventurers in the American West, from the humble Forty-Niners to the grandly educated Francis Parkman (see 15 February), kept track of their encounters in journals. This was partly to keep a record, of course, but it was also to add physical detail to an account of strange and wonderful landscapes and settings that would otherwise seem simply fantastic in retrospect.

  John Muir was one of the greatest of these natural observers – a Thoreau who actually went somewhere. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, he emigrated with his family to Wisconsin, and studied botany and geology at the University of Wisconsin. His articles on Yosemite and other sites of overwhelming natural beauty in the California Sierra, published in Harper’s, Scribner’s and The Century in the 1870s and 1880s, did much to promote the American National Parks movement. He founded the Sierra Club, which remains one of the country’s most effective ecological lobbying groups.

  On this day, as published in My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), Muir ‘rambled’ to the top of Mount Hoffman – at 11,000 feet, ‘the highest point in life’s journey my feet have yet touched’. Although his account of the view is rhapsodic – ‘serene, majestic, snow-laden, sun-drenched, vast domes and ridges … [with] lakes and meadows in the hollows’ – it also deploys the language of scientific geology: ‘a ridge or spur about fourteen miles from the axis of the main range, perhaps a remnant brought into relief and isolated by unequal denudation.’

  In fact, the two descriptive modes reinforce each other. Knowing the scientific names of things enhances their brilliance – indeed, makes them visible in the first place. ‘The surface of the ground, so dull and forbidding at first sight … shines and sparkles with crystals: mica, hornblende, feldspar, quartz, tourmaline … keen lance rays of every color flashing.’

  But it was the trees that really got him going:

  The hemlock (Tsuga Mertensiana) is the most beautiful conifer I have ever seen … It is now in full bloom, and the flowers, together with thousands of last season’s cones still clinging to the drooping sprays, display wonderful wealth of color, brown and purple and blue. Gladly I climbed the first tree I found in the midst of it.

  So full of glee is he, the serious scientist is not embarrassed to confess climbing a tree like a child. It’s part of the fun – and also part of the close observation. No wonder his spirits remained high:

  Toward sunset, enjoyed a fine run to camp, down the long south slopes, across ridges and ravines, gardens and avalanche gaps, through the firs and chaparral, enjoying wild excitement and excess of strength, and so ends a day that will never end.

  27 July

  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the Federal Writers’ Project into law

  1935 Putting unemployed writers to work during America’s Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was among the most visionary pieces of legislation brought in as part of Roosevelt’s reformist New Deal.

  Some of the 6,600 writers employed by the FWP (up to 25 per cent, falling to 10 per cent after 1936) could be recruited from the ranks of professional writers – journalists, novelists and the like – whether or not they were out of work. The rest had to be the actual unemployed on relief. This meant teachers, librarians, bank clerks – almost anyone who could put together a coherent paragraph.

  But for FWP director Henry G. Alsberg, invoking the best Popular Front spirit of collective egalitarianism, these very disadvantages could be given an ideological spin. Writers needed to get away from the idea that their art was ‘sacrosanct’, he thought. Instead ‘cheap books, less fuss about our sacred personalities, and more se
rvice to the common cause in the fight against fascism … would bring us very much closer to the masses’.1

  What did they write? Best remembered are the American Guide series, one devoted to each state in the union. Though providing itineraries for car tours, along with suggested places to eat and stay, these were far more than guide books, offering histories, cultural surveys and even the folklore of the states covered.

  More useful in the long run were the FWP’s oral histories, begun after the state guides were completed. 2,900 of these life stories have been filed in the Library of Congress; thousands more remain in state collections. They cover every occupation and region, from cowboys in Texas to fishermen in Maine, including tenant farmers and even ex-slaves in the South.

  Among the many American authors to be given their first chance, or an early break, by the FWP were Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow, John Cheever and Frank Yerby. Studs Terkel turned the life histories into his life’s work. His Division Street, America (1966), Hard Times (1970) and The Good War (1984) presented the voices of Chicagoans talking about their jobs and their city.

  Black writers gained most. Zora Neale Hurston in Florida, Richard Wright in Chicago and Ralph Ellison in New York – all found their material and voices while working for the project. Hurston finished three novels, Wright wrote Native Son (1940), and Ellison’s experience in gathering oral history in New York gave him the key to black speech in his masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952).

  1 Henry G. Alsberg, speaking extemporaneously at the Second American Writers’ Congress, 1937, in Henry Hart, The Writer in a Changing World, New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1937, p. 245.